News

Injured young canoeist `nearly unconscious` before rescue at foot of falls in BWCA

Paul Walsh

07/08/2015

July 08--A teenager was pinned "for many hours" and "nearly unconscious" for a time as rushing waters pinned his leg between his damaged canoe and rocks after he and two others descended a 25- to 30-foot waterfall near the Minnesota-Canadian border, authorities said Wednesday.

Rescue personnel freed the injured 15-year-old at the bottom of Upper Basswood Falls late Tuesday afternoon, but it was another 2-plus hours before the teen was airlifted out of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) by a State Patrol helicopter and eventually relayed to a hospital in Ely.

The boy, whose identity has yet to be released, was being treated Wednesday for "crushing injuries" to a leg and hypothermia, said Lake County Sheriff Carey Johnson.

"They were afraid they were going to lose him," Johnson said of the fellow canoeists who came away unscathed when they went over the falls late Tuesday morning. The teen and his companions were in one of at least four canoes from a church group in Rochester, Minn., the sheriff said.

It was the pure force of the cascading waters that pinned the boy's leg between the mangled canoe and the rocks, Johnson said. "This is one of the most dangerous places" in the BWCA to navigate, he said.

Upper Basswood Falls is a tempting place for canoeists to catch a thrill and descend with intent. Johnson added that boaters also often take the ride down rather than portage around.

The sheriff said he's heard a "couple of different stories, so far" about whether these canoeists intended to ride down the falls, which Johnson described as more like "a series of rapids."

Rescuers determined that the teen became trapped sometime between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m., but the lack of cellphone service in the area kept them from calling for help.

Shortly after 1 p.m., a group with the Boy Scouts' Northern Tier High Adventure Program that was doing portage trail maintenance came upon the teen and radioed into its base on Moose Lake. From there, a call to 911 was made.

The waters where the canoeist got stuck are " more like a rapids on steroids," said Northern Tier General Manager John Van Dreese.

Sheriff's personnel reached the teen about 3 p.m. and began treating his leg injuries. It wasn't until roughly 5:15 p.m. that emergency personnel freed the boy, who was "nearly unconscious during the last 30 minutes of the rescue and was suffering from extreme hypothermia," according to a play-by-play account from the Sheriff's Office.

The State Patrol helicopter swooped in around 7:30 p.m. and rushed the teen to a waiting U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seaplane, which then handed him off to an ambulance bound for a hospital in Ely.

Justin Mayne, a captain with the Lake County Rescue Squad who was in radio contact with rescuers and assisting with their positioning, said "there's been quite a bit of rain" lately that would have made the water's flow all the more intense. The airlift was complicated because it was staged "in such a remote area," he added.

Mayne described the falls as "kind of like a long chute. People do canoe it. It's not like a straight falls."

Even with his own experience as a rescuer, Mayne said, "You won't catch me doing that for fun."

A similar rescue in the same area was pulled off in June 2014 while several Boy Scouts and their leaders from suburban Cincinnati were canoeing on stormy Basswood Lake. One canoe was pushed to the shore by the relentless winds and waves, while the other capsized. Two of the leaders were rescued by a State Patrol helicopter from an island in the lake.