From More than 80 search-and-rescue workers from five agencies covered the mountainside near Denny Creek. Using chain saws, shovels, and their bare hands, they had cleared away tons of ice, but tons more remained. So did unanswered questions: Would the victims have enough air to breathe? Would they drown in the rising waters or give in to hypothermia before rescuers reached them? Was it already too late?
Shoving all that aside, Cushman crawled into the shifting ice and yelled again, "Can anybody hear me?" Then he held his breath, straining to hear something—anything—from the frozen rubble below.
Thursday, August 21, 2008, had begun in a flurry of mismatched hiking boots and lost water bottles in the Corbett family's Seattle home. "It was pretty obvious we hadn't done a lot of this," says Joni Corbett, 45, who, with her neighbor Chrissy Gelmini, 54, had planned to take their two sons, two daughters, and two dogs on a day hike in the nearby mountains.Finally, by early afternoon, the two families were winding their way through the immense spruces and moss-green light of the Denny Creek Trail, 50 miles east of the city. Beside them, the creek chattered with snow melt. The boys, Alec Corbett, 17, and Alessandro (known as Ollie) Gelmini, 14, ran ahead to explore, while the two girls—Marta Gelmini, 10, and Halle Corbett, 7—stayed closer to their mothers, skipping rocks in the water and playing with the dogs. Beside a small waterfall, they ate the lunch they'd carried in their backpacks. "It was so pretty and so close to home," says Gelmini. "I remember thinking, Why don't we do this more often?"
After lunch, they continued hiking, the trail growing steeper and rockier and the air chillier as they climbed. Two miles from the trailhead, they stopped to watch the creek waters cascade in gauzy sheets down the 85-foot Keekwulee Falls. There they noticed the ice field just above the falls. "At first I thought, How cool snow in August," says Corbett. "I assumed it was a patch about as big as a table, but I guess we were seeing it from far off." As they hiked toward it, they realized they'd found more than a simple patch of melting snow.
They'd stumbled upon a yawning, crystalline cave carved and fluted by the waters of Denny Creek, spanning the entire mouth of the 70-foot-wide canyon. Winter storms, blowing in off the Pacific, get snagged on the peaks of the Cascades and drop hundreds of inches of snow in the high country. An exceptionally wet winter had packed the narrow canyon above the falls with drifts. Wind, melting, and its own immense weight then compacted and compressed the snow into a white fang of ice hundreds of feet long and a dozen feet thick even in late August. "It was beautiful," says Corbett—a jewel of winter glistening in the summer sun.
It was also deep, shadowy, cool against the heat of the hike—and enticing. Alec and Ollie posed while Corbett snapped a cell phone photo at the mouth of the cave, then the two boys turned and stepped inside. "It was all echoey in there," Alec recalls. "There was steam rising off the snow, and it was hard to hear over the creek."
Moving deeper into the maze of ice and shadows, they saw a patch of light ahead, another way out. "We had to cross a little channel of the creek," Alec says. "I used a stick to kind of pole-vault across, tossed it back to Ollie, and then turned around." Behind him, Alec heard the crunch of his friend's shoes on the gravel. He saw Cyprus, his beagle, bolt from beneath his feet and scurry out of the cave. Seconds later, he heard a crash:
"It was like snow falling off a roof but louder." Much louder.
A hundred feet away, YMCA camp counselor Tyson Goeppinger, who had led his own group up the mountain to see the ice cave minutes before, heard a deafening roar and felt the ground shake. He knew immediately what had happened. "At first I thought how amazing it was to be near an ice cave when it collapsed," Goeppinger says. "But then I heard a woman screaming."
Calling For Help
Operator: Emergency. Fire and rescue.
Joni Corbett: We are on a hike, the Lake Melakwa hike. My kids are in a snow cave, and it collapsed on them. Oh my God … They're suffocating. No!
Corbett's heart hammered in her chest, and her voice was shaking so much, she could hardly make herself understood.
Operator: I need you to calm down so we can get you help.
Corbett: We're going to need a helicopter or something. It collapsed, like, three minutes ago. Please hurry. Oh my God. Are you sending help? They are going to die.
Goeppinger ran toward the screams. Marilyn Pyke, leader of the church group just behind, arrived minutes later. "We began crawling carefully around the ice, yelling the boys' names," she says. "The creek was moving under and around the ice. We put our heads down into any crack we could find and kept shouting their names, but there was no response."
All around them was a jumble of ice blocks shattered against rocks. Pyke and her group tried hacking at the blocks with sticks and shoving them with their legs, to no avail. "At one point, I saw a block that had landed on a log about 18 inches in diameter and just splintered it," Pyke says. "That's when I realized the tons of weight we were working against." There was nothing they could do but pull back, wait for help, and pray.
