BURSTIn June 1980, climbers and park wardens Tim Auger and Peter Perren took a 2,000-foot fall from the East Ridge of Mount Logan in Yukon and survived. Badly injured, Perren managed to clear snow from the face of Auger, who had been buried and was turning blue. Both men lived.
Perren had often said that the fall he and Auger took was the defining experience of his time as a park warden, and one that continued to shape his life decades later. “I am sure that it is no surprise to anybody to hear that the fall that Tim and I had off the east ridge of Mt. Logan was by far the most notable experience of my time as a Warden,” he said. “Indeed this event and its consequences has shaped my life in ways that I am still, well after over 40 years, continuing to appreciate and understand.”
The accident happened on June 14, 1980, the final day of their climb. After successfully climbing the east ridge route, the team began descending in rope teams of two. Perren and Auger were roped together, both carrying heavy packs. Auger, thinking ahead to the glacier below rather than the final section of ridge, was using ski poles. They had just left their last camp, travelling slightly below the crest of the ridge.
Auger was above and about 25 feet behind Perren when he either slipped or the snow beneath him gave way. He began sliding uncontrollably. “He called out to me that he was falling,” Perren recalled. When Perren turned and saw it was true, he reacted instinctively. Had they been on the crest of the ridge, he could have jumped off the opposite side to counterbalance the fall. Instead, he drove his ice axe into the slope in an attempt to anchor himself.
For a brief moment, he managed to stop Auger, but the force was overwhelming. Perren was pulled from his stance and catapulted downhill, flying past his rope mate. Auger later told him that he had noticed something flash by, but by the time he realized what it was, Perren had hit the end of the rope and was now pulling him.
Neither was wearing a helmet. Perren tumbled headfirst downhill, bouncing repeatedly. As he fell, a single thought repeated itself in his mind. “Peter, you dummy if you don’t turn yourself around, you’re going to smash your head into something and that will be the end of you.” Another thought intruded just as briefly. His mother had been killed in a car accident only months earlier, and he had begun settling her estate. He thought that if he died now, “my poor brothers were going to have to finish winding up not only my mother’s estate … but also look after mine.”
As they slid, they triggered a wet snow avalanche that began to gain mass. Perren said a quick prayer and brought his hands up over his mouth. If he was buried, he wanted to protect his airway and create an air pocket. He remembered a story told by Peter Fuhrmann about a woman in Italy who had survived burial in an avalanche by repeatedly scratching away the ice mask that formed around her face as she breathed out. According to the story, she had worn her fingers down to the first knuckle, but she lived.
At first, Perren felt himself slowing. He thought, “okay, this is going to be okay, we are going to stop.” The next instant, he was in free fall. They had gone over a cliff.
Later, Auger told him that this was the point at which he lost consciousness. His last conscious thought was wondering if this was what it had been like for Bugs McKeith when he fell from a cornice on Mount Assiniboine years earlier and was killed.
After a brief free fall, Perren landed hard and began rolling, tumbling, and spinning violently. He was completely helpless. “There was absolutely no way I could do anything in terms of orienting myself or controlling any part of my fall,” he said. “I was in God’s hands that afternoon.” Once again he began to slow, and once again he thought they might finally stop. That hope vanished as he shot over another set of cliffs.
The fall seemed endless. There were three distinct free falls, each followed by violent tumbling and churning. At one point he felt a sickening crunch in his left leg. Eventually, nearly 2,000 feet below where the fall had begun, he was flung out onto the glacier at the bottom of the cirque.
The rest of the team had watched in horror from above. Tom Davidson and Murray Hindle, who were behind Auger, witnessed the entire fall. Willi Pfisterer was leading the descent. Someone shouted to Willi, “Tim has fallen!” Without looking back, Willi replied, “Well tell him to stand up.” The reply came back immediately. “No, no he’s fallen off the ridge and pulled Peter with him. They’re gone!” From above, it must have appeared impossible that either could survive.
Perren came to rest in a sitting position. His pack was shredded, with only coils of rope and the frame still attached. His left leg was grotesquely twisted, the knee bent at a right angle with his ankle forced laterally toward his hip. Every ligament and tendon in the knee was torn except one, which was crushed.
