On a Wyoming mountain nearly 20 times as high as any Wisconsin ski hill, an exhausted trio of backcountry skiers took a moment to rest after a five-hour climb. The island of mountains they were perched upon burst through the earth, interrupting a peaceful ocean of rustling flatland sage painted blue from the sunrise. And while the three skiers continued their ascent to the summit for four more hours, that morning is all one of them remembers.
The mountain Ryan Redmond scaled. Photo by Ryan Redmond.
No memory of the mountain catching every foot of his tumble. No memory of the rescue basket tightly holding him as he dangled below the helicopter. No memory of the eighth-floor hospital bed cradling him for weeks during his coma. And although the skier’s face is once again speckled with sunlight, the light that brightens his face pours through the windows of his mother’s Wisconsin home rather than from the Wyoming daybreak. It is in this home where Ryan Redmond now reconciles the life he was plucked from three months ago with the life of recovery he now faces.
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Twelve years ago, Ryan’s dad, Mark, presented him with a gift of independence: a 1999 Toyota Tacoma, a truck Ryan later affectionately named “Yoder.” Over the past decade, wherever Ryan went, Yoder went. And with over 240,000 miles on the truck, Ryan has certainly done his fair share of traveling and living cross-country. This past June, Ryan again packed up his life with his girlfriend Maria, stuffed it into Yoder and headed west to Wyoming’s Jackson Hole valley to complete a six-month AmeriCorps internship with the local Teton Science School. A strong advocate for equality and social justice, Ryan began a program for Latinos and Native Americans — a program that would fuse together his passions of the outdoors and social justice by bringing the underprivileged into nature. But only one month into his internship, a skiing accident upended Ryan’s world.
After arriving in the tourist ski hub of Jackson, Wyo., Ryan organized a mountain climb and ski trip with Ben and Rob, two graduate students who knew the mountains better than any Wisconsinite would. They decided to climb the Middle Teton, the third-highest peak in the Teton Mountain Range, and ski down the Ellingwood Couloir, a dauntingly steep 1,500-foot gully filled with snow and nestled in the side of the Middle Teton.
The trio arrived at the base of the Middle Teton by midnight. During the next four hours of the early morning, the three determined backpackers scaled the mountain’s rocky terrain in the dark and by 4 a.m. finally approached the snowline — the height snow and ice cover the ground year-round. Ryan, Ben and Rob pulled out their ice axes and crampons to begin ascending the mountain through snow, rock and ice. An hour later, the three sleep-deprived backpackers rested on the side of the mountain and watched the vast morning sky greet them with warm radiance. The trio stood on their mountainous island of solitude and gazed at the sun’s rays creeping over the shadowed Tetons, slowly illuminating the sea of lush greenery below and the demanding trail above.
Nine arduous and exhilarating hours after he first arrived at the Middle Teton, Ryan stood atop the Ellingwood Couloir breathing in the thin air and ready to take the plunge. He anchored his boots to his skis and strapped on his bindings. Positioned to glide past the rock walls that enveloped the white channel of snow, Ryan propelled himself down the chute. And for a fleeting moment, the chilled wind thrust against Ryan’s face as he flew toward the bottom. But after his fourth turn, Ryan began plummeting down the couloir, colliding with the cold, hard earth and striking his head with every fall. “It’s pretty rare for me to fall, and I cartwheeled — or we call it ragdolled — I ragdolled for almost 1,000 feet,” Ryan said. “Which is why I’m currently living at my mom’s house.”
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Ryan’s parents Kay and Mark Redmond offered their family a life cushioned with moderate wealth. As the founder and owner of the Waukesha-based design and building firm The Redmond Company, Mark had been incredibly successful with his business over the years. And while the Redmonds were fortunate enough to be a privileged family, Kay noted she and her husband agreed to teach their children the importance of work and service to others. “Life isn’t about money. The only good thing about money is that you can give it back and maybe help somebody else,” Kay explained. “You get back what you give, and Ryan and my daughter got that very early.”
As a teenager, Ryan attended Marquette University High School, a private, all-male, Jesuit school located in Milwaukee. Despite the school’s staggering tuition rates, Marquette is situated in the Merrill Park neighborhood: an area of blight, particularly during Ryan’s high school experience. As the Marquette boys of the ‘90s paraded their brand new Nike Airs and Reebok Pumps, two of Ryan’s classmates were held up at gunpoint for their tennis shoes in front of the school. These unexpected moments of a terrifying reality became eye-opening experiences that revealed to Ryan a very different side of life than he was used to. And in completing over 350 hours of volunteer service with inner-city youths in high school, Ryan was continuously reminded of underprivileged livelihoods.
After growing up in southeastern Wisconsin, Ryan moved to Oregon for college. During his time out west, Ryan volunteered with the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, an organization that pairs mentors with children who are in need of an adult role model. He moved from volunteer to employee after the organization hired him, and Ryan suddenly found himself leading the mentorship program for two years. Although the program proved to be an outlet for him to encourage healthy relationships and social equality, Ryan admitted most of his energy then was put into climbing and skiing. “My skis and climbing gear cost more than a lot of people’s cars,” he said. “But that’s what I chose to spend my money on.”
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Ryan ragdolled down the side of the chute until his body came to a halt nearly 1,000 feet from where he began the tumble. “Most ski hills here in Wisconsin are about 300 vertical feet, so it’s three times that long that I fell,” Ryan explained. “It’s like falling down Olympia or Little Switzerland or something like that, three times that distance.” As Ryan cartwheeled down the snow-encrusted ground and disappeared into the distance, Rob was paralyzed by fear at the top of the chute. But Ben sprang to action, and working steadily to reach Ryan, it took him an hour and a half to finally reach Ryan’s unconscious body. An outdoor adventurer trained in wilderness medicine, Ben noticed swelling in Ryan’s head and peeled off his fixed, inflexible climbing helmet to keep him stabilized. “My head probably would have exploded,” Ryan said. “He’s probably the reason I’m alive.”
Ben called the Teton Interagency Dispatch Center at 10:15 a.m., and two rangers arrived to provide emergency medical care around 12:30 p.m., more than three hours after the accident occurred. Another ranger was flown into a landing zone near the accident and helped prepare Ryan for a short-haul evacuation. Cocooned tightly in a basket, Ryan and a park ranger dangled 200 feet below the cabin as the helicopter ferried them to land where rangers could stabilize him. “They brought in another helicopter with doctors in it to check me out and make sure I was even worthwhile, to see if I’d even lived.” After a team of emergency medical providers stabilized him, Ryan was flown to the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls.
More than 1,000 miles away, Kay Redmond returned from church to her Wisconsin home and noticed the message light blinking on her phone. She had two messages, one from a park ranger and one from a doctor asking if she was related to Ryan Redmond. Kay called the doctor back, a neurosurgeon in Idaho Falls who told her about Ryan’s fall and current condition. As the sun began to set on Wisconsin, Kay anticipated difficulties locating a plane flying near Idaho Falls before the day was over and told the doctor she would find a flight to arrive in the morning. The other end of the telephone stoically responded, “I think you need to get here tonight.” So, in a flurry of phone calls and car rides, Kay and her family found themselves on a plane to Idaho Falls. For three long hours on the jet, the family barely spoke. No one knew what to expect. Everyone was exhausted. Nobody could sleep. But they prayed and prayed Ryan would be kept safe and they would make it in time.
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1 Comments
Wow, what an amazing story. Very inspirational.