A Bizarre Gear Failure Led to a Giant Headfirst Whipper in Red Rocks. Here’s How the Climber Survived.

When search and rescue officer Jared Wicks flew out to the Dark Shadows Wall in Red Rocks to save a critically injured climber, he knew exactly where to go, not just because of the information from the dispatcher, but because of the wash of blood that stained the ochre sandstone. He could see it from the rescue helicopter.

“We noticed them immediately, from a distance,” Wicks told Climbing. “There was quite a bit of blood on the wall.”

The seven-member Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) Search and Rescue team received a distress call at 11:50 a.m. on Saturday, February 28. The call reported that a climber, 50-year-old Jarred Jackman, had fallen on the second pitch of trad route Dream Safari (5.11a), a four-pitch extension of a popular route called Risky Business (5.10c). Wicks, a climber of 30-plus years who has worked with LVMPD for more than 20, said that both lines are dangerous—at least PG-13, if not R-rated, depending on your constitution.

Before his fall, Jackman and his partner, Danny Urioste, both veteran climbers, were flowing up the wall. It was a low gravity day, and stoke was high. Approaching the toughest moves of Safari’s second pitch, which follows a thin seam, Jackman tried to fit a blue finger-tip-sized Totem, but couldn’t find a placement he was happy with. “I plugged it in, but only three lobes engaged, so it didn’t feel great,” Jackman told Climbing. “I didn’t want to rely on shitty gear, so I pulled it out and reracked it.”

Jackman had a bomber nut a few feet below him. “It was this gold [#7] DMM offset, in a money placement,” he said. With this nut backing him up, and the crux well within his ability, he decided to keep climbing. “I moved up to a sinker hand. It was really good,” he said. “At that point, I was well into the crux.” Using this handhold, he pulled his feet up, smearing both on the varnished wall. He was now roughly 10 feet above the nut.

Suddenly, he peeled off the wall, cartwheeling into a 40- to 50-foot plunge that ended in a headfirst smash against the rock.

Jackman was unconscious, contorted into a strange position, and bleeding heavily from the head. Urioste acted fast, calling 911, and gave Wicks and his team his exact location, roughly 600 feet up the wall.

Wicks and another officer jumped into an MD530 helicopter and flew out to the wall. The helicopter dropped Wicks and his partner off on a ledge some 500 feet above Jackman. “I determined that rappelling in from the top would be quicker,” Wicks said, “because I knew we were going to need a lot of gear: ropes, a litter, quite a bit of medical supplies.” There, they built an anchor, were joined by more rescuers and began rappelling down the wall.

An AMGA guide and his client had been climbing below Jackman when he fell, and at the same time, this guide was climbing up to reach the victim from below.

Wicks reached Jackman at 1:30 p.m., roughly an hour and a half after the accident. Urioste had lowered him to a small ledge, roughly a foot wide, and he and the guide were applying pressure to his head to control the bleeding.

The situation didn’t look good. “It looked like the head was the initial point of impact,” Wicks said. “He was wearing a helmet, which saved his life, but he had two pretty nasty head lacerations. I could see his skull.”

Jackman was conscious and wasn’t having trouble breathing, but it was clear to Wicks that the victim had some form of spinal trauma, because he couldn’t move his left arm. He put Jackman in a cervical collar, and made an ad-hoc chest harness using slings, so that the victim wasn’t just supported from the waist, by his climbing harness, and then wrapped him in a puffy to keep him warm.

By this point, three other rescue officers had made their way down the wall with a litter. They bundled Jackman into the litter and began lowering him down the wall to the canyon floor below. The team reached the ground at 5:30 p.m., where three volunteer rescuers were waiting, including a doctor and a nurse.

“That particular canyon is very tight, and has a lot of dense foliage,” Wicks said. “There are creek crossings, and tons of massive boulder hopping. It’s not a cruiser trail.” He and the rescuers began lugging the litter through this rugged terrain to a clearing 500 yards away, where the helicopter could land. There, they loaded Jackman up and flew him to a nearby fire station, where an ambulance was waiting.

In total, the rescue operation lasted seven hours, involved four full-time SAR officers, two helicopter pilots, and four volunteer rescuers.

What went wrong on Dream Safari?

Jackman, who suffered a serious head injury, doesn’t remember exactly what happened during the fall. He remembers clipping the nut and moving up through the crux. The next thing he knew, he was at the base of the pitch, covered in blood.

“I definitely did not think I was going to fall, I wasn’t gripped at all,” he said. “I recall looking down, thinking ‘Damn, I’m in the air, what the heck?!’ and then I remember waking up in Danny’s arms.”

Wicks conducted an after-action review with a cadre of local Red Rocks climbing guides and Urioste to find out what went wrong. He said the nut, the highest piece in the seam, was fairly bomber, just like Jackman thought. “It had its carabiner clipped to it, with an alpine sling hanging off of that carabiner.”

Oddly, there was no carabiner on the rope side. The sling was simply hanging on the wall. It was as though Jackman had extended the nut with the sling, but then never clipped his rope into it. The piece that actually arrested his fall was an orange hand-sized Totem, 10 or 15 feet below.

What Wicks learned, through talking with Urioste, was that a lone wiregate carabiner, undamaged, slid down the rope and came to rest on Jackman’s tie-in knot after he fell. Urioste, who watched Jackman place the nut, couldn’t be certain, but believed Jackman had clipped his rope into the piece, but the carabiner he used had somehow become unclipped from the sling during the fall.

