It was Feb. 14 and a winter storm was pummeling Cape Breton Island as well as most of the East Coast.
It’s a day that won’t soon be forgotten by Cape Breton fishermen Richard MacPhee and Scott Rafuse, professional firefighter Ryan O’Shea and the two men rescued from the Cape Breton Highlands National Park because of the threesome’s initiative.
Friends Dave Metcalfe and Hughie Whalen left Glace Bay that afternoon to go snowmobiling. Whalen was also friends with MacPhee, a fellow snowmobile enthusiast.
“Hughie is a friend of mine. He used to snowmobile with us quite a bit. He posted in the afternoon he was at the Dancing Post in Margaree. For him to get to Margaree, he’s got to cross the ighlands and go down the other side and based on the conditions that day, he was absolutely crazy being out in this weather,” recalled MacPhee.
Evening came and MacPhee never thought anything more about it until about 10 o’clock when another friend, Scott Rafuse, shared that Hughie was missing, he hadn’t made it home from snowmobiling.
“Right off the bat I’m thinking oh no. He’s many hours late from his normal routine,” said MacPhee.
Concerned, MacPhee called 911, reported the incident and talked to an RCMP officer.
“He called me back an hour later and he said he spoke to SAR and they deemed the conditions too dangerous to search. They weren’t going to do anything until morning.”
While Hughie and Dave were seen at the Pig and Whistle, a warming shelter in the Highlands around 5 p.m. that day, they were also seen to leave to continue their journey. MacPhee said the RCMP officer was of the belief the two were still at the Pig and Whistle, assuming they probably turned around and went back.
“Knowing Hughie personally, that’s not his nature. If he decided he was going home, he was getting home. So I got confirmation his truck was still at the head of the trail and he was still out there. I knew it was a do or die situation for him,” said MacPhee.
MacPhee turned to social media, sending out a message on the local snowmobiler’s page to see if he could round up a few guys to go help look for the two missing snowmobilers.
“Ryan O’Shea was one of the first ones to answer me. Later I called Scott Rafuse. He was game to do it so the three of us geared up our snowmobiles and started up there. We met up at the Oregon Road, which is the entrance to the trail that takes you up the mountain.”
The three started out. “We found Hughie at kilometre 14. Under normal circumstances it would take us maybe five to 10 minutes to get up there by snowmobile. It took us probably an hour and half. We had massive snowdrifts to get through. Visibility was zero. That was the reason we got stuck the first time. We couldn’t see the drift in front of us and we just hit it too slow, it knocked us off our sleds, the machines got stuck. We just couldn’t move. We actually had to wait for a slight break in the visibility so we could move forward,” said MacPhee.
It was around 3 a.m. in the morning when they found Hughie.
“Just prior to us finding him, the conditions were that bad and the drifts so large that there was no way we were getting through, so we kind of felt like we had to leave it there. For a split second as we were starting to turn around, there in our headlights was Hughie laying beside his machine. It was just the perfect spot. If it had been another 50 feet away, we wouldn’t have seen him. We just couldn’t go any further,” said MacPhee.
The three approached the disabled snowmobiler. “We thought he was dead. He was lifeless, covered in snow. We took a while to get a response out of him. Once we seen he was responsive and starting to shiver, we thought that was a good sign.”
With Hughie found, the task then became how to get him down the mountain.
“There was no way he could ride his own snowmobile out, even we if got it unstuck. Our machines are only single seats. It would have been next to impossible to try and hang on to him on our sleds. So we made the difficult decision we had to get help, which meant going back down the mountain and because we had such a battle getting up, we were scared to death that if one or two of us went to get help and got into trouble, there wasn’t going to be enough manpower to get the sleds unstuck, so we made the difficult decision of leaving Hughie alone so we were sure we could get down the mountain to get help, otherwise it would have been four of us in trouble,” said MacPhee.
The three got to the bottom of the hill, jumped in their trucks and drove to the nearest house about half a kilometre away, knocking on the door until someone answered. While MacPhee was calling 911 to let them know they had found Hughie, Scott and Ryan continued on to the home of the highland trail system groomer operator at the end of the Oregon Road, knocking on his door until he got up.
“They told him you got to get up and help us,” said MacPhee.
It was around 7 a.m. by the time Hughie was brought to safety and transported to hospital. “It took us about an hour to get him down the hill,” said MacPhee.
By that time the search party for the still missing snowmobiler was expanding, with people coming from Ingonish and Margaree.
“The Ingonish crowd found Dave, about 100 yards from where we found Hughie. He was off the trail. The wind was so violent and the visibility so bad we passed by him many times, but he couldn’t hear us because he had dug himself in a hole in the snow and we couldn’t see him. We were that close to him.”
By now, it was afternoon and the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) was coordinating flights overhead.
“They were pinging his phone and triangulating his position. They came within a half kilometre radius, narrowing down the search area so everybody looking for him kind of congregated in a small area. Once they did this, the weather broke for just a few minutes. The visibility got really good. Dave came out of the hole and had his arms up in the air. One of the guys just happened to be there at the right time. They looked at him and thought he was a moose, then realized it was him,” said MacPhee.
Hypothermic and disoriented, Dave jumped back in the hole and covered it back up with the side panel from his snowmobile after being found, said MacPhee laughing.
“Dave was in better shape than Hughie. I figure Hughie was about an hour away from death. His temperature was already down to 35 degrees. He was just barely conscious and not aware of his surroundings.”
As fishermen and a firefighter, MacPhee said himself, Rafuse and O’Shea are all very safety conscious. “That’s basically what drove us to do it. We couldn’t have asked for a better three to do this,” said MacPhee.
