A team of four rescue specialists from Banff and Jasper National Parks flew to Baffin Island late last week to aid in a rescue in Auyuittuq National Park.
A pair of climbers from France were ascending Coronation Glacier, located on the eastern side of one of Canada’s more remote national parks, on Friday, April 15, when one of the climbers, a male, fell 120 feet into a crevasse.
The second climber used a satellite phone to call for help, drawing rescue crews from Parks Canada and the Department of National Defense (DND), which flew from Gander, Nfld. in a Cormorant helicopter.
Marc Ledwidge, visitor safety manager for Banff, Yoho and Kootenay National Parks, said the RCMP provided a plane to fly two rescuers from Banff and two from Jasper to Baffin Island, Friday, allowing them to reach Auyuittuq National Park by Saturday morning.
With Ledwidge and the rest of the Parks Canada crew waiting in Pangnirtung, the DND search and rescue crew fly to the site to assess the situation and rescue the man if possible.
“They were able to put some guys on the ground and got the person out quickly,” he said, adding the Parks crew was held as backup if the rescue became complex.
Ledwidge said the man suffered a broken arm and broken ribs.
“He was pretty cold, from the sounds of it, but in the end, he’s going to be fine. He’s walking around the hospital in Iqaluit now.”
As Parks Canada rescuers with a specific skill set, Ledwidge and his crew are called on to respond to situations that require a technical expertise.
The last rescue they responded to at Auyuittuq National Park was in 1997.
“That’s why we would have been deployed to a place like that, because it is a remote national park and it has low visitation and very few incidents; consequently, we (Parks) would not maintain that kind of technical capacity in a place like that,” Ledwidge said.
