Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosBrian Rouse, 29, is comforted by his mother, Kay, right, and his wife, Tammy, in the couple's Sunriver home Friday after he questioned if there was anything else he might have done to save his father's life. Brian survived three days and two nights of subfreezing temperatures in the Deschutes National Forest but his father, 53-year-old Roger Rouse, could not be saved.
Rob Kerr / The Bulletin
'No matter what it took'
Snowmobile ride turns into son's struggle to save his father
By Cindy Powers / The Bulletin
Published: December 10. 2006 4:00AM PSTThe last words Brian Rouse said to his father were, "I love you, and I'm going to get you out of here."
The men had weathered two days and two nights in a blinding winter storm in the Deschutes National Forest, trudging through hip-deep snow.
By nightfall on the second day, 53-year-old Roger Rouse could no longer walk.
It took Brian a half-hour to drag his dad 30 feet to a tree well shelter he had dug out to shield his father from the relentless wind.
They couldn't stop shivering.
The temperature was dropping.
Brian's boots - soaked from a fall into a stream the night before - had frozen solid to his feet.
And they were nearly a day away from being found.
They had been out since Sunday morning, Nov. 26, when they launched a half-day snowmobile trip from Dutchman Flat.
When they failed to return, search and rescue teams were called in to look for the men in whiteout conditions. Rescuers knew they were looking for experienced snowmobilers who had lived in the area for decades.
Brian Rouse estimated he and his father had ridden in the area at least 100 times. They knew exactly where they were and Brian carried a Global Positioning System unit.
But they couldn't get out.
A ferocious snowstorm and howling winds made rescue efforts nearly impossible.
Volunteer searchers on snowmobiles were called back shortly after they left at about 7 Sunday night because they couldn't see anything but a wall of snow.
That left two Sno-Cat operators to patrol through the night, driving at speeds that weren't much faster than the average person can walk.
The first outing
Roger Rouse called his 29-year-old son on the morning of Nov. 25 to see if he felt like heading up the mountain for an early morning ride the next day.
"We hadn't been out this year," Brian said. "He said 'Let's go for a quick ride and meet at Dutchman.'"
Roger, of Bend, was an avid snowmobiler who had been riding for more than 30 years.
He had bought a new machine just a few months before.
"This was his dream sled," said Kay Rouse, Roger's wife.
They arrived at about 7 a.m. Sunday and headed up the snow along Century Drive.
It was the start of a routine ride, except for the poor visibility. Snow blew in all directions.
Brian had a backpack, but his dad did not.
The men rode out to an area around Todd Lake, playing in the snow and checking to make sure all was well with their rigs.
To make the going easier, they rode on ungroomed trails in the trees where visibility improved.
They zoomed up toward Moon Mountain but could only see 15 or 20 feet, Brian said, so they decided to drop down into a more forested area.
"We followed some other tracks that were in there and they took us down into a valley," Brian said at his Sunriver home on Friday. "We stopped and talked and I said the trail comes back in, but we were trying to decide how much farther down we should go."
They could hear other riders up on Trail 6, which runs along the side of the Bend Watershed.
"We went down a little drop and the snow is nothing but 3 1/2 feet of deep powder," Brian said.
They had been out for about three hours and off trail for about an hour and a half.
The two were certain that they would come across the trail if they kept heading down.
The ride became more difficult when they ended up in a ravine. They would have to cross a creek, so they looked for its narrowest point.
"We stopped the sleds, walked down to check, then walked back to the sleds," Brian said. "That is what burned the most time, stopping the sleds and walking."
Both men were dressed for winter weather, with layered clothing, snow pants and winter jackets. They wore Sorel boots, and Brian said he had wool socks on his feet.
Brian had some jerky and granola bars, but Roger had forgotten the nuts and Wheat Thins in his truck. Between them, they had three bottles of water.
Heavy snow had been falling all day.
The soft powder meant their snowmobiles weren't going to make it back up the hill they had come down. But they weren't worried and thought they were headed back to Trail 6.
"Our only option was to work our way down," Brian said.
They found a spot where the creek was about four feet wide and six inches deep, Brian said.
"We took our pack shovels and filled in the creek with snow so that we could cross," he said.
They had no idea how much time they would spend shoveling snow that day.
Downed trees and small creeks crisscrossed the area. And each encounter with either one meant getting off the sleds, shoveling snow on top and packing it down to make passage possible.
