Icy storm transforms Bay State couple's glacier getaway

Pair survives hiking mishap in Cascades

Near the end of their five-day hike through Washington state's North Cascades, snowstorms, sleet, and 60-mile-per-hour winds socked Matthew Edwards and Robin Gibson, forcing them to huddle on an 18-inch-wide ice ledge.

Two days later, after they had moved onto a glacier, help arrived. But the couple thought they might be imagining it.

"We still couldn't tell, with all the echoing and the wind swirling," Edwards said yesterday at the Western Massachusetts home he and Gibson share in Wendell. In the whiteout conditions, rescuers' voices were "so faint, you didn't know if you were hearing things."

Edwards, 32, and Gibson, 27, had begun their climb through the Cascades on Aug. 24, in a getaway the couple had planned only two weeks earlier. Edwards, an avid hiker, had crossed the Cascades last summer and fallen for its scenery and peacefulness.

"I liked it so much," he said, that he wanted to show his girl- friend. But unlike last summer, when sunny, 80-degree days provided perfect hiking conditions and Edwards wore shorts, a 30degree chill and storm clouds cast a pall over last week's trip. At the beginning of the week, nightly storms soaked the mountains, but the rains slowed and stopped each morning, so the couple went on, Edwards said.

Until Wednesday, when the storms didn't lift. Edwards said he had been looking for lenticular clouds - ones that resemble flying saucers - which may foretell bad weather. But the already cloudy sky made it difficult to spot a bad storm brewing. As he and Gibson crossed the Dana Glacier, roped together, winds slammed the slope and swept up the snow, creating whiteout conditions.

"We could barely see each other on the ends of the rope," about 50 feet apart, Edwards said. They wanted to descend from the 8,000-foot precipice, but the cloud-locked sky made it difficult to find the best way. So, he said, they chose to climb down an unnamed gully, steep as a stepladder. Edwards led the way.

Then, Gibson began to lose her balance, and they decided she should remove the 50-pound pack that had been jerking her away from the cliff. They tied the pack to a rope and tried to lower it to a ledge below them.

But the pack fell down the mountain, taking their rope and much of their climbing equipment, Edwards said. That mishap left them unable to avoid the snowbound glacier's deep and potentially deadly crevasses.

"It would have been suicide to go back the way we came," he said.

So they settled on a ledge with a small rock separating them from the void below, anchored their picks in the ice, wrapped themselves in a sleeping bag and tent that Edwards had been carrying, and waited for the storm to clear.

After five hours, conditions were unchanged, and the couple called for help using the cellphone Gibson's mother had ordered them to take. Somehow they reached the Skagit County Sheriff's Office, which told them help would be on the way shortly.

But night fell, and no one came. The sun rose, and no one came.

"We had to get to the glacier," Edwards said. By midday Thursday, they had climbed off the ledge onto flat, snowy terrain. Edwards filled their tent with rocks to keep it from blowing away.

On Friday morning, "we said to ourselves, 'If nobody comes and finds us by 3 p.m., we're going back,' " Edwards said. It was a risk they felt they had to take, he said.

But by midday, three men from Bellingham Mountain Rescue had arrived - "good, awesome volunteers," Edwards said. They had made a half-day climb before finding Edwards and Gibson, using a global positioning satellite system to track the cellphone signal. Tacoma Mountain Rescue, the Navy, and the sheriff's office also helped in the rescue, Edwards said.

Edwards, Gibson, and the three men hiked down to a landing zone, where a helicopter took them to Concrete, where they warmed up and got a motel room. There, they turned on the TV, "and all we could see was ourselves," Edwards said.

Gibson's mother, Helen Gibson of Montague, said she's glad the couple heeded her warning to take along a phone. "The last thing Robin said to me as she's leaving, is 'Mom, we're just going to leave our cellphones in the car, since we won't get service,' I looked at Matt and I said: 'Matt, you bring that cellphone. It may not work, but it might work.' "

Gibson called it "a mother's intuition."

"When she goes on that next hike, I told her, she was going to have the highest technology equipment and GPS so I could find her no matter where she was," she said.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the couple's rescue was among a weeklong string of mountainside rescue attempts around Puget Sound amid unusually chilly weather in the region.

Despite the close call, Edwards said he and Gibson won't stop hiking. Their next adventure, however, will be tamer: In January, they're heading to Costa Rica, where their longest hike will take one day and lead them to a waterfall. "It'll be a little warmer," Edwards said.

Maddie Hanna can be reached at mhanna@globe.com.