by Glenn Taylor
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Dec 12/97) - A dramatic rescue effort by local volunteers saved the lives of two snowmobilers, who went through the ice at Airport Channel last weekend.

"I'm just glad to be home," said Leonard Adams, who was travelling with a group of friends at 2 a.m. Sunday morning, when his machine went through thin ice on Airport Channel.

Adams, Val Moore, Calvin Adams and Tegwin Jones were travelling to a cabin on Onion Lake, when Adams' brand-new machine crashed through inch-thick ice. Adams and passenger Val Moore jumped off, but not before both got wet up to the knees.

Meanwhile, Calvin Adams and Moore took off for town, while Jones and Adams lit a fire and tried to keep warm.

Adams took off his soaked boots and dumped them. That was a mistake, he said. In seconds, his boots froze solid and he couldn't get them back on. Instead, he lay his cold feet into the tops of the boots and waited for help.

By now, Calvin Adams and Moore had arrived in town, and picked up Paul Sullivan, who raced out on his machine to rescue them. "If I'm not out in twenty minutes, go get help," Sullivan said he told Barry Setzer and others who had also come to help.

Sullivan didn't make it out as quickly as he'd hoped, however. While carrying the two on his sled, all three went through the ice again. Sullivan said he got "wet up to his chest" getting his two passengers out of the water. Adams lost his boots in this second dumping, and the three moved for shore.

With no sign of Sullivan coming back, Setzer and others raced back to town to get more help, and found it in acting fire chief Rick Lindsay and Donald Ross, and Canadian Helicopter pilots Mike Craig and Bruce Taylor.

Craig said he and Taylor lifted off in a Bell 212 chopper at the airport, while Lindsay and Ross snowmobiled out to the scene. It was now about 5 a.m., and Adams and Jones had been out in the elements for three hours, and getting colder by the minute.

"My biggest problem was that my feet were really soaked," said Adams. "I was afraid I was going to lose them before the night was over."

Chopper pilot Craig soon found Adams and Jones with a search light, and Sullivan -- an engineer for Canadian -- walked to a clearing where the helicopter could land.

After checking the Onion Lake cabin and realizing the group was still out there, Lindsay and Ross snowmobiled to Airport Channel, where they met the helicopter. "We tried three different approaches to get to them, but we just couldn't do it," said Lindsay, referring to thin ice conditions.

Lindsay and Ross decided to go to the airport, where they met the refuelling helicopter and jumped aboard, with blankets and hot packs. The chopper then set the two men down on a lake about 1000 metres from the site.

When Lindsay and Ross finally met up with the group, they realized they had moved to the wrong side of the channel, and couldn't reach them on foot without going through the ice themselves.

"We couldn't cross the creek, so we had to invent something really fast," said Lindsay. Using sticks pulled from the bush, they laid them down across the creek and used them "like giant cross country skis" to get across to the group, getting wet themselves in the process.

By now -- about four hours later -- Adams was so hypothermic that he was shivering uncontrollably and hallucinating, according to Lindsay. He couldn't walk, and getting him across on the sticks would have been impossible. "There was no way we could have got him to crawl or walk in the snow in his bare feet," said Lindsay.

"I was cold and very scared," said Adams. "I was just really tired, too tired to really respond all that well."

The two men wrapped Adams and Jones in Arctic sleeping bags, and took off their wet clothes to help them dry off. "He was in really bad shape," said Lindsay. Jones seemed OK, and was able to talk to her rescuers.

Lindsay and Ross decided they would need a stretcher toboggan to get the two out, so they returned to the airport by chopper and got more gear, before returning with more winter clothes.

Crossing the sticks again on hands and knees, Lindsay fed the group into the stretcher, and with Ross holding ropes at the other end, the two were able to move the group across to shore and the waiting chopper. Sullivan had been picked up by chopper earlier, and was back at the airport making coffee for the rescuers.

By 10 a.m., Adams and Jones were in an ambulance and heading for town, some seven hours after they first got wet. Adams was released from hospital Monday morning, after enduring "the most pain I've ever felt in my life," as his feet thawed. Both emerged from the ordeal unharmed and with all toes intact.

"There's not much to say except, if it wasn't for them, I'd probably have ended up freezing," said Adams this week. "I just can't thank them all enough."

Thankfully, the night of the rescue was fairly mild, with temperatures around -19 C. It would have been a different situation altogether if the temperature had been -30 C. "I don't even want to think about that," said Adams.

RCMP are warning snowmobilers to stay away from Airport creek area, due to thin ice and overflow. The area is typically a trouble-zone this time of year, said Lindsay, as water from Airport Lake is compressed by overhanging snow and ice into nearby channels. The moving water breaks ice in the channels, and it takes some time to refreeze properly. Add the effects of El Nino, and the area becomes extra hazardous, said Lindsay.