"I just kept thinking, They are going to come out," Gelmini recalls. "I thought they would walk out and be okay … any minute now." But the minutes passed; no one came out.
Trying to Hold on to Hope
Under the ice, Alec was stunned but alive: "I didn't know what happened." A 40-by-50-foot section of the cave had collapsed on top of him, shoving him face-first into the ground. Only a small log directly ahead of him, about as big around as his waist, had kept him from being crushed. The log deflected some of the ice and created a small breathing space.
Still, his face was inches from the flowing creek, and the water was rising around the ice blocks that dammed its flow. "Twice in the first couple of minutes, the water splashed me in the face and I'd have trouble breathing," he says. Both times, however, the ice shifted and the waters receded. "I was pretty anxious. I tried to push myself up and break through, kind of doing push-ups to get it off my back, but it was too heavy." Exhausted, he laid his head on the log to quell his panic. "That's when I heard Ollie moaning."
His younger friend was pinned against a boulder nearby, his left hand crushed under an ice block, his eyesight blurred by blood from cuts on his face. "I couldn't see him, so I yelled to see if he was all right," Alec says. "But he just kept moaning."
Ollie had heard his friend, though. "The way I was pinned was making it really hard to breathe or talk, but I calmed down a little when I heard Alec's voice."
Alec shouted encouragement—"Hang on! Someone will be coming. Just hang on!"—and Ollie began calling back. In halting shouts edged with fear, they talked about their chances for rescue. They talked about Bishop Blanchet High School, where Alec would be a senior and Ollie a freshman, and anything they could think of, the sound of each other's voices a fragile lifeline between them. "Mostly we just kept telling each other to hold on," says Alec.
Wearing only sweatpants and ski jackets, trapped by ice and lying in water, the boys soon felt the cold. Alec knew they shouldn't fall asleep and kept asking Ollie if he was awake. But Alec was slipping into hypothermia himself. "The way I was caught, my left leg was bent right up near my face, but I was so numb, I couldn't even feel my foot," he says. In the dark and barely able to move his hands, he leaned forward and bit down to see if it really was his foot. His tongue touched the sole of his boot. Thrashing around in an attempt to get free, he felt his right foot kick Ollie in the chest. "I hadn't realized he was so close. I reached out my hand as far as I could." Ollie reached out too. There, in the darkness, their fingers touched. Alec stopped struggling. The two boys held hands and waited.
Search and Rescue
Minutes after Joni Corbett's 911 call, an alarm crackled at the Eastside Fire and Rescue station in North Bend, ten miles from the Denny Creek trailhead. "A lot of the crew are hikers and skiers, so we knew the general area," says Cushman. "But there are a lot of steep gullies up there, a lot of slide areas, and we didn't know exactly what we'd end up getting into." They grabbed everything they thought they might need (shovels, pickaxes, a chain saw), drove to the trailhead, and hiked in.
What site commander Lt. Dean deAlteriis saw when he reached the creek an hour later made his heart sink. "I didn't know what to expect with an ice collapse in August," he says, "but with victims under that much material for such a long time, I wasn't expecting a very good outcome. Still, you put those emotions aside and get to work."
First, they had to pick a spot to begin the excavation. There was a huge area—bigger than three fire engines, according to deAlteriis—to look for two boys. The searchers had one shot at getting it right.
After scrutinizing Corbett's cell phone photos of the boys, the rescuers first thought they should dig near the entrance. But Cushman had a different idea. "I asked myself, Where would I be? And I had kind of a gut feeling—there's no other way to describe it. I just had a feeling where they would be." He moved the operation 40 feet upslope and said to the others, "Here. Let's dig right here." Although they wouldn't know it for hours yet, Cushman had marked a spot almost directly over Ollie Gelmini.The boys were unaware of the frantic activity ten feet above them. "We couldn't hear anything. We just kept squeezing each other's hands to keep awake," Alec says. As two hours turned to three, their emotions leaped and tumbled. "We'd convince each other that help was on its way, and then I'd think, I don't know how big this thing is. What if they can't find us?" When the sun came out above them, the cave would lighten, giving them hope. "Then it would dim and I'd think, It's getting dark. The rescuers won't be able to get here," says Alec. Ollie counted the pebbles in the creek bed over and over; Alec watched the water drip—anything to keep their minds off dying. Then, in the silence, they heard a thud.
"It took a couple of whacks with the shovel to realize that this was an impossible task with hand tools," Cushman says. He yelled down to where the equipment was gathered, asking a crew member to bring him a chain saw.
"We brought the saw in the event that we would have to cut support timbers to shore up a collapse," says deAlteriis. "The idea of using it to cut the ice was a total surprise, but it worked great. Without that chain saw …" His voice trails off.
