The Adventurer's Son(57)

ANOTHER SEARCH FROM thirty years before emboldened me. It was a time before specialized teams of roped rescuers existed in Fairbanks and it was up to us in the climbing community to bring home our own. One night we got a call from the Alaska State Troopers who said there had been a climbing accident in the Hayes Range. Our community was small. We all knew it was Carl Tobin or Matt Van Enkevort climbing Ninety-four Forty-eight, a mountain Carl and I had failed on three years before. As more information trickled in, we discovered that Carl had been seriously hurt during a long fall in an avalanche. Leaving Carl in a small bivouac tent, Matt had skied and hiked twenty miles until he found a moose hunter’s camp with a radio and used it to call for a rescue. It wasn’t clear yet what the extent of Carl’s injuries were, only that he had broken both legs, including his femur. Carl was my regular climbing partner and I feared he could die.

The next morning, four of us left before dawn in an army helicopter that dropped us at the toe of the Gillam Glacier. The Range was swallowed in storm, but we headed up-glacier anyway. We pulled a big sled to bring Carl back. Whiteout had reduced visibility to a few yards and forced us to follow the wind’s direction calibrated by compass. Never sure where we were, we knew only the direction we moved.

Tied together, we skied into a wind so fierce it knocked each of us down at some point. Miraculously the storm slackened and a hole in the blizzard opened that reached across the glacier. Through this window I saw we were near Ninety-four Forty-eight, and with the improved visibility, I spotted Carl’s tent above the glacier on a moraine, a low ridgeline of rocks left by the glacier’s movement.

The break in the weather had come at just the right moment. Realigning my compass, we skied into the teeth of the wind as the hole in the storm closed again. First on the rope, I fought off my fear for the worst as we skied up the moraine. But as we pulled to its top, we saw that it wasn’t Carl’s tent, but a boulder. Dismayed, I feared we might not find him at all. The glacier was big and the whiteout hid everything more than fifty yards distant.

I led us to the boulder anyway and looked downhill past it, seeing behind the moraine for the first time. And there was the tent! We hurried down the moraine. My mind raced. Will we find Carl alive? And what if we don’t? What then? The tent flapped wildly in the wind, but had a strange, counter beat to it, too. As I closed in on the half-buried shelter, I heard loud cursing.

“Carl!” I yelled. “Carl!”

“Yeah!” I heard Carl’s voice from inside the tent, “Yeah. Hey, who’s with you?” he asked.

We were all relieved he was alive. It seemed incredible, given the conditions, that we had found him at all. We secured Carl in the sled and worked him down the glacier through the storm and whiteout to the helicopter pickup. I thought about how we had found him. We were a small group of his friends who had the skills and knowledge to know where to look and how to get there, coupled with resources, like the army’s helicopter, for support.

But the real lesson had been this: Follow intuition. It often leads in the right direction, if not directly to the destination. If we could find Carl on the Gillam Glacier in a whiteout, then we could find Roman in the jungle.

CRUZ ROJA’S ANNOUNCEMENT that they would soon call off the search had only galvanized our resolve to search on our own. Thai and I shopped for three days of lunch food to supplement the freeze-dried dinners we had brought from Alaska. We packed light: a bug tent with a tarp-like rain fly, stove and a cookpot, sleeping pads, sleeping sheets, dry clothes, and head lamps, all wrapped in dry bags inside our packs. We would be ready to leave at dawn.

That night at the Iguana, as I tried to sleep, my phone rang with an unknown number. The caller was cagey, but offered to help. “How?” I asked.

“Tell me what’s happening.”

I gave him the story, ending with how the Costa Rican Red Cross had kept us out of the park.

“The Red Cross sucks,” he said. “But I can help. I hear through the grapevine that a black snake has your son.”

“A black snake?”

“Yeah, a bad motherfucker. That’s what we do. We deal with black snakes and do extractions. I have an asset in Costa right now. It usually costs thirty but we’ll do it for fifteen.”

Unsure what I was hearing, I stuck to the facts. “Well, I’m going in tomorrow. Somebody saw my son, talked to him a couple weeks ago. I went in there today, where he was last seen, and we’re going back.”

“Who are you going with?”

“A local guy. He knows the place well.”

“Do you have anybody to watch your back?”

“Watch my back?”

“Yeah. Can you trust this guy? What do you have for a weapon?” That got my attention.

“Um, no. No weapon. But I have another friend from the States with me.”

“Oh, okay,” said the cagey voice. “Look, I’m going to text you my number and if you need help with the black snake, get a hold of me.”

Then he hung up.

What the hell was that?





Chapter 30


Las Quebraditas


Vargas in Las Quebraditas, August 1, 2014.

Courtesy of the author



Early the next morning and supplied with food and camping gear, Thai, Vargas, his son, and I retraced Jenkins’s route to Zeledón. Hungry for anything that might help me find Roman, I lingered and searched for clues at the nondescript boulder where he had eaten breakfast weeks before. If he’d come this far, he would have likely kept going, toward the disorienting jungle of Las Quebraditas, where we would head to next.