Emergency physician Alison Sheets, MD, knew how treacherous climbing the sheer rock walls in Eldorado Canyon, near Boulder, Colorado, could be. An experienced technical climber and guide, she had climbed most of them herself. So when a message came in on her pager late on a sunny afternoon in October 2014 — “climber with head injuries” — Sheets, who is the medical director for the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, grabbed her rescue gear and rushed out. 

After hiking the steep, rugged 30-minute approach — and joined along the way by other rescuers responding to the call — she spotted the injured climber on the rock face. He’d fallen 60 feet, stopped by a small juniper tree growing out of the rock about 30 feet from the ground. His legs were straddling the tree, his face against the rock, and he wasn’t moving. A fellow climber, on the wall with him, had wrapped a T-shirt around his bleeding head.

Sheets climbed up to join them. The fallen climber’s head was gashed and his legs and feet had sustained serious injuries. But what alarmed her most was when he said, “I’m weak, can’t push myself up.” She asked him to squeeze her fingers. “Here was a guy who had just made a very difficult climb, and he barely had any strength in his hands,” she remembers. That suggested that he had central cord syndrome, a compression injury to the upper spinal cord that makes any movement potentially very dangerous. 

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