The Rescue of Belle and Sundance (8 page)

My sleep that night was shallow and restless. I dreamt of the two horses standing in a narrow, deep hole, surrounded by high walls
of snow—a prison that resembled a small yet deep swimming pool, made of snow and ice. In my dream, I stood alone atop one of the walls, looking down on the two pathetic-looking creatures and feeling sad, disillusioned and confounded by their predicament. While I was puzzling over how to get them out, I threw hay down to the starving animals. Then in the distance, far away, I heard the drone of snowmobiles. Eventually, in my dream, Matt drove to the lip of the would-be grave. “We’ll get them out of there,” he said confidently. Then I woke up.

THE DIGGING STARTS

A
t 10 a.m. on Wednesday, December 17, eight volunteers met in the Renshaw parking lot. They drained the last bit of coffee from their Thermoses before unloading their sleds from their truck beds and heading up the mountain. Temperatures had dipped to minus twenty-four Celsius the night before, and the bright sun, though welcoming, was doing little to warm things up.

The first day of digging drew Dave Jeck (Logan’s dad), Matt Elliott and Stuart MacMaster (Dave’s brother-in-law)—the three stalwarts as I later came to call them for all the time they spent on the mountain—plus Dean Schreiber, who put in almost as many
days as the stalwarts, along with Leif Gunster, Logan Jeck, another local man named Anthony Pepper and Toni Jeck. The mood was buoyant in some quarters. Matt, especially, felt confident that with all this help, the horses would be off the mountain by the end of the day.

The eight volunteers chatted about the weather and how they had dressed against the cold—as they would if they were going sledding for the day. They had their avalanche shovels, as they always did, but no other gear. Casting a glance up the mountain, Dave wondered what awaited them and what gear they’d have to bring the next day.

The plan was to make a plan, but only after seeing for themselves the lay of the land. Dave wondered how deep the snow was, whether it would be loose or packed. Maybe there would be no next day. Like Matt, Dave hoped they could just walk the horses out and down the mountain.

The ride up to the horses was long, almost an hour long, in bone-chilling cold. Wind chill from flying along on those snow machines just added more menace to the cold, still air.

When Dave Jeck finally glimpsed those two horses on the
mountain, just shy of 11 a.m., his heart went out to them.
Wow!
he thought.
They’re still alive!
To see them standing there in all that snow made him angry. If you can’t get horses out and if you can’t put them down yourself, he said to himself, arrange for someone else to do it. No use dwelling on that now.

Belle and Sundance rewarded the eight rescuers for their arduous trek up the mountain with a whinny—accompanied by a beseeching look. This was a muted yet brave greeting. Something to build on.

After each horse was fed a flake of hay from the bale brought up the day before, Dave quickly determined that the first job to be done was to get the front shoes off those horses. Toni had used a hoof pick the day before to clean their feet of snow and ice, but Dave saw that the snow and ice had once more balled up under their shoes, making standing more difficult. So he pulled the shoes off and cleaned the horses’ hooves.

Next, the group built a fire. The horses—thanks to the efforts of diggers the day before—were parked in their new snowy enclosure in the woods and out of the worst of the wind. Four feet away, the fire enabled the melting of snow for water and gave rescuers at least a semblance of warmth.

The volunteers gathered around the fire for a strategy session. Their first thought was that they could simply stamp their feet, pack down the snow as hard as they could and walk down the mountain to the logging road, with the horses following. So the eight rescuers struck a comic pose, driving their boots into the snow—as if in anger. The stompers imagined that they had created the beginnings of a path out, and Dave led one horse, with Toni to follow with another. They would do this, they thought, fifty yards at a time with one destination in mind: the logging road.

 

But as skinny as they were, the horses still weighed seven to nine hundred pounds each, and the lead horse, the gelding, didn’t make two steps before he was buried up to his shoulders in snow. The mare, following, had a somewhat easier time plowing through the trail he had broken. But the snow was far deeper than the rescuers had imagined, and the cold made compacting the snow almost impossible. Turning the gelding around and getting him back to the snowy enclosure was not too difficult, and the two horses certainly co-operated, doing their best to help. But the rescuers now issued a collective “Uh-oh. So much for that plan.”

Back at the fire, the diggers looked ahead. Cold, they knew, was the enemy, but so was time. What shape would the next day take, and the one after that? How many days of digging were called for? Good questions, and no one had any answers.

It was decided that a reasonable target for leaving the parking lot every day was 10 a.m. The sledders would get to Belle and Sundance shortly before 11 a.m. By 4 p.m., all eight rescuers knew, it started to get dark on the mountain in winter, so they would have to leave the horses by 3 p.m. A four-hour window. No, less. Diggers would have to stop periodically to rest or eat or drink fluids, and a wood fire would have to be built and maintained so hands and feet could be warmed and snow melted for the horses to drink.

After some discussion, the group decided that the only way to get the horses out was to dig a deep trench, almost to the ground, all the way down to the logging road. Once on that wide, groomed road, they figured, they could walk the horses the almost thirty kilometres to the parking lot and, from there, trailer them out.

The trench would have to start a few feet below the horses so they wouldn’t be tempted to exit their snow pen and try to follow the volunteer brigade down the trail after each day of digging. The trench’s dimensions would need to be at least three feet wide and six feet deep. Precise length, to be determined. Precise path and angle down the mountain, to be determined.

Those in the group experienced with horses knew that horses are claustrophobic and that the trench solution was risky. But until and unless some other option presented itself, this, they believed, offered the only way out for Belle and Sundance.

 

Wearing his snowshoes, Dave set out to find a feasible route from the horses’ present location to the logging road, but he quickly discovered that a direct line down entailed a steep descent and too many gullies.
Tomorrow
, he thought,
I’ll scout for a better route
. Meanwhile, the diggers worked in the general direction of the logging road.

After a little experimenting, the shovellers soon developed a
simple but efficient system: split up and spread out. The first shovellers dug down in the snow several feet, then moved ahead. The next two took the trail down another foot or two, then moved ahead, and so on. For a time, it looked as if the rescuers were building a set of snow stairs down the mountain, but eventually, the required depth was reached, and on it went. Spreading out also offered a psychological advantage: at the end of the day, each digger felt part of a team that had dug a hundred metres of trench.

Better yet, some team members were old friends. Dave Jeck, Matt Elliott and Stu MacMaster were sledding pals who had journeyed up the mountain together many times and gotten into—and out of—some jams on occasion. The core of Team Belle & Sundance comprised three men who knew, liked and trusted each other, and that bond held true on the mountain.

Dave Jeck quickly emerged as a leader of the team. Dave is a fifty-two-year-old cowboy who looks as though he just stepped off a billboard where he had posed as the Marlboro Man. Tall and slim with greying hair and moustache, Dave is the kind of quietly confident, easygoing man people instinctively trust, and he proved a perfect choice to head up the rescue effort.