Hynes dropped a pin on his phone. There was no signal, so he continued down the highway until he was able to call 911. Then he circled back and parked at a pullout not far from the pin. The gorge was so precipitous that Hynes couldn’t see the bottom, but he had a DJI Mavic 3 drone. He set the machine aloft, and its camera captured the Honda, which had fallen three hundred and twenty feet—about the height of a thirty-story building. The silver vehicle lay upside down in the Uncompahgre River, crumpled like an aluminum can.
When an accident occurs on a steep part of the road, police and emergency services wait until skilled climbers arrive. On that morning, a call went out to the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team, a local volunteer organization that is staffed with many expert climbers. Two members, Jeff Skoloda and Tim Pasek, arrived and strapped into harnesses and helmets. They climbed down a rope that led to a Tyrolean traverse, a fixed cable that runs over the river to the other side of the gorge. After that, they installed a rope on the far cliff wall and rappelled down to the Honda. It took them about twenty minutes to reach the wreckage.
As Skoloda approached, he couldn’t tell how many people were inside. He is in his fifties, a successful sculptor and metalworker who owns a large workshop in Ouray. Since joining Ouray Mountain Rescue, in 2000, he has helped recover more than a hundred bodies, often in treacherous terrain. Many have been climbers, skiers, or other recreationalists, but some were found in vehicles that tumbled off the Million Dollar Highway. When Skoloda kneeled beside the Honda, he heard a scream.
“My only note is maybe you don’t need to start every sentence with ‘and.’ ”
Cartoon by David Ostow
Until then, the men had assumed that they were involved in a recovery operation. Now they tried to open the doors, but the Honda was too damaged; a handle broke off in Skoloda’s hand. The screaming sounded like a young girl, but the voice was muffled and hard to hear above the rushing river. They couldn’t see her face, because that side of the car had landed against a large boulder. But there was a small gap in the broken window on the other side, and Pasek reached in and touched a bare foot.
“Can you feel that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Yes!”
Pasek used his emergency radio to tell rescue services on the road above that there was a survivor. They asked him to estimate how old she was, in order to figure out what size equipment might be necessary. The tumbling vehicle had left a long trail of debris across the sheer cliff—shoes, clothes, books, papers, luggage. Near the end of the trail, a children’s book was lying in the dirt. Pasek picked it up: “A to Z Mysteries: The Zombie Zone.” He has two children of his own. He looked at a page and made a guess—“I think she’s probably about ten.”
In 2008, the public-school district of Ridgway, a town north of Ouray, donated a decommissioned school bus to Ouray Mountain Rescue. The team transported the bus to the Million Dollar Highway, where they shifted it into neutral and tied the steering wheel so that it wouldn’t turn. Then they positioned a loader behind the bus and pushed it off a curve in the road.
Skoloda attended that training exercise, and he still has vivid memories of the school bus flying through the void and then sticking into the side of the mountain. “It kind of lawn-darted into place,” he told me recently. After the vehicle came to rest, the rescue team helped twenty volunteers climb down and position themselves inside the bus. The volunteers wore moulage makeup that resembled blunt-force injuries, and each of them had a script to follow. Two mannequins were also placed inside—fatalities. For the next two hours, the rescue team practiced cutting into the bus with extrication tools, and they made triage and evacuation decisions based on the role-played injuries of the volunteers. A temporary morgue was set up on the Million Dollar Highway.