From Watch Your Step
Nestled in the Wasatch Mountains south of Salt Lake City, the caverns of Timpanogos Cave National Monument sit more than a mile above sea level and over 1,000 feet above the American Fork River. The canyon's rocky flanks are dotted with Douglas firs and crowned by glittering limestone crags. The spectacular vistas draw tens of thousands of people up a steep trail each year to see the caves' array of stalagmites, stalactites, helictites and flowstone.But to three-year-old Paulina Filippova, all this natural beauty was less interesting than the green cardboard can of pretzels in her hands. It was about 5:30 p.m. on a late September day in 2006, and the pixie-faced blonde was hiking with her mother, Olga, her older brother and sister, and two family friends. The group had just toured the cave and was headed back down the winding path.
As Paulina walked, she shook the can, fiddled with the lid and plucked out the occasional treat, apparently oblivious to her mother's warnings to watch her step. The trail curved sharply left; Paulina kept walking straight. Olga grabbed for her, missed by an inch -- and watched in horror as her youngest child plummeted 25 feet down a cliff, landed on a near-vertical scree slope, tumbled 50 feet into a stand of scrub oak, and vanished. "I thought, That's it," Olga recalls. "I will never see her alive again."
Olga and her physicist husband, Andrey, moved to the United States from Russia in 1995 when an American firm hired him for a job in Salt Lake City. Settling in suburban Magna, the nature-loving couple went hiking and camping as often as they could. In time, they brought along their children: Nina, now nine, Fyodr, seven, and finally Paulina.
By 2006, Andrey had established his own business, developing industrial cameras. That fall, he invited an old friend, Novosibirsk State University computer science professor Vitaly Tsikoza, to visit; the two planned to discuss a possible joint venture. Andrey had always admired Tsikoza's blend of gentleness, modesty and intellectual brilliance. In their younger days, they spent hours rambling through the woods, talking about everything from software programs to the meaning of life.
On the Sunday after Tsikoza's arrival in Utah, Andrey suggested a trip to Timpanogos, a favorite spot of the family's. He had work to do, so Olga would take the children, Tsikoza and another colleague.
Tsikoza, an athletic 41-year-old, carried Paulina in a backpack up the mile-and-a-half-long trail. The girl was on foot, though, when the group exited the caverns and started back down the mountain. It was along this stretch that Paulina fell over the side.
Olga and Tsikoza quickly climbed about ten feet down to a narrow ledge.
"Do I jump?" Olga cried.
"No," Tsikoza said. "Go get help."
Olga scrambled back to the trail and ran toward the cave entrance. "My daughter fell!" she screamed. "My daughter fell!" Desperate to reach Paulina, she rushed back to the cliff and began searching for another way down.
Then she noticed that Tsikoza, too, had disappeared.
Fragile Cargo
That day, Mickey Horak was trying something new. A 26-year-old electrician from Texas, he had spent his whole life on flat ground before moving to Utah a few months earlier."Not much hiking where I'm from," he says. "I'd never done it."
Horak, an avid skateboarder who'd recently taken up snowboarding, is an adventurous type. "I like anything that gets my adrenaline pumping," he says. He hadn't found the Timpanogos hike too challenging. That changed when, leaving the caves, he and two friends heard Olga's cries for help.
Running downhill, Horak found Olga pointing to where her daughter had disappeared. Realizing that a direct approach was hopeless, he went back up the trail and found an entry point where the slope was slightly less severe. From far below, he could hear faint crying.
Horak went down 60 feet -- much of it on his backside -- to the lip of a 70-foot drop. Grabbing a tree trunk, he looked left. There, 15 feet below, lay a child in a pink jacket. She was on her stomach in a deep gully, clutching a root as her feet dangled over the cliff's edge.
Horak scooted gingerly down the rockslide. "Hey, little girl," he murmured, "you okay?"