"We were stopping about every 100 feet," Brian said.
When they got off their sleds, they sunk hip deep in snow. The snowmobiles were getting stuck in the soft powder.
And every time Brian went to get back on his sled, a quarter-inch layer of new snow covered the seat.
Brian used his GPS to help them strategize about the best way out.
"We knew where we were, and we were trying to get out of there," Brian said. "We are looking at 2 or 3 (p.m.) now and we knew we were in trouble because we are burning daylight, and by GPS we were four miles from the Bend City Water Commission building."
Roger started worrying about getting in touch with Kay and Brian's wife, Tammy. But they couldn't get cell phone service.
And they weren't making much headway.
"Dad started throwing around the idea of walking and I said, 'Let's keep moving the sleds," Brian said. "'They are our heat source, they are our light source, so let's keep them.'"
But the machines were becoming a liability.
They got to Bridge Creek at about 3:30 p.m.
It was too wide to fill in with snow, so they had to ride across water.
When Roger's snowmobile hit the opposite bank, it caught some air. He ended up in a tree well.
The machine nearly stood on end.
"Boy, that really took the wind out of our sails then," Brian said.
Brian crossed the stream, but his snowmobile couldn't make it up the bank.
He parked his rig and helped his dad dig out his machine. Then they hauled Brian's sled up the bank.
They had burned another hour and a half, and it was getting dark.
"Dad says, 'I don't know Brian, maybe we should start walking,'" Brian said. "So we started looking for a place to park them."
Roger didn't realize there was a stream up ahead, hidden by a small rise. His snowmobile got stuck in the mud and the two men had to pull it out.
They parked the rigs, marked their location on Brian's GPS and talked about a game plan.
Walking through the night
They considered three potential routes and decided to head for the caretaker's shed at Tumalo Falls, about four miles away. The creek would serve as their guide.
But walking through the brutal storm with no light was going to be tough.
"We didn't have a flashlight or a headlamp or anything to walk out to," Brian said.
The wind was blowing so hard that a match wouldn't stay lit.
They tried dipping sticks in Roger's fuel tank and lighting them with his spark plug.
"We got the sticks lit but they would blow out as soon as we got them lit," Brian said. "I grabbed a rag from my sled, but that only burned for about 10 minutes.
"We kept grabbing sticks and dipping them in the tank, lighting them, lighting them, lighting them and then we decide we are just wasting time."
His dad joked about accidentally lighting his sled on fire as "quite an end to a wonderful day."
Brian, a former cross-country runner who still visits the gym nearly every day, said he was up to the task of a four-mile hike through the snow. But he was concerned about his dad.
At 5 feet 11 inches tall and 190 pounds, Roger Rouse was in great shape. But he was tired out.
"At this point I am doing fine but Dad was a little low energy-wise because we had been nothing but stuck all day long," he said.
They had been eating every few hours and keeping hydrated, but they were running low on water.
When they headed out, Brian said, it was snowing sideways.
He knew progress would be slow.
"I knew as soon as we started walking that we were going to spend the night out there," Brian said. "I thought, 'It is going to take us all night and all tomorrow to get out of here.'"
They kept their helmets on for warmth.
Brian broke trail, but they could only go 10 or 15 steps before stopping to rest.
"It's hip deep, you are tripping over downed trees, the small new trees and creeks that run under the snow," he said. "And when you trip you are up to your shoulders and you have to crawl up out of that."
He used his shovel as a probe. For hours conversation was pretty much limited to Brian yelling back to his dad "there is a creek here, a tree here, a downed tree."
They spoke little, but commented on the beauty of the creek.
Roger said he was feeling cold and tired. Brian wanted to keep him moving.
"We would walk about an hour and then huddle up next to a tree and take a break," he said.
What little moonlight there was didn't help much with visibility.
The lenses on their helmets were frozen inside and out, so they had to raise them a bit to see.
"So you're just looking through a little crack and my eyelashes were freezing together," Brian said. "It is blowing the whole time so you are holding your hand up, trying to keep the snow out."
His father continued to talk about being cold.
"Every time we would stop Dad would start shivering," Brian said. "I said to myself, 'I will let him break enough to rest but not to get too cold.'"
Within a few hours, his dad started falling behind.
Brian lost sight of his father a couple of times, not realizing he had stopped to lean against a tree.
