Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [148]
Captain Ekker conferred with Wayne County’s commanding officer, Chief Deputy Doug Bliss, who agreed to call out his county’s search-and-rescue group, including a horse team for faster ground-searching capability. Even though it was his request to deploy the mounted searchers, Captain Ekker joked, “Well, with the helicopter in the air, by the time you pull those horses down there, we’ll have found him. But bring ’em out, and be ready to stay the night.”
At 11:25 A.M., Chief Deputy Bliss paged the search-and-rescue group with the message to rendezvous in Hanksville: “Meet at Carl Hunt’s for search in Horseshoe Canyon area. Bring horses, be prepared to be out all night.”
Terry Mercer, a pilot with the Department of Public Safety, had just been canceled for a flight, and had left his DPS helicopter fueled and sitting on the helipad at the Salt Lake City International Airport, when he got a call at ten-forty-five A.M.
Within twenty-five minutes, Terry was airborne and communicating with Captain Ekker, who asked him to pick up one of his officers at the Huntington airport in the northwest part of the county, some seventy air miles from Horseshoe Canyon. By twelve-fifty P.M., Terry had landed and brought on board the aircraft bush-bearded Detective Greg Funk, fresh from an undercover assignment in the Emery County sheriff’s narcotics division. They departed for the canyon, just thirty-five minutes away by air.
Even with the two-hour flight from Salt Lake, Terry’s DPS chopper was the first to arrive at Horseshoe Canyon, landing in the dirt parking lot. Sergeant Mitch Vetere showed Terry my maroon truck, and they looked through some of my hiking and camping gear in the pickup bed. After a quick discussion with the BLM and NPS rangers gathered at the trailhead, Terry and the two officers decided that the best place to look for an experienced hiker would be to search the northern end of the canyon, toward its intersection with the Green River. When the next helicopter arrived, it would fly over the upper half of the canyon, to the south of the trailhead.
With their flight plan identified, Mitch joined his colleague Greg in the backseat of the helicopter as a second pair of onboard eyes, even though he was particularly averse to flying. Federal regulations prohibit BLM and Park Service employees from boarding any aircraft that does not have a green-card registration. Since the Utah DPS officials have a primary focus of aiding the counties, they don’t let their pilots have green cards, and thereby avoid any obligation to help with federal requests. While this policy usually works in DPS’s favor, conserving the department’s limited resources for local and state needs, it removed the dozen BLM and NPS rangers assembled at the trailhead from the pool of available air searchers. Thus, as much as Mitch disliked flying in general, and despite the special anxiety he reserved for helicopters, he was the only person at the trailhead who could ride.
At 1:56 P.M., Terry lifted the DPS chopper in a swirling cloud of red dust, and flew into Horseshoe Canyon on a northeast bearing toward the confluence of Barrier Creek and the Green River. For twenty miles, he steadily piloted the helicopter below the rim rock, following the meanders of the dry Barrier Creek streambed at the bottom of the canyon. Greg and Mitch watched for footprints in the sandy canyon floor and kept an anxious eye on the unnervingly scant distance between the helicopter’s rotor blades and the sandstone walls. With the smell of jet fuel reminding him that he was riding on an airborne gas tank, Mitch