Despite the severity of the injury, many things went right. Most critically, no arteries or veins were damaged, and there was no catastrophic bleeding. Adrenaline masked the pain. Perren straightened his leg as best he could and called out to Auger. There was no answer.
Reaching into his shirt pocket, he pulled out his Swiss Army knife. Two twenty dollar bills fell out, fluttering away into the wind. He laughed as he watched them disappear. He cut himself free of the rope and surveyed the slope above, which he later said looked like “the aftermath of a Mountain Equipment Co-op store explosion,” with gear scattered everywhere.
He called out again. Silence. Unsure whether to dig along the rope or search more broadly, he used his good leg to push himself slowly across the snow. Not far away, he spotted the heel of Auger’s red Hanwag boot protruding from the avalanche debris. Digging with his bare hands, he uncovered Auger’s face. He was blue, but he revived on his own as soon as his airway was clear.
Auger was conscious but confused, convinced he had been in a skiing accident at Sunshine Village. By then, Perren’s adrenaline was gone and the pain was intense. He finished digging Auger out and urged him to gather what gear he could so they could huddle together for warmth. With no watch and no sense of time, they waited, knowing that rescue would eventually come.
After what must have been several hours, they heard a helicopter somewhere down the glacier. Expecting it to come for them immediately, they were puzzled as the sound repeatedly started, echoed through the cirque, and shut down again. As they waited, they talked quietly about their work as wardens and about life beyond Parks. At one point, Auger mentioned that he had always wanted to be an architect. Perren told him he did not yet know what he would do, but that his knee injury meant he would need to think differently about the future.
During one of these long waits, they saw another wet snow slide coming down from the ridge above. Auger’s back was sore, and Perren had been urging him not to move. When Auger saw the slide approaching, his instinct was to stand and shuffle aside. Perren, in agony and barely able to move, thought to himself, “God this is crazy, to have survived this and now we’re going to get wiped out by a secondary avalanche?” He judged that the slide would not have enough volume to reach them, and made himself a quiet bargain. If it reached a certain point, he would drag himself clear. It stopped above them.
Eventually, the Alouette III helicopter crested the glacier and came into view. It landed beside them, the crew clearly surprised to find both men alive. Perren was loaded onto the floor behind the front bench seat. Auger sat in front with the wardens and pilot Ron Eland.
Restarting the helicopter proved difficult. After repeated failed attempts, Ron Chambers reportedly said to the pilot, “Just turn all the switches off, pretend you’ve left the helicopter for the day, and now you’re coming back to work in the morning to start the helicopter. Take a deep breath and do it that way.” The advice worked. As they lifted off and cleared the ridge, Pfisterer, watching from above, was seen jumping up and down with relief.
Years later, at a warden reunion in the mid-1990s, Perren finally learned the full story of the rescue. Poor radio communication had initially sent the helicopter to the wrong group. Fog rolled in, preventing takeoff, even as Pfisterer pleaded from above, knowing the cirque below was clear. Using the Alouette’s wheels and skis, the pilot taxied along the glacier following wands, repeatedly shutting down when visibility vanished. At one point, a warden tied a rope to the helicopter and walked ahead as a guide. When they finally reached Perren and Auger, the pilot stepped out and promptly fell into a small crevasse up to his armpits, adding further stress before departure.
The helicopter flew to a fuel cache, then on to Haines Junction and Whitehorse. Perren was later transferred to Calgary, where he spent weeks hospitalized. The sudden shift from an outdoor life to being bedridden was profound. At first, he felt sorry for himself, until he saw another patient his age admitted for a leg amputation following a car accident. Perspective came quickly.
When asked years later whether he still dreamed about the fall, Perren answered simply. “No, it has never given me any nightmares.” He reflected on how much had gone wrong that day, and how much had gone right. His mother’s recent death had felt senseless. By any rational measure, he and Auger should not have survived either. “From that same perspective Tim and I should never have survived and yet we did,” he said. “It was nothing less than miraculous that we made it.”
I was lucky to have climbed with Tim Auger on Mount Louis, one of his favourite mountains; read more about here. The above information came from the Whyte Museum, the Canadian Alpine Journal, the American Alpine Journal, and the Park Warden Alumni page here.
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