"You couldn't see each other 30 feet away," Brian said.
He decided to keep going at the same pace but cover shorter distances.
"So now were going maybe five steps before I turn around and check on him," Brian said.
Brian's hands and feet were getting cold, so he was determined to keep moving.
"I was on a mission and my plan was to get us out of there as quickly as possible," he said.
By midnight, the men were out of water.
Brian headed down to the creek. His father eyed the edge, warning that it might not be solid.
"I am about half way through filling up the first bottle and the edge gives," Brian said.
He landed on his feet and frigid water filled his boots.
They continued walking to a spot where some large ponderosa pines had fallen across the creek.
Brian walked down the steep bank, shimmied out on a pine tree and filled the water bottle.
He gulped it down, then refilled the bottle for his dad.
After climbing back up the bank, he tried to empty the water from his boots, but much of it had soaked into his boot liners.
When they got up and moving, Roger Rouse seemed to be doing better.
But they repeatedly had to walk around enormous downed pine trees to avoid small streams running underneath, slowing them down even more.
Monday morning
It started getting light. By Brian's GPS they had covered about two miles.
And twilight seemed to give the storm a renewed energy.
"When morning breaks, the wind picks up and it is still snowing," Brian said.
But the daylight brought them hope that they would soon be found.
“As dawn is breaking, we hear snowmobiles and we are both excited, thinking, ‘That wasn’t so bad, all we had to do was walk all night,’ “ Brian said.
They headed west, up a peak where the noise was coming from.
It took them four or five hours to get to the top, Brian said.
They thought they saw three snowmobilers waving to them. But when they hiked over, no one was there.
The men wandered around what they thought was an old logging camp. They saw broken tractors, flags and a weather station.
Exhaustion, dehydration and hiking through the punishing storm had begun to take their toll.
“We would think there was a sign on a tree and then we’d go up and it’s just bark,” he said. “I knew I was seeing things. Dad was far gone and seeing more things than I. But I was pretty delirious.”
They spent much of the day walking in circles, looking for the snowmobilers.
Finally they headed down the peak, following the trail they made on the way up.
“At this point Dad can barely walk,” Brian said. “He is wiped out, his legs are cramping from being dehydrated. It’s still snowing and it is starting to get dark.”
They did eat snow, Brian said, but their last drink of water was the night before.
“We are completely out of water,” he said. “We have nothing but jerky left and it’s really, really hard to chew jerky with no hydration in your body. You just chew and chew and chew.”
He leaned his father against a tree, shoveled a path to a large spruce and then dug out a shelter underneath.
At 5 feet 11 inches tall, Brian is a lean 145 pounds.
“I told Dad to lay on his back and push with his legs while I pulled him by his arms,” Brian said.
“He is saying ‘I’m really tired and cold,’ and he seemed kind of out of it,” Brian said. “At that point I was thinking ‘I need to rest, I will probably have to leave Dad there and walk out on my own.’
“At that point we are pretty much soaked because we had been in the snow for two days,” he continued. “That was the first time I realized that I was really wet, and this was going to be a cold night.”
They spent the night huddled together and shivering in a space barely big enough for both of them.
Condition worsens
When Brian woke up Tuesday, he saw that his father had inexplicably taken off one of his gloves.
Brian tried to put it back on but couldn’t get his dad to unclench his hand.
“I go to wake Dad up and he is delirious, in heavy shock,” Brian said. “He is talking but he isn’t making any sense. He is thrashing around and grabbing at his chest and legs.”
He ended up putting his dad’s glove on over his closed fist.
Brian stayed with his dad, huddling close and trying to warm him up for about two hours.
“At this point the sun is getting brighter, it’s not snowing as hard and the wind isn’t as bad, but it was just really, really cold.”
A nearby weather station reported the temperature at 16 degrees that morning.
Brian headed out toward the trail they had forged the day before in hopes of coming across rescuers.
His legs were cramping, but he was determined to get his dad out of there.
When he got to the top, he became concerned about his father and headed back down to check on him.
He was out for about three hours.
“At that point, he is still breathing but he is just quiet, not moving,” Brian said. “I told him I was going to get him out of there no matter what it took.”
He went back to the trail up the peak and saw an Air Life helicopter overhead.
“I am waving like crazy but I can tell they can’t see me because I was in a bunch of huge trees,” he said.
