Editor’s note: Tribune columnist Mike Conklin, a member of the 1st Presbyterian Church of Lake Forest, accompanied the church’s mountain climbers on this year’s expedition.
With Mt. Hood hovering in the background on a recent June evening, the 11-person mountain-climbing group was gathered in a truck-stop parking lot on Portland’s outskirts.
The annual 1st Presbyterian Church of Lake Forest outdoor expedition to Oregon, organized by Senior Pastor Terry Swicegood, was coming to a close. After four days of mountaineering and whitewater rafting, everyone was saying goodbyes to their guide and friend, Rocky Henderson.
One by one they shook