Gets 31 stitches after rush to dodge lightning

A Jasper Park Lodge employee who fell off a cliff and tumbled 15m down Roche Bonhomme in a hasty descent last week after feeling electricity in the air was grateful for Parks Canada’s lightning-quick helicopter rescue.

Peter Blak, 23, and his companions Jeff Grieve and Adam Obst were getting ready to pack up after having lunch at the summit of Roche Bonhomme, a mountain just northeast of the townsite, when black clouds rolled in.

“I noticed a screeching sound and thought, ‘This is odd’,” the Windsor native said. “I looked up and the clouds were really dark.”

Blak tried to lead the trio down a shortcut and wound up at a dead end. Finding himself too far down to turn back, he sent his friends in another direction and surveyed his options. 

“I saw a little pathway to the left and said, ‘Okay if I can make it up this one rock I can get down an easy way to the treeline’,” he said. But by then some snow had fallen and Blak lost his footing on a slippery rock and tumbled over a cliff.

“I don’t really remember much, I kind of bounced off and rolled on loose rock,” he said. “I stopped and looked down at my leg and could see a little bit of bone, it was very scary.”

While his friends made their way to him, Blak used his cell phone to call 911. It was about 3:15 p.m. To get back down by foot would have been about a three hour hike.

“Thank God my phone wasn’t broken and I had signal,” Blak said. His buddies used dressings from their first aid kit and extra clothing to wrap his wounds.

The three-person rescue team collected the hikers about 95 m from the summit, at 2,400 m. By 5:15 p.m., about two hours after making the call, Blak was on the ground in an ambulance.

At Seton Hospital, Blak needed 24 stitches in his left leg just below the knee and another seven in the same spot on the right. Both legs were scraped as well as his left arm and hand, which was badly cut.

Steve Blake, public safety specialist for Parks Canada, said he and the other rescuers were surprised Blak’s injuries weren’t more severe.

“He had some pretty serious lacerations on his legs from the sharp rocks but was in pretty good shape considering how far he fell,” said Steve Blake, public safety specialist for Parks Canada.

The trio did the right thing by getting down off the ridge, said Blake, who assisted in the rescue.

“They got real signs for the potential for lightning,” he said. “The one guy said he could feel a static shock through the metal rivet in his hat.”

When the potential is there it can make for a serious situation, and the rules on a mountain are the same as on level ground.

“We saw lightning when we were up there and it made our response much quicker than it might have been,” Blake said. “Take cover, get down off exposed places – you don’t want to be on a high point of land.”

A number of factors contributed to the speed and success of this rescue, said Blake, including the fact they had a cell phone and were able to describe their location.

“It’s easy to find people above treeline, especially three waving people in one place,” he said. “And visibility was still good and they said they could still see Jasper, so we knew what side they were on.”

Blak hopes others won’t be discouraged from hiking after hearing his story because he certainly isn’t.

“It’s a regular hike that other people do, it’s an unfortunate accident,” he said. “In a situation like that don’t panic, just remember which way you came up and stay with your friends.”

Blak figures he’ll be ready to hike up Whistler’s Mountain in about a month. “But I’m going to check the weather,” he added.