An Air National Guard Blackhawk helicopter hovers over a man who fell 2,000 feet down Skywalker Couloir in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, Sat. June 16 in Colorado. His rescue was initiated by Malachi Brooks, 17, and Bodhi Governson, 19, who began learning search-and-rescue skills on the junior ski patrol at Eldora resort when they were each 15. Governson is now a paid patroller while Brooks aims to become one this winter. The fallen skier survived. (Video courtesy of Rocky Mountain Rescue Group)
Bodhi Governson and Malachi Brooks were just two ordinary guys, not yet 20, when they set out to ski Skywalker Couloir in the Indian Peaks Wilderness on June 16.
By the end of the day, they’d be heroes for helping rescue a skier who fell at the top of a plunging descent and tomahawked more than 1,000 feet toward a rock outcropping.
Skywalker is the main couloir on the south face of South Arapaho Peak. It’s described on 14ers.com as “very difficult” with three Star Wars-themed entrances into the 2,000-foot descent that starts at 13,200 feet and pitches to 55 degrees.
Governson said the snow was slushy by the time he and Brooks dropped in. But they stopped at a 400-foot section in the middle of the couloir because the sun hadn’t hit it yet and it was still too icy to safely descend.
Governson, from Longmont, is 19 and Brooks, from Boulder, is 17. Both have been skiing since they “were able to walk” and consider themselves “OK skiers.” Governson is a part-time paid patroller and Brooks is a volunteer patroller aiming to turn professional at Eldora ski area this winter. They both joined the junior ski patrol program at the Boulder County ski hill when they were 16 and 15, which Neil Sullivan, patrol director, said is a relatively difficult gig to get, with lots of kids applying.
These guys are pretty special, though, Sullivan said.
“Malachi is self-aware, a great skier and just absorbs things. He’s really present and like a sponge. Everything you say, you know it’s going in there and staying.”
“Bodhi is calm but with a sense of eagerness,” Sullivan added. “He has confidence and humility. You look in his eyes and see this excitement. He’s looking forward to doing everything you’re telling him.”
The Eldora junior patrol has 12 kids who start their training with Outdoor Emergency Class through the National Ski Patrol that lasts two nights a week from August to October. “Then they’re on the snow, around the professional patrol, learning what all the equipment is and the nature of the job,” Sullivan said. “They’re talked to and introduced to this whole thing the same way the pro patrol is.”
They’re also exposed to all of the trauma pro patrol sees, which at Eldora, like most ski resorts, is significant.
Though they can’t treat an injured skier until they’re 18, the young patrollers witness bones being splinted and skiers being loaded into sleds. They see head injuries, broken femurs and the occasional death.
“They’re also there to assist, which could mean helping lift a backboard or loading a person into a sled,” Sullivan said. “They could be doing traffic control, or a couple of them might go out and close a run if that’s what we need. They provide a great workforce. And they’re given a lot of responsibility.”
From first descent to first responder
The many skills Governson and Brooks have been learning came into play during their first descent of Skywalker last weekend.
While they were waiting for the sun to soften the narrow section of shaded snow they sat above so they could ski it, they witnessed a terrifying accident.
A skier, identified only as a 47-year-old man, began his descent down the left side of the couloir. He lost control and began tumbling, making full body head-over-heels vertical rotations down the run. As they watched, Governson instinctively grabbed for his phone and dialed 911. Fortunately the call went through and a rescue was initiated.
Brooks said his first thought was, “we need to figure out how to get down to him.” But he knew they couldn’t keep descending on skis because of the danger of slipping on the ice. “We needed to prioritize our safety to help him,” he said, repeating a key tenet in rescue training.
So they carefully secured their skis to their backpacks, put on crampons, hiked to skiable snow and made turns for about 700 feet to the fallen skier.
The rescuers won’t say what his injuries were because first responders are sworn to confidentiality by health privacy rules.
That doesn’t surprise Sullivan, who says the teens are respectful and go by the book.
“Their ability to recognize a situation and to listen and provide the care that’s necessary, both of them have developed so much of that,” he said.
Emilie Jue, a technical field leader for Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, saw their training in action.
She’s been with Rocky Mountain Rescue for seven years and has participated in 700 of the estimated 1,400 search and rescue missions the professional organization has performed, free of charge, during that period. She was the first person flown to the couloir via Medevac helicopter. Her day job is physicist.
Jue arrived an hour and a half after Governson made his call. As the helicopter neared the accident, she spotted the guys, wearing bright red shirts. When the aircraft set her down, she saw they’d covered the patient in an orange emergency blanket.
Her priority once she landed was to locate the patient, secure him and provide medical care, she said. “But when I was about 50 feet away, someone approached me and asked if I was ready for a medical report.”
Both Governson and Brooks were wearing Eldora ski patrol T-shirts. She knows Eldora patrol responds to a high volume of accidents, so their association with the patrol “increased my confidence in what Bodhi and Malachi were saying,” she said.
Governson gave her one of the most thorough medical reports she’s ever heard, and Brooks took impeccable notes. By the time she arrived, Governson had taken three sets of vitals and Brooks had documented them all.
Once she learned Governson is an EMT, she told him, “‘There’s no reason I need to take over for you if you are willing to keep going.’ He said he was happy to, so I gave him a stethoscope. He was totally willing to keep on it as Malachi kept taking notes.”
Based on the patient’s condition, location in the couloir and distance from a landing pad and the trailhead, Jue recommended an evacuation via a cable hoist beneath a helicopter. She asked the Rocky Mountain Rescue Team member running operations and the coordinator from the Emergency Services Unit of the Boulder County Sheriff to coordinate the resources. They tried to get a Black Hawk helicopter from Buckley Space Force Base but ended up using one from the High Altitude Air National Guard Aviation Training Site in Gypsum.
Then the helicopter came, big, army green and menacing during combat. But out in the wilderness, headed for a skier who was merely chasing some fun and fell, it might as well have been a big, benevolent butterfly.
This one carried two members of Vail Mountain Rescue Group who are also members of the Colorado Hoist Rescue Team.
The team on scene, which had grown to seven, prepared the man to be hoisted on a cable into the Black Hawk’s belly. He was transported to the Nederland High School parking lot, where he was transferred to an ambulance and at around 4 p.m. taken to a hospital. Meanwhile, Jue and the other rescuers packed up and hiked out of the backcountry while the teens finished their epic ski descent and followed.
The rescue had taken around five and a half hours, but Governson’s and Brooks’ day had been going for 10. They’d left their houses at 3:30 a.m. They’d climbed thousands of feet and skied thousands more. They’d broken out crampons and down climbed something sketchy. They’d kept it together every second of the rescue they launched while chasing their own high-risk, high-reward fun.
Jue called what the teens did “very detailed, professional and well done.” She praised them for “witnessing something extremely hard and staying calm.”
“They went into ski patrol mode instead of saying, ‘Oh [bleep] what do we do?’” she added. And she said the man who could have fallen to his death in Skywalker is doing better and has been discharged from the hospital.
“Without any doubt, he is lucky that Bodhi and Malachi were in the couloir.”