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SIX

HYPOTHERMIA

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind.

— Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)

You start to shiver, sporadically at first, but then uncontrollably. Hands become numb and it’s difficult to take the lens cap off your camera. Goosebumps form over your entire body it seems as your breathing becomes quick and shallow. Shivering is violent now and any movements are slow and laboured. You stumble and your hat falls off but you don’t pick it up. Lips are pale. Ears, fingers, and toes are turning blue. Suddenly you feel this warm sensation and the shivering stops but you have trouble speaking. Your hands remain limp at your sides but you stagger on. You forget where you are and where you are going. Exposed skin becomes blue and puffy. There is some comfort as you lie down on the wet ground. Breathing slows as you drift off. Half an hour later your heart stops.

Hypothermia can occur in the summer; most people don’t realize this. Parents watch as their children swim off the dock at the cottage. Within fifteen minutes their lips are blue and they’re shivering uncontrollably. They wrap towels around them and tell them to sit in the sun or put clothes on. What parents don’t know is that little Johnny’s core temperature has dropped two degrees Celsius, from the normal thirty-seven degrees down to thirty-five degrees. That doesn’t seem like much but when the body temperature drops below thirty degrees, all major organs fail and clinical death occurs.

Hypothermia, or what was once referred to as “exposure,” is the number one killer in the outdoor adventure trade. And it happens a lot, mostly because people are unprepared or inexperienced. The unprepared tend to die on the trail, whereas the inexperienced die in the water. Either way, death by hypothermia, in most cases, is preventable.

I have been close to death more times than I would like to admit to. And I have been so cold and wet and miserable and tired that all I wanted to do was to lie down and sleep. But my will and instinct to survive overrode any self-doubt and I managed to pull myself from the edge each time, perhaps a little smarter for the experience. And most of these affairs occurred when I was younger and I brandished an imperishable attitude. I fought Nature on my terms alone; it was a constant battle to survive because I had yet to learn how to live within the dictates of the natural world. It’s much different now, and as a wilderness guide I have the welfare of the client to consider … and the client constantly tests your ability to ameliorate situations.

One of the odd dichotomies about wilderness guiding is the tenets governing the well-being of the guide. The guide remains, at all times, stoic, gallant, and self-sacrificing, which is true to an extent. But there are times when the guide is vulnerable, mostly due to his or her actions while tending client needs. On whitewater river trips, particularly in the Far North where water and air temperatures often hover just above freezing, it is often difficult to remain dry. The guide is in and out of the water or weather constantly — dislodging canoes off rocks, fixing equipment, pitching camp — while relentlessly checking the well-being of the group, and Gore-Tex jackets get thoroughly soaked inside from sweat and outside from rain or snow. During these times I have felt myself slipping into the first stages of hypothermia, well knowing the consequences should I allow it to progress to the point where I can no longer make a rational decision, or carry out even basic tasks. At this juncture there are few options. It is here that my own welfare supplants that of the client and the decision is made to stop, erect a temporary weather shelter, make a fire, brew a pot of tea, and get out of wet clothes. I am the first to tend to my needs. Usually by this point others in the group are also in need of a warm-up. The guide cannot benefit the group if debilitated; it’s the same principle extolled while flying in a jet with your children — you are always instructed to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting your kids.

I was hired one winter to guide and instruct a large group of high-school students who were stationed at a well-known outdoor school. The directors had assured me that all students had been well-trained in basic winter survival skills. Our destination was Temagami where we would trek in and set up a base camp using large canvas prospector tents equipped with wood stoves. It had snowed heavily overnight but the temperature hovered just above freezing and the snow was wet and sticky. I had instructed everyone not to bring skis because the conditions warranted travel by snowshoe. When I arrived at the base camp it was raining, the buses were parked and waiting, but the students were all standing out in the weather without their outer gear on — the instructors were nowhere to be seen. Thoroughly soaked, the students then sat in the heated bus for three hours for the ride to our start point. When they unloaded the bus there were no snowshoes — just skis; to add to the complexity of the expedition, one of the leaders had a severe cold. By the time we had everyone harnessed to their respective toboggans it was mid-afternoon and it would be dark by the time we arrived at our prospective campsite. The snow stuck to the bottoms of the skis like cement, everyone was cold from the start, and progress was interminably slow. I dropped my own load several times and went up and down the line encouraging the students (and leaders) to keep moving until we reached the campsite. Fortunately, I had brought a large thermos of coffee which was rationed out to the neediest along the line. I broke a trail to the campsite and began excavating a spot for one of the tents and gathered enough firewood to last a couple of hours. The group was in a sad state by the time they reached the campsite and few were able to carry out chores with any efficiency. We set up the one tent and ignited a fire in the stove and everyone huddled inside to get warm. This could have been a routine winter camping expedition with no hitches; instead, the directors of the group were negligent in preparing the group for the outing. The students were also incapable of setting up camp and lighting fires with any proficiency, even after I was told by the staff that they had already received extensive training.

