Grace on the Edge

“Les, the sheriff just called, and he’s wondering if there’s anyone at camp who could go up to Mount Washington. They’ve got a lost hiker, a 17-year-old with minor injuries. They need someone to be with him until Search and Rescue can come up and get him.”

Mount Washington, a 7,795-foot (2,376-meter) spire of volcanic basalt, juts skyward above Big Lake Youth Camp in Oregon, United States. Les, the camp director, has climbed the peak at least a dozen times and is a certified wilderness first responder. It was Sunday, and the camp was transitioning from kids’ camps to family camp. This promised to be a very busy day.

All they need is someone to sit with the hiker and wait, thought Les. I could probably do that.

“OK. Tell them I’ll head up, locate the hiker, and wait for the rescue team.”

The Search Begins

As Les headed out, he called Kasondra, a camp nurse and climbing instructor, to see if she’d come along. On a hunch he grabbed ropes and full climbing gear for the two of them. Then they began hiking through the forest toward the mountain.

Fifteen minutes later Les’s cell phone rang.

“We just got a new coordinate from one of our helicopters,” the sheriff’s office said. “They got a ping from the hiker’s phone, and he’s actually somewhere up near the peak.”

From a distance, Mount Washington looks like a hunk of solid rock. Up close, however, it’s a tall pile of broken, gravely basalt, the crumbling remnant of an ancient volcano whose safe climbing routes shift with snow, ice, rain, and hot summer days.

“I was really glad we had brought our climbing gear,” Les remembers. “If this fellow was lost near the peak, he might have fallen into one of the mountain’s steep gullies. To get him out, we would need all our ropes and more!”

After Les and Kasondra had been climbing and praying for about 30 minutes, a small helicopter landed in a meadow at the base of the mountain, dropping off a search and rescue team who began searching the meadows below. Les didn’t have a radio connection to them, so he and Kasondra just kept climbing toward the last known coordinates from the hiker’s phone.

“There’s a series of big sharp gullies on the east face of Mount Washington,” says Les as he retells the story. “Thinking the hiker might have fallen into one of them, we begged God to guide us as we climbed up to the edge of each one, looked around carefully, yelled his name, and waited quietly to hear if he called back. We moved carefully up through each one, disappointed that all we heard was silence.”

The uppermost gully is called the saddle. This is the last big dip before climbers take on the mountain’s imposing 300-foot vertical spire, where climbing teams always rope up before tackling the cliff.

At the saddle Les and Kasondra checked their gear, leaned out over the edge, and looked out into the void. Les called the hiker’s name again and again, each time accompanying his call with a cry to the God who listens.

“Luke! Luke! Luuuke!”

Twenty feet into the saddle Les glanced down into the gully and caught a glimpse of Luke lying on his stomach and hanging on to a small pile of crumbling gravel rocks just above a thousand-foot vertical drop.

Les had shouted another name on this same ridge three years before. That time the lost hiker’s name was Brian. He was one of the Big Lake camp staff, a young man who’d gone off to climb the mountain alone. That time there had been no answer, and Les’s good friend Brian had died on the mountain.

This time . . . they heard a weak response!

“Hello! Are you OK?” Les shouted back.

“Yes—well, no. I’m stable, but I can’t move. I fell, and my leg may be broken.”

“Hold tight. We’re going to anchor in, and we’ll try to reach you.”

Hanging Over the Edge

Les and Kasondra roped up, and Kasondra anchored Les as he began to climb out and up toward Luke’s voice. Twenty feet into the saddle Les glanced down into the gully and caught a glimpse of Luke lying on his stomach and hanging on to a small pile of crumbling gravel rocks just above a thousand-foot vertical drop. He had been hanging there for four hours.

“I was ready to go down and secure Luke safely,” Les recalls, “but just then we heard an incoming rescue helicopter, a big Black Hawk that was already beginning to stir up the rocks around us. I roped back to Kasondra, and we quickly stuffed our gear into our packs as fast as we could. We didn’t want our ropes and everything else whipping around in the wind of the helicopter’s rotors.”

 A medic roped down from the helicopter and immediately realized he would not be able to secure Luke safely. The helicopter was stirring up too much dust and rocks, and he would not be able to grab Luke and haul him up to the helicopter. A call to Les’s phone promised that another climber would come up to join them in about an hour.

When the helicopter left, Les roped up again and carefully climbed over to Luke.

“I went over to where Luke was hanging and secured him by clipping onto his harness,” Les remembers. “When Luke had fallen into the gully, he’d struck a rock and somehow stuck there! He was literally hanging on a broken part of a very steep rock chimney. If he slipped any more, he would drop hundreds of feet.”

“Can you help me get away from this edge?” Luke pleaded.

“We’ll try,” Les prayed.

It took about 20 minutes, but God guided Les and Kasondra as they carefully pulled Luke up the gully to a ledge where he could release some weight off his broken bones and where the Black Hawk could reach him to carry him to safety. They hung there together, talking and praying as they waited.

“Nobody knows I’m here,” Luke admitted. “I told my dad I was going to take some pictures on the mountain, but I didn’t tell him I’d be climbing.”

They waited for an hour, praying to God and talking to the sheriff and the helicopter rescue team through Les’s phone.

“We had Luke all bundled up when the Black Hawk came back,” Les continues telling the story. “The most painful part was strapping him in and hauling him up. Ten minutes later he was at the hospital.”

Then the mountain was suddenly silent again.

Grace on the Mountain

There’s no way Luke could have fallen 40 feet and stopped where he stopped. No way his smashed cell phone could have connected to make the SOS call and reveal his location. No way professional help could have found him so quickly near the top of a wilderness mountain. No way—except God’s way.

“We don’t get one back from this mountain very often,” said the sheriff. “This is a huge win for all of us!”

But it was an even bigger win for Les.

“It was so redemptive to go back to the same place where our staff member Brian had fallen,” Les says. “This time I was able to grab someone and pull them back from the edge. It was like experiencing grace on the edge.”