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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.
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