Track Meet, Cleanup & Survival

Drumroll please .... The annual district stockade track meet was held at LEFC tonight and the Battalion members were the awesome assistants to make sure things ran smoothly. From basketball catchers to score keepers to clothes pin counters, everyone was in the groove.

In the meantime a crew of guys was outside helping clean up, raking leaves and beating back the blackberry bushes trying to take over the parking lot. Great work, clean up crew!

If that wasn't enough excitement for one night, we all heard the amazing story of Andrew, our guest speaker. As a 19 year old back in 1987 he found out what it means to really 'cross the line'. While snowboarding with his dad and brother, he crossed over into the out-of-bounds area at Mount Baker. He ignored the orange line and the warning signs, looking for some of the best powder. But it didn't take long for him to realize that he was in a tough spot. Trying to get back to the main run, Andrew slipped down a steep slope and fell 40 feet, and then another 20 feet into a crevice. That is like falling from the top of a 6 story building!

The bad part was that no one knew exactly where he was and he was wedged in the crack of snow and ice with his arms stuck above his head, his snowboard wedged below him, and ice cold water  dripping down his back the whole time.

His dad and brother were waiting for him at the bottom of the run, and it didn't take long until they realized that something was wrong. A huge search started all over the ski area with staff coming from everywhere. Just by chance, one of the searchers noticed a chunk of snow that looked like it had been disturbed at the top of the crevice where Andrew had fallen in. It took the rescuer 30-40 minutes of steep climbing to get up to the top of the crevice to call down to see if there was anyone even there. They had found him!

But the story wasn't done yet. The first rescuer climbed down to where he was and a large group of rescuers waited above to help pull Andrew out with ropes and pullies. But even with a rope strapped around his wrist they couldn't budge him, so they had to come up with a new plan. The rescue team ended up digging out the snow into the bank and dug a tunnel to get to where Andrew was. From the time he fell in around 3:15, it took until 9:00 and the rescuers moving over 10 tons of snow by hand to get him out.

Normal human body temperature is supposed to be 98.6 degrees Farenheit (37 Celsius). When they got Andrew on the stretcher to get him down the mountain his skin color was blue, and when they got him to the ambulance his core body temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit (26.7 Celsius) and as they rushed him to hospital his heart stopped 5 times. There were so many times in his ordeal when it all could have ended, yet somehow he survived through the efforts of the rescue team, the paramedics, and also the hospital staff who managed to get his body temperature and vital signs back to where they need to be.

He even made it into the front pages of the Province newspaper. The cool thing is that he is now a pastor in Surrey after he started to follow God a few years after this all happened. Obviously his wife and kids and the rest of his family are glad he survived his teenage ordeal to still be around today and we were all glad to hear his amazing story of survival.