Have a death-defying experience — then press record? That’s what one Seattle woman did while injured, bleeding, and needing rescue in the North Cascades.
Snow is softening in the mountains, which can be very dangerous.
On Saturday, Arielle Lui was with three others near Chianti Spire at an area called Rebel Yell when things went south, as explained in our interview and her vlog.
It takes a lot to freak out Arielle; she’s a poster girl for adventure, but never wanted to post something like this.
“We’re currently waiting for search and rescue ... it’s about 4000 feet to get out of here,” Lui says to the camera.
She was leading three other climbers in the North Cascades, and explained how the snow pack that day... was not so packed.
“It was supposed to freeze overnight and didn’t,” she says, “I was just, like, standing, and then all of a sudden, the snow underneath me collapsed.”
Lui went tumbling, but was able to stop using an ice ax.
“If you see over there, you’ll see a fall line of where I fell... can’t see the bottom,” she recounts.
Her crampons, however, did more harm than good, impaling her leg.
“I’m currently sitting in an emergency bivy sack,” Lui says to the camera. “Those are my pants you see, there’s blood pretty much running down half of them.”
The group activated their Garmin rescue signal and called for help, while Lui put her cell phone to another use.
“I think I’m going to vlog my search and rescue from here,” she says to her phone.
Recounting her experience to KIRO 7, Lui said, “Things happened really fast after this, so I’m going to give a quick overview; they found us and the helicopter got really close - like 15 feet from the mountain and they dropped two medics down on a line and checked out my injuries and secured us with harnesses and a sack to winch us up into a helicopter, it was really crazy like in a movie.”
Lui got stitches and will recover, thanks to the Navy crew who flew her to Bellingham.
“I mean, they were like the coolest dudes ever,” she says.
Lui says she can’t walk yet, but she plans to get back in the mountains as soon as possible, just not on soft snow with crampons.
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