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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.
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