One of the inherent mistakes made by winter trekkers and often those in a leadership capacity is to treat a winter expedition like a summer trip. A summer kilometre is two or three in the winter if the conditions are bad, and those beautiful summer campsites on the lake could be a winter camper’s nemesis during a storm. Judging the distance you can walk on snowshoes pulling a toboggan, or skiing with a backpack in the winter is more difficult, especially travelling with a large group. Students are notorious for not dressing appropriately and they often don’t factor in the consequences; to them, rescue is always close at hand, until something happens and the reality that they are in the wilderness sinks in.

One of the classic cases of a mismanaged expedition was the Lake Temiskaming tragedy of 1978. It was my first year as a ranger and the headwater of the Ottawa River was in my jurisdiction. I had paddled down this wide section of river on two occasions before; it was legend amongst the residents of the established canoe camps on Lake Temagami who made the crossing regularly, that this body of water was to be respected. On June 11, the St. John’s School headed out with thirty-one paddlers in four brand new canoes. They were eighteen-footers, not quite freighter or voyageur canoes, the leaders put eight in three canoes and seven in the other. Overloaded, the boats laboured in the rough waters. One canoe swamped, and then a second that went to help the first, then a third canoe went over. The fourth canoe did its best to shuttle kids and teachers to the Ontario side of the river but it wasn’t enough to save twelve kids, aged ten to fifteen, and one teacher. The river water temperature was seven degrees Celsius; a body loses heat twenty-five times faster submersed in water than on land. The kids never survived much more than an hour before succumbing to hypothermia.

St. John’s School of Ontario was an Anglican boys’ school whose tenets supported corporal punishment; students were to endure pain and hardship to develop stronger character. Since the accident there have been several documents produced, critiquing the misguided expedition, including James Raffan’s book Deep Waters, published in 2002. And through my own experiences as a park ranger and guide, having observed school and church groups in the wilds, there are obvious logical conclusions we critics can hypothesize about the tragedy: that the guides (or teachers) made fatal decisions based on their collective inexperience in big water crossings. I’m surprised that there haven’t been more accidents like this one. Proper jurisprudence by the guide/ teacher would have included a risk management strategy that included precautions travelling over large bodies of cold water. On my trips I’ll raft two or more canoes together to make crossings or run big rapids that can be kilometres long. Dumping on big lakes or on long rapids can be tough to remedy, not to mention life-threatening. In 2004, there were twenty-three canoe-related deaths and three kayak-related deaths in Canada.

The modern body of medical knowledge — a clearly ethical issue — about how the human body reacts to freezing to the point of death is based almost exclusively on experiments carried out in 1941 by the Nazis in Germany. The Luftwaffe conducted experiments on prisoners to learn how to treat hypothermia. One study forced subjects to endure a tank of ice water for up to three hours; another study placed prisoners naked in the open for several hours with temperatures below freezing. The experiments assessed different ways of re-warming survivors. These morbid tests were carried out by the Nazi High Command at Dachau and Auschwitz, selections made of young healthy Jews or Russians. The experiments were conducted on men to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front, as the German forces were ill-prepared for the bitter cold. The two-part freezing experiments established how long it would take to lower the body temperature to death, and how to best resuscitate the frozen victim. Test subjects were usually stripped naked for the experiment. An insulated probe which measured the drop in body temperature was inserted into the rectum and held in place by an expandable metal ring which was adjusted to open inside the rectum to hold the probe firmly in place. The victim was put into an air force uniform, then placed in a vat of cold ice-water and allowed to freeze.

One of the regular occurrences I’ve come across in the Far North where hypothermic conditions have no seasonal boundaries is paradoxical undressing. Almost 50 percent of hypothermic deaths are associated with this phenomenon. It typically occurs during moderate to severe hypothermia where the victim becomes disoriented, confused, and combative. The victim may begin discarding clothing, like mitts or hats or even overcoats, which in turn increases the rate of temperature loss. There have been several documented case studies of victims throwing off their clothes before help reached them.