Even with the saw, and the two additional ones he radioed for, the task was painstaking: Cut a one-by-one-foot block, wrestle the slippery 50-pound square out of the way and into the creek, cut another. "We had to work carefully," deAlteriis says. "It was wet and slippery up there, and lifting the ice was very hard work." They had to go slowly to make sure they didn't cut the boys. Crews rotated out of the work site every 20 minutes to rest and warm up. One square foot at a time, they burrowed deeper into the heart of the cave and, they hoped, closer to the boys.
It was growing dark. A steady rain fell. Beneath a pine tree, curled in the fetal position, Joni Corbett was overcome. "I just couldn't take it," she says, "the thought of the boys under there all that time." She finally allowed herself to be led down the mountain with the girls to a medic site set up at the trailhead while Chrissy Gelmini stayed near the cave. "They couldn't have dragged me off that mountain," Gelmini says. But she, too, felt hope fading. "There was a point," she says, "when I thought, I have to release my son. I thought he was dead, and I had to come to grips with that." Then she heard someone shout, "They've heard a voice!"
Cushman was jammed way down in a crack in the ice almost at creek level, still shouting and listening, shouting and listening, when he thought he heard a low moan. He yelled back over his shoulder, "Everybody, quiet!"
The saws were shut down. Radios ceased crackling. The whole mountain seemed to go silent. Then he heard the sound again.
"We've got someone alive down here!" Cushman shouted. Then they heard a second voice. The chain saws snapped back to life. Ice flew out of the hole. "When we heard the voices, everything changed," deAlteriis says. "But we had to be careful. There was still a lot of ice to move." As they dug closer to the voices, only a few feet from the spot where Cushman had told them to work, they switched to pickaxes and shovels.
"We got to Ollie first," Cushman says. "We almost had him free, but the block pinning his hand was just too big. 'I have to run a chain saw above you,' I told him. He got pretty nervous, but our time was getting short."
Five hours after the cave had collapsed, Ollie Gelmini was lifted from the ice. Medics secured him to a backboard, gave him an IV to prevent dehydration, and applied warming packets to raise his body temperature. On the narrow path, rescuers passed him hand to hand out to where his mother was waiting. His face was covered with blood and his eyes were closed, but when he heard his mother's voice, "he looked at me and I knew it was Ollie," Gelmini says.
Waiting at the medic station down the mountain, Joni Corbett knew only what was relayed by radio. "I knew they had gotten one of the boys out, but the rescuers couldn't or wouldn't tell me which one," she says. "Then I heard someone say that the boy still in the ice was really worked up and wanted to get out now." She thought that might be Alec.
"Once Ollie was out, that's when I got the most anxious. Then I was alone," Alec says. "I was having a hard time breathing. I wanted the ice off my back. I remember they were whacking it with ice axes. I wanted them to stop, but they said no. So I just shut my mouth and waited." The one huge chunk of ice still pinning him was teetering dangerously just above his back. If it fell the wrong way, it would crush him, but it was too risky to use the saw this close. While one rescuer struggled to hold the block in place, others tried to crack it with ice picks, blow upon blow, each one sending a shot of pain through Alec's back.
Finally, the block broke. Thirty minutes after Ollie was taken out of the ice and five and a half hours after the collapse, both boys were free. As rescuers pulled Alec out, he looked down at the log he'd been pinned near. "My first thought was, If I'd taken one more step, I'd be dead." His second thought was about Cyprus: "Has anyone seen a beagle?"
Both dogs were safe, at the medic station, but the danger wasn't over. "All the while, I'd been watching a crack in the second part of the ice cave," Cushman says. "When we started, it was about the size of my fist. By the time we got Alec out and down to the helicopter, it was more than two feet across." Eight minutes after rescue personnel cleared the area, that part of the cave gave way, burying the spot where the boys had been trapped and the rescuers had worked.
A Happy Ending
A helicopter airlifted Ollie and Alec to Seattle's Harborview Medical Center, where doctors found that both boys had broken backs. Ollie had nerve damage in his left hand and lacerations on his face. Alec's left foot was broken. Both suffered from hypothermia and dehydration, and both needed surgery and months of physical therapy. But they're expected to fully recover.
"There must be a greater plan for those two," deAlteriis says. "They certainly got a second chance."
Three days after the rescue, Brian Corbett, Alec's father, who had first introduced his family to the Denny Creek Trail, sat in a chair next to Alec's bed with his hand on his sleeping son's shoulder. "Around 3 a.m., Alec woke up and started describing a nightmare to me," his father says. "In the dream, he was still in the ice, and the rescuers weren't coming." Still in pain and heavily medicated, Alec told the story calmly and quietly as his father choked back tears. "He finished telling me and went right back to sleep like it was no big deal," Corbett says. Then, next to Alec's bed, he wept.