The chopper was circling the area.
“I am thinking maybe they are picking Dad up, maybe they are using heat-seeking equipment,” Brian said.
He wanted to be with his dad when rescuers arrived, so he turned back.
That’s when he heard the first rescue whistle.
He yelled out.
A snowshoer came around the corner and asked him who he was.
“I said I am Brian and he said, ‘Holy cow, we have been looking for you,’” Brian said. “I said, ‘I figured.’”
It was 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
From the time the Rouses headed out on their sleds to the time they were found, 19 inches of snow fell.
“He asked if I was OK and I said ‘Yeah, but you need to go check on my dad,’ “ he said.
Five more search and rescue volunteers arrived and got to work feeding Brian, giving him dry clothes and warm water.
His core temperature was 88 degrees.
“They were amazed and said, basically, at this point, they were looking for bodies,” Brian said. “I told them I wasn’t just going to lay down and give up. I was going to fall dead in my tracks.”
They walked Brian down to a spot near the tree well, but they wouldn’t let him see his father.
“I kept asking about my dad and they kept avoiding it,” Brian said, wiping away tears.
When rescuers went to cut off his boots, there was a 2-inch layer of ice around the top. They removed the boot cuff but couldn’t get the rubber shoes off, he said.
Brian asked why he couldn’t see his dad and was told the volunteers were taking care of him.
At the end of Skyliner Drive in Bend, the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue division established a command center.
Brian was found in an area of the Bend Watershed, about 10 miles west of town, impassable by snowmobile. There was no place for an Air Life helicopter to land and they didn’t have the equipment haul him out.
Twenty snowshoers headed out in waves, starting at about 4 p.m.
Just before dark, the rescuers who were with Brian started a fire.
“I started getting upset and asking about what was going on with Dad,” Brian said. “Finally they were straight with me and said his hypothermia had set in so deep it would take a hospital to get him warm, and they need to concentrate on me.
“I said, ‘You need to take him off the hill before me,’ “ he said. “They said ‘That’s not your decision to make.’ “
At 7:30 p.m., a National Guard helicopter was cleared for takeoff from Salem.
The bird was designed to fly in high altitudes and hover in extreme conditions. And the specially trained crew carried the equipment needed to hoist Brian 130 feet over the treetops in the watershed.
When it arrived at about 9 p.m., Brian’s rescuers had to douse their fire so the downdraft wouldn’t endanger them all.
“That was the major bummer thing that everybody was pretty unhappy about,” Brian said.
They had to shut off their headlamps as well, because the National Guard team was using night vision equipment.
Rescuers had packed Brian in a heavy sleeping bag and were dragging him from place to place, trying to find a safe pickup spot.
They put him in a basket and strapped him in.
“At this point I’m thinking ‘How much longer is this going to last,’ “ Brian said. “They have you cinched down, across your head and several places on your body and you can’t move your arms.”
He was lifted into the copter and arrived at St. Charles Medical Center-Bend about five minutes later.
It was just before 10:30 p.m.
The rescue choppers do not fly for recovery missions, so it was up to the folks on the ground to get Roger Rouse out. He had not survived, and incident commanders told the search and rescue volunteers to hike out without him, for their own safety.
At the hospital, emergency personnel went to work on Brian.
“They tried to tug at my boots and realized they were frozen to my feet,” he said. “They poured warm water over them and it felt like it was boiling hot.”
His feet began to throb and haven’t stopped since. His fingertips were discolored from the frostbite and still show signs of the ordeal.
Brian spent nearly a week in the hospital and still cannot walk.
The body reacts to severe frostbite similarly to a third-degree burn, he explained.
“The won’t know for four to six weeks if I’m going to lose anything,” he said Friday.
Rescuer’s recovered his dad’s body from the woods two days after Brian’s rescue.
Brian said he has had a hard time accepting that he did all he could for his dad.
“I just sit and think about all the shoulda, coulda, wouldas,” he said, choking back sobs.
But Brian’s mother said her husband died doing something he loved, with someone he loved.
“We have talked about it and he said, ‘I hope I go quick, I hope I go doing something I love,’ “ she said. “Roger wouldn’t want us wallowing in self-pity. He is in a wonderful place and we will see him again.”
Cindy Powers can be reached at 617-7812 or at cpowers@bendbulletin.com
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