Paulina whimpered. Horak saw a deep gash in her forehead. Feeling himself sliding toward the precipice on loose gravel, he dug his feet and left hand into the underlying mud, and used his right hand to try to hold the girl still. Without help, they would both go over the edge.
Part-time ranger Marc Ellison was leading visitors through the cave when a fellow ranger rushed in.
"A baby has fallen off the cliff!" the woman shouted.
The 34-year-old Ellison hardly seemed an ideal candidate for heroics. A full-time clerk at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints headquarters, he was pudgy and balding. He had suffered since childhood from a potentially lethal blood illness and was still regaining his strength after a bone marrow transplant three years before.
But Ellison was also a former Eagle Scout, a veteran rock climber and a father of six. He ran to the locker room for a rappelling rope. Not finding one, he grabbed a two-way radio instead. Following the route Horak had taken, he climbed down to a flat rock just above where Horak and Paulina were trapped. Looking up, Horak asked, "Can I hand her to you?"
"First we'd better check to see if she's got a spinal injury," Ellison said. "If she does, moving her could make things worse."
"Can you wiggle your fingers and toes for me?" Horak asked. She did, with a grin that nearly knocked him off balance. Bracing himself, he lifted her into Ellison's outstretched arms. Then Horak scrambled up to join the ranger and the child on the rock.
Soon Olga appeared on the slope, about 20 feet above them.
"She's okay," Ellison yelled, "but please don't come any closer." He asked Olga for her daughter's name, then turned to the girl and said, "Hello, Paulina. We're here to help you. We'll hold you and keep you safe."
That's all they could do. From where they stood, the canyon wall was too steep to climb. And though the ledge they were on seemed stable enough, large rocks, some knocked loose by onlookers above, rained down on them.
Paulina, meanwhile, kept drifting off to sleep. All three adults continued to talk to her to keep her conscious, with her mother calling out in Russian from her nearby perch.
As they waited for help, Horak and Ellison, who had learned of Tsikoza's disappearance from Olga, called out for the missing man. Within a half hour, word came over the radio that his body had been found, smashed on the rocks more than 200 feet down.
The two men told Olga only that the news was "not good."
By the time volunteers from the county's search-and-rescue team arrived, shadows were falling over the canyon. At last, about 90 minutes after Olga's first anguished cry, a rescue worker rappelled down to where Ellison and Horak sat with Paulina, setting off a small landslide. Ellison used the man's foot as an anchor to avoid being swept off the side of the ledge. Once the rocks stopped falling, he handed Paulina to the harnessed and helmeted volunteer. Gripping the rope for support, Ellison and Horak clambered up to where Olga waited. Then the two men hauled up the rescue worker, who held Paulina tightly.
Forty minutes later, a helicopter appeared, its rotors churning up thick clouds of dust. Lowered by a cable, a paramedic fitted Paulina with a neck brace and loaded her into a basket. As the copter flew off, its fragile cargo dangling below, Olga's relief was tinged with frustration.
"I wanted to hold her," she says. "I couldn't wait until it was all over and I could get her in my arms."
Before that could happen, rescue workers had to hoist Olga, Ellison and Horak back up to the trail. Olga returned to the parking lot, where she met up with her family (Andrey had hurried to the scene after getting a call at work). That's when she learned Tsikoza had died.
"He was such a kind, thoughtful person," she says. "He was just doing what he felt he had to do."
Except for a mild concussion and some cuts and bruises, Paulina was unhurt, and she spent just one night in the hospital.
Today, the green can that caused all the trouble -- recovered at the scene -- sits above the stove in the family's modest bungalow. An hour's drive away, a makeshift shrine of stones and keepsakes, erected by Olga and Andrey, stands at the spot where Tsikoza's body landed.
For risking their lives to save a little girl, Mickey Horak, Marc Ellison and, posthumously, Vitaly Tsikoza received Carnegie Hero Fund medals. Even more rewarding: Their daring earned them a permanent place in the Filippovs' hearts.