A late, good friend of mine, Victoria Jason, in her book Kabloona in the Yellow Kayak describes her adventure up the coast of Hudson Bay with explorer Don Starkle. Starkle ranks with other Canadian adventurers, like John Hornby, who pushed their limits well past their ability or knowledge to survive. Starkle sat in his kayak in a hypothermic state, in sight of rescue, but had removed his mitts which allowed his fingers to freeze solid.

On Arctic canoeing expeditions, where inclement weather and wind conditions prevail and clients often get wet, hypothermia is a constant concern. The guide is subject to wet conditions, always, on shallow rivers where clients continually get hung up on rocks and need to be assisted. There is often no shelter except for the tent which is pitched at the end of a day. Clothing, damp from sweat inside, or soaked through by snow and rain, waterlogged boots, and general malaise and flailing spirit, all add up and can easily culminate in a serious hypothermia climax. To say I’ve had tough days on the trail is an understatement; clients need constant attention, beyond the needs of the guide, and there have been occasional circumstances where I’ve had to rescue cast-off clothing, hats, gloves, vests, and even lifejackets — all the things necessary and critical in keeping someone warm even though everything may be damp. Paradoxical undressing can happen even at the onset of mild hypothermia: when an objective destination is set, and circumstances arise when it is best to just keep moving until adequate shelter can be secured, clients (and some inexperienced guides) get careless. Even though they know they dropped something, in their faltering mind it makes sense to forget about it, however irrational and dangerous, they plod on with a false sensation of warmth, or the anticipation of getting to a warm place soon. There have been many situations when it was necessary to stop where there was no lee-cover from the wind, set up a makeshift shelter using canoes and brew a pot of tea, simply because one client showed signs of hypothermia. Clients can only be pushed as far as the weakest member; physical and psychological conditioning has a breaking point — going beyond this point compromises the integrity of the trip and the safety of the group. Unguided, inexperienced groups generally rely on the strongest (or most vocal) member of the party if situations arise. Selecting a leader this way is a slipshod method of maintaining stability and duty of care, especially knowing that human nature casts most of us as sheep. One person slipping into a hypothermic state can spell quick disaster for a group if it is not remedied quickly; once a person hits the second and third stage of cold immersion it gets harder to bring them back and easier for the rescuer to cause the victim to succumb to cardiac arrest while trying desperately to warm them up. Tricks and back-pocket remedies found in “survival” manuals are futile when common sense has been abandoned.

Moisture is the bane of the adventurer’s peaceful existence. I hate being wet and I’ll do anything to stay as dry as possible. I have no qualms about pitching a good kitchen tarp over a firepit on a rainy day, cooking, reading, and watching other canoeists or hikers passing through, miserable and wet. There have been many occasions when the smell of fresh-brewed coffee and sweet-buns baked in the reflector oven has attracted the appearance of sodden campers who appreciate getting in out of the rain and drying out, if only for a temporary stopover.

While acting as a guest park warden in New Zealand, tending a forty-eight-bunk hut along the Routeburn Track in Aspiring National Park, I was amazed to see how poorly many of the hikers were dressed. I was there for the month of May, at the onset of the New Zealand winter, and a time when the tail end of the hiking season still attracted enough trampers to warrant keeping the warden’s hut open. People would arrive after the hard climb to the hut, often soaked from sweat, wearing nothing more than tight blue jeans and sneakers and perhaps a light wind-shell. In the Southern Alps of the park, the climate changes from balmy warm in the lush valleys to bitter cold up in the treeless passes. Several people had died along this track, either from venturing off the trail and succumbing to hypothermia, or by slipping off the icy edge of a trail along a mountain pass. I spent most of my time keeping a warming fire going in the bunkhouse, lending trampers adequate clothing (which was returned on the trek back), or moderating the effects of hypothermia on ill-prepared hikers. A young man from Quebec had left his pack, bedroll, and food at the terminus of the trail, fifteen kilometres away, and had made his way to my hut over one of the mountain ridges. By the time he arrived at the Routeburn Falls hut he was hypothermic but insisted on walking the fifteen kilometres back to his gear along the trail. I refused to let him go and he stayed in my cabin for two days drying out and shaking off a deadly chill. He was physically fit and an ardent trekker, but he lacked the ability to pace himself or to judge how far he could travel in unknown territory.