Gary Davidson
Out of bounds - Part 2
A second SOS is spotted.
Andrew Findlay Featured in our Winter 2009 issue.
It’s hard to imagine the psychological torment that Blackburn and Fortin must have endured hearing six or more helicopters flying high overheard every day shuttling guests from the warmth of their hotels at Golden or Kicking Horse Resort to the Purcells for a day of powder. As Rudi Gertsch notes, the weather was clear and visibility virtually limitless so the choppers were flying at mountaintop elevation. The chances of spotting movement far below in the glades, forests and meadows of Canyon Creek, let alone signals in the snow, would have been similar to spying a
sailboat from the seat of a trans-Atlantic flight.
On February 21, six days after the couple had ventured out of bounds, Jeff Gertsch and his ski buddies were cleaning up the cabin, stuffing their packs and waiting for a return flight to Golden, following a blissful week in the mountains. After loading their gear into the chopper, they clambered aboard and as they flew above Canyon Creek, they glimpsed another faint SOS in the snow. Again a sign of distress, but no signs of people.
Once back in Golden, Jeff told his father about the sighting and this time the senior Gertsch called police.
The RCMP then contacted Golden and District Search and Rescue and were told that the report had already been investigated, meaning no other corroborating evidence could be found to support the notion that people were lost in the Canyon Creek valley. Based on this discussion, the police took no further action, and Gertsch continued managing his busy heliskiing operation, thinking that a search was being organized. It wasn’t.
On the same day that Jeff Gertsch spotted and then reported his second SOS, the situation was turning increasingly desperate for the couple from Quebec. The two had retraced their route back down Canyon Creek coming to rest a few kilometres downstream from where their tracks had first intersected the valley. Fortin was weak and cold, and fading fast. They managed to build a makeshift shelter in the woods, and it was here—on February 22—that Fortin would take her last breath, succumbing to hypothermia. She died agonizingly close to Kicking Horse Resort, virtually within view of the Stairway to Heaven chairlift that they had happily ridden a week previous. Now Blackburn was alone and cold, crippled with grief and fear. He was suffering from frostbite and exposure. For the next two days he stayed with his wife’s body, hoping for a rescue.
On February 24, after a week of bluebird weather, a ceiling of clouds dropped depressingly on the surrounding mountains, but it was this deteriorating weather that would prove to be Blackburn’s salvation. The dense cloud cover forced the Purcell Heliskiing pilot to take a much lower flight path. With Rudi Gertsch sitting in the front passenger seat of the Bell 205 and a full complement of heliskiers on board, the pilot hovered slowly over Canyon Creek. Suddenly Gertsch spotted a solitary figure standing in the snow, waving his arms, clearly in distress. Gertsch instructed the pilot to fly overhead, so as to indicate to the person that he had been seen, before beelining back to Golden with his guests. Gertsch immediately called the 911 dispatch in Kelowna, which then relayed the report to the Golden RCMP detachment, which in turn tasked search-and-rescue to mount a mission. Strangely enough, at almost the same time, the RCMP detachment in Banff was notified by its counterpart in Montreal that Blackburn and Fortin had failed to disembark from their scheduled f light into Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport.
Later that day, Don McTighe, a pilot for Alpine Helicopters, flew into Canyon Creek with a small search-and-rescue team that would pluck Gilles Blackburn from his nightmare and also recover the body of his wife. The rescue was painlessly quick and easy, almost as if to emphasize the tragedy of the couple’s nine-day misadventure so close to civilization.
McTighe has been a mountain pilot for almost 30 years and has flown many rescue missions. He has vivid memories of that day. “We picked him up three kilometres from the resort. [Blackburn] just got in the helicopter and sat down. Considering everything, he seemed calm and in amazingly good health,” McTighe says.
Blackburn didn't remain calm for long.
When details of the ordeal and the delayed rescue began to emerge, the press had a field day. Fiction quickly blurred with fact. In an interview, Blackburn mentioned that he and his wife had feared wolves at night as much as the cold, and several news reports erroneously stated that he had defended their encampments from wolf packs with the sharp end of a ski pole. Blackburn was quick to acknowledge that he and his wife had made a crucial error by skiing out of bounds, but as questions began to surface around the rescue, the implication in the media was that pleas for help in the form of SOS signals had essentially been ignored.
Later last spring, this tragic story ended up where many people feared it would—in court. On May 7, Blackburn launched a lawsuit against Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, the RCMP and Golden and District Search and Rescue. The lawsuit claims that “as a result of the negligence of the defendants, the plaintiff has sustained physical and psychological injuries, loss and damages…” Blackburn is asking for monetary compensation and answers, and taken as a whole, the litigation reads like a bruising indictment of search-and-rescue incompetence.
Immediately after the rescue, Blackburn participated in a number of interviews with national media. Since the lawsuit was announced, however, both he and his Whistlerbased legal team have been quiet, and they did not return calls from explore. Given the sensitivity of the issue, the case is bound to get ugly as the lawyers representing the different defendants argue their cases, and also examine the personal role Blackburn played in this sad story. Almost eight months later,
Gertsch still shakes his head wondering what went wrong. The fact that repeated sightings of SOS signals resulted in what he believes was very little response from either the police or search-and-rescue upsets him. “It’s unacceptable that the authorities didn’t respond to a report from a reliable source. Look, I’ve been skiing out there for 35 years. When you see an SOS anywhere in the world, it doesn’t matter if it’s in the desert or the snow, an SOS is an SOS,” Gertsch says.
Gertsch has heard some people suggest that those who go out of bounds are somehow less deserving of a rescue.
For him, that’s tantamount to saying police shouldn’t assist people in a crumpled car on the roadside simply because they were speeding. “When people need help, we help them. It doesn’t matter what
the causes are,” Gertsch says.
