Siphon Draw Rescue

[SuperstitionGuy]

A very dangerous rescue was accomplished by the Superstition Search & Rescue team this week. You can read about it at the following link. There are some lessons to be learned with this incident. #1 the party in trouble had a cell phone. #2 the rescue team was trained and equipped to drop down from the top, hundreds of feet and accomplish a pick off rescue and this is a very dangerous thing to do!

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[djui5]

I remember reading that article. It's amazing how one can get injured, so close to trail heads and such, so quickly. Just goes to show you that no matter where you are you need to be careful. Smart girl

[nonot]

Hardly a smart girl, two two of them set off to do a climb straight up the shear face of the flatiron with apparently no technical gear! She didn't do anything to help other than not faint and fall down on top of him.

The guy looked like he was very lucky to live, the website has a color photo that shows better how hard he smacked his head on the rocks during the fall. Black eye and lost seven teeth but still managed to make the call before blacking out, very lucky guy.

I'm not positive, but based on one of the pictures, it looks like they left the siphon draw trail a half mile past the basin and were attempting to get up the flatiron by going directly up It appears he fell from where a ledge meets one of the large vertical cracks.

[djui5]

I meant smart because as he continued trying to find a way down when they got cliffed out, she stayed put. If he would have stayed put he wouldn't have been in that condition because he wouldn't have fallen

[big_load]

Wow! He was extremely lucky to have lived long enough to make the call, much less long enough to be lifted out. It's a shame that rescuers must take such risks on behalf of such knuckleheads, although I'm sure this pair learned enough to avoid being repeat customers.

[Jeffshadows]

Thanks for posting this up. The very best thing that can ever come out of something like this is a lesson for those observing...

Jeff

[Thoreau]

That article definitely helps me realize the luck my group had when we went out there.

Myself and two friends (one of which is a fellow photographer) set out to photograph the sunrise the Sunday before the two rescuees in the article went up. After about an hour of shooting along the base trails, and about 30 minutes after the sun came up, we made the decision to climb to the top without even knowing what/where the top was. We had about 4 liters of water between us and about a liter of gatorade. Food consisted of about a half dozen energy bars, and two of us had 30 pound camera bags with us.

To say the least, we will never go so unprepared ever again. We made it to Flatiron (I stopped at the very last wall before reaching the top because I didn't trust myself to scale it with the bag I was carrying, nor with my level of dehydration) but not before running out of all fluids 3/4 of the way up. For added fun we lost the trail twice on the way back down, the other two guys got minor ankle sprains, and we came out of the trails into some friggin RV park quite a distance away from my car. Counting the photographing of the sunrise, NUMEROUS stops along the way up, an hour or so at the top, and almost as many stops on the way back down, plus getting lost twice, I think we were hiking for a good 10 hours.

Since then we have PROPERLY hiked Camelback and Fossil Springs, but not before stocking up on trekking poles, GPS devices, a water filtration device, camelbak hydration packs, hats, gloves, food supplies, etc.

We truly were lucky that the article in this thread wasn't written about us considering all of the stupid mistakes we made, but I'll be damned if it wasn't a surefire way to teach us a lesson that we'd never forget! If our experience turned south the way it did, I can't imagine what the outcome would've been if we had tried something as crazy as a full frontal attack on Flatiron...

[Jeffshadows]

Don't feel foolish, this is how everyone learns. There are those smug individuals that will disavow ever having endured such an incident, and I can guess that all of them are folks who never venture more than a mile or two in-trail. You can read all of the articles and books you want and undergo countless training sessions and classes and still never hardwire the thought about going prepared until that first time you run out of water and make it back to the trailhead feeling like you were hit by a train...