Urioste also said that when Jackman fell, he could feel the rope start to go tight, as the nut held the fall. “There was a very specific moment where he thought, ‘Oh, this won’t be so bad,’” Wicks relayed. “But then all of a sudden, he felt that dreaded pop and the rope went slack again, and then the victim continued to fall.”

Wicks said that the accident doesn’t have a clear cause, but instead, multiple small factors converging. “It’s super easy for us all to Monday morning quarterback this,” Wicks said, “but when we were debriefing with the local guides, a lot of whom climb that route quite frequently, it was determined that the section the victim was on does take pretty good pro. It’s just a matter of how comfortable you are at the moment, to hang on thin holds and place gear.”

Jackman is a very experienced climber, and though he hadn’t climbed Dream Safari before, he said he was well within his comfort zone. “People think of this as a dangerous route, and maybe there are segments that fit that description, but where we needed pro, there was pro. If that gold offset had held, it would’ve been like a 10 foot fall.”

So how did the carabiner become unclipped from the alpine draw? Jackman threw out a few ideas. “We were using an Edelrid rope with an aramid sheath, which is pretty stiff,” he said. “Maybe a more supple rope wouldn’t have unclipped.”

He also noted that the carabiner he’d used to clip into the draw was a Black Diamond Oz, which has a very smooth gate action. “A CAMP Photon, for example, moving those gates takes a concerted amount of effort, the gates on an Oz are different, they open much easier.” This makes it easier to clip, but it also makes it easier, theoretically, to unclip.

“In my mind, that section was 100 percent protected,” Jackman said. “I even recall, right when I first fell, thinking, ‘No worries, that piece is right below me, it’ll be like a 10-foot fall.’ But in the future when I enter sections like that, I’ll think about opposing biners, the specific biner I’m using, whether the gate is stiff or not, or whether I want to use a locker.”

The other big question is why he ended up hitting the wall headfirst. Jackman said it’s odd, because the rope—to his left—wasn’t behind his leg as he fell. “The first part of the fall was totally clean,” he said. He believes that when the highest piece unclipped, the sudden influx of slack caught behind his leg, flipping him upside down. The fact that he has rope burn running from the back of his right knee down to his ankle seems to confirm this.

“You’d think the rope would’ve ended up behind my left leg if anything,” he noted, “but when you’re falling into a huge loop of slack like that, I guess anything can happen.”

“Numerous bad things all stacked up to make this the fall what it was,” Wicks said. “This wasn’t an inexperienced climber being an idiot … A few really rare events occurred to make this a worst case scenario.”

“It was Murphy’s Law,” he concluded, referring to the adage that, “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

What kept Jarred Jackman alive?

The pictures of Jackman’s Black Diamond Vapor helmet, which shattered into fragments upon impact to absorb the blow, tell a clear story. If he hadn’t worn a helmet, those wouldn’t be styrofoam fragments, they’d be fragments of skull. “That helmet 100% saved our victim’s life,” Wicks said. “It did exactly what it was supposed to do.”

Jackman, who has been climbing since the late 1990s, said it’s the third time he’s broken a helmet—first in a mountain biking crash, then a kayaking accident, and now a rock climbing fall—and each time, they’ve kept him from so much as a concussion.

“I have no headaches, no vision impairments,” he said, of his latest accident. “I was unconscious for a bit, so some people would say that’s evidence of a concussion, but if I had one it’s really minor. This helmet kept me alive.”

“I’m sitting in my backyard now, legs crossed, chilling,” he added, speaking to Climbing over the phone. “If you didn’t see this halo [a traction device used to treat spinal injuries] on me, which looks like somebody strapped an archaic bird cage to my head, you’d be like, ‘Oh this is a totally normal dude.’”

Urioste’s quick thinking was crucial, too. He called 911 as soon as the accident occurred and then provided clear, detailed information about the victim’s location, mechanism of injury, and current condition.

Wicks also said that Jackman’s mental fortitude can’t be overstated. “He was so calm through the process,” the rescuer recalled. “He knew he was in a super bad way, but he wasn’t panicking, he wasn’t freaking out. That was incredibly helpful for us. It’s a lot to do medical treatment and assessment on a sheer wall 600 feet off the ground. So his attitude, the fact that he was able to keep himself together, played a huge part in the success of this operation.”

The extensive network of volunteers Wicks’s team can call upon, he said, were also a key part of this rescue, from the climbers who assisted on the wall to the medical personnel who met them at the base—all of whom were volunteering their time, unpaid.

“We have brain surgeons and trauma surgeons, we have professional rope access guys, we have world class climbers, all of these folks have some other professional job that they do, and they’re just doing this just out of goodness of their heart,” Wicks said. “Quite frankly, they’re the real professionals. We couldn’t do it without them. There are only seven of us full-time officers, so the volunteers are what make our team so successful.”

Jackman, a native of Washington who spends his winters in Las Vegas, is now recovering from three fractured vertebrae—C4, C5, and C6—a contusion on his spinal cord, and a pseudoaneurysm in his carotid artery, among a host of other injuries. His sister organized a GoFundMe to support his recovery. Jackman has arranged for any money that doesn’t go towards his medical expenses to be donated to LVMPD’s SAR team.

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