bitework

The blur of a hand moving away from the lens reveals my first views of our future flight path down Mount Rundle. A moment later and the man holding the camera turns the device and gives a somber look at the small LED blinking next to the lens. Maybe it was somber, or maybe that was just my perception knowing what I knew. Things, that he did not know when he filmed this.

After returning the helmet-mounted GoPro back to his head, he pauses like a slalom skier waiting for the gates to open. Without warning he leans forward, and before my heart can return from its quick trip to my throat, he is airborne.

The earth momentarily drops out from under him at every rock band, but instantaneously begins to creep closer and closer with every buttress. He banks right over a small ridge of rock and into a chute, flying only a meter off the face of the mountain. Head first at ungodly speeds, I wince with every fatal collision he narrowly escapes.

I’m waiting for the moment of impact, yet it never comes. We watch to the end and only then am I reminded that this was Ryan’s footage from his jump two days prior to his disappearance. Had we had the footage from his final jump, I wouldn’t be here looking for him.

—

It was first thing Tuesday morning, I was missing work, again. Three members of my local search and rescue group were standing next to me in the small briefing room at the Banff Parks office. It was day 6 of the search for a missing base jumper and nearly all of our resources were exhausted. The four of us would head out with a single safety specialist to scour the few remaining areas left unsearched.

Only two days ago there were easily 60 searchers here, along with friends and family of Ryan who wished to help search as well. The base jumping community here is small, tight knit and has a likeness to that of a secret society. A friend of Ryan’s had been put on the team I led over the weekend. Cody explained this secretive world to me openly and honestly, in the hopes that the additional knowledge would improve our odds. He was generous, kind and compassionate. At the end of the day he tried to hand me some cash as a thank you. I politely declined and told him that, if he liked he could make a donation to the Volunteer SAR group I was with. (Tragically, only two years later I would learn of Cody’s passing in his own base jumping accident, when his wife came into a friends outdoor shop looking to buy some “mountain shelves” for the funeral programs.)

—

“Thwocka thwoka thwoka” The old familiar sound of the helicopter reverberates through my body as we cruise past the Dragons Back. Coming up the back side of Mount Rundle we soon crest the summit where the pilot pauses for a moment, in an almost mimicked fashion of Ryan prior to jumping. The nose of the heli dips toward the valley bottom as our pilot does his best to fly the exact route with nearly the same grace.

All eyes are on the lookout, trying to decipher the code and solve the mystery of where he could be. It’s hard, looking for base jumpers. Base jumping is illegal in the parks and so base jumpers will often wear jet black wing suits, complete with black parachutes. They jump at dawn, when they have enough light to jump but not enough to be easily spotted. Some will exercise further caution by waiting for the last moment to pull their parachute.

I recognize a few familiar landmarks from the video, as we pass. We spot a small black tarp, but it’s just a decoy of sorts. Parks has put this there as a reference for what we are looking for. In another moment we reach the end of the run and pull up over the river. The pilot banks and pulls back up the face of the mountain where he pulls up to a rock outcrop on an upper buttress. He toes in with a single skid so that we can climb down and out of the helicopter, ready for our day to begin.

—

Not an effort was wasted in the search for Ryan, we GPS tracked and mapped every bit of that mountain to ensure coverage and overlap. Sometimes in search and rescue you have hard days, sometimes you have hard weeks. Nothing, and I repeat NOTHING is as hard as searching to the most thorough extent possible and still coming up empty handed. Albeit we weren’t truly empty handed, having uncovered the remains of a missing man from Quebec during the search, we didn’t have the ability to provide closure to the family mourning the unknowns of their loved ones disappearance.

After another unsuccessful day, the safety specialist radio’d in to base and they sent the heli back up to get us. We had checked every box we could check with the info we had. As I clambered through a small forested section atop the buttress, back towards the pick up point, I felt the moss under my feet and questioned Ryan’s whereabouts. To this day there are questions and theories that suggest that he may have never even jumped that fateful morning. Knowing some backstory, it isn’t at all unbelievable that maybe he is out there living a reinvented life somewhere. Unfortunately I am unlikely to ever know for certain, in my lifetime.

—

As the heli winds down my team and I report to command for a debrief of the day. We have done our best, we have done all that is reasonable to do and this is our last day on this search. 

I walk out of the parks office and see a familiar face. A warden I had met earlier that year at the Kananaskis Public Safety showcase approached and before I could even muster a greeting I heard his voice boom with one part hope and one part sarcasm.

“How ‘bout that bite work?”

I paused to think, not so much about the question but about my response. You see, during the showcase the warden mentioned it was too bad he didn’t have a good victim so he could demonstrate bite work with his dog Kaz. I was feeling particularly confident that day and volunteered myself. My confidence diminished, however, when the warden said “You know, maybe another day.. He’s never missed before but if he did today, that’s a lot of damn witnesses.”

“You know, he’s been working for 6 days straight with no reward.” Said the warden, sensing my hesitation.

—

And that is how I found myself running for my life, through a field in Banff, with naught but a padded sleeve to protect me from the 60+lbs of pure muscle and razor sharp teeth of a black Shepard named Kaz.