Alison Dakin is a longtime Golden resident and a former owner of Golden Alpine Holidays, a backcountry skiing operation. For the past two winters, she has guided part-time for Purcell Heliskiing. She says not many people in the community are happy with Blackburn’s decision to sue, but she believes the town is split on the question of whether or not the police and search-and-rescue acted appropriately. In her mind, however, they obviously did some things wrong. “I’m all about personal responsibility in the backcountry but sometimes we fuck up,” Dakin says. “I sure hope that people will be there to help if I make a mistake.That woman didn’t need to die.”
When Gilles Blackburn filed his statement of claim in B.C. Supreme Court in May, a chill descended on the entire provincial search-and-rescue community. It marks the first time that a volunteer search-and-rescue organization is being sued for, in effect, something it didn’t do. Rescue volunteers were subsequently dismayed to learn that the province wasn’t going to cover the costs of defence against a civil lawsuit. They felt that the government had hung them out to dry. Shortly afterwards, Golden and District Search and Rescue decided to suspend its operations. Several other rescue groups threatened to follow suit, and only when the province committed to coming up with a solution to liability coverage did the Golden unit resume operations. (In August, the B.C. government delivered on its promise, bucking up $180,000 for liability insurance covering all 85 of the province’s search-and-rescue organizations.)
With the insurance issue resolved, fears that the province would be left without a search-and-rescue safety net have been allayed. Now it’s up to the lawyers to sort out the messy case in Golden. The three defendants—Golden and District Search and Rescue, the RCMP and Kicking Horse Mountain Resort—have circled the wagons. In its statement of defence, search-and-rescue denies all allegations of negligence and says any “injury, loss or damage was caused wholly or in part by the negligence of the Plaintiff…” Kicking Horse Resort is leaning on the exclusion of liability waiver that adorns the back of every lift ticket, which has proven robust in past court cases. The RCMP also denies negligence, despite the fact that two days after Blackburn’s rescue, Corporal Dan Moskaluk stood before a Golden news conference and admitted the RCMP made an error by not conducting a search on February 21, the day they first received reports of an SOS in Canyon Creek.
Don Blakely, a lawyer and veteran manager of the search-and-rescue team in Vernon, B.C., has watched the Blackburn case closely. He says it’s important to remember that searches are expensive, meaning you can’t simply dispatch a helicopter and an army of volunteers without doing some basic homework. Though he admits a distress signal seen in the bush makes for a pretty persuasive argument for some sort of response, he believes Golden’s search-and-rescue will avoid liability simply because it had not been given a task number, a requirement that is clearly described in policy governing how search-and-rescue organizations operate. However, Blakely says that as this lawsuit grinds through the courts, there will be lessons to be learned.
“In events like this that prove to be tragic, there tends to be a series of compounding errors by the victims. On the response side of the equation, there seems to have been a breakdown in communication, misunderstanding and a lack of precise information,” Blakely says. “But you can’t minimize the personal negligence of the plaintiff. Just think how different this might have turned out if [Blackburn and Fortin] had simply had a pack of matches.”
Kyle Hale, of Golden and District Search and Rescue, gets visibly agitated at suggestions that the group willfully ignored the SOS. “Sure it’s gut wrenching to think that we could have done this or we could have done that, but hindsight is 20/20. We acted on the best available information we had at the time,” he says.
He believes the avalanche of media reports following the incident failed to emphasize the fact that Blackburn and Fortin broke pretty much every rule of backcountry travel.
Nobody knew their itinerary that day, they had no survival gear, they made distress signals in the snow but failed to remain at the spot, and, perhaps most important, they knowingly skied out of bounds. “You can’t walk six feet along that boundary without hitting your head on a sign that says ski-area boundary,” Hale says.
The morale of Golden’s search-and-rescue team may have taken a body blow as a result of the lawsuit, but one thing is certain: team members can count on general public support. In Golden, mountain sports are a religion and there’s no doubt the court case has struck a nerve. The initial sympathy many people had for Blackburn started to evaporate the moment he enlisted a lawyer and pointed the finger of blame at search-and-rescue volunteers, who often forgo work and family obligations to help people in distress. The following response to a CBC online story on the lawsuit was typical: “I feel for him that he lost his wife, I really do, it’s never pleasant when someone passes, especially under circumstances such as this when it could have clearly been avoided by taking common sense precautions. Even my six-year-old brother knows to tell someone when he’s going out of the yard. He also knows not to cross boundary lines he’s not supposed to.”
Tunde Vertesi, a resident of Golden who moved to the town five years ago for the mountain lifestyle, agrees with the sentiment. “I think most people share the same feeling, that they shouldn’t have been out there in the first place.” Vertesi worries that the court action may result in further regulation of outdoor pursuits that attract people partly because they are relatively free of regulation in the first place. Or even worse, it could damage the volunteer search-and-rescue system and therefore endanger people who might need assistance in the future.
As for Blackburn, he has said that he launched the lawsuit for exactly the opposite reason: to fix a faulty system and ensure that someone doesn’t needlessly die in the future.
Like a lot of other wilderness tragedies, this one started with a single poor decision—to duck under the rope at Kicking Horse Resort. When that decision was compounded by more errors, Gilles Blackburn and Marie-Josée Fortin hoped, as most of us would, that somebody would be there to save them. Often that hope is rewarded, but occasionally it’s not. In this case, says veteran heli-pilot Don McTighe, “Everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong.”
No matter what the outcome of his lawsuit, Gilles Blackburn will have to live with the tragic consequences of that poor decision forever.
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Originally published in explore magazine. Copyright © 2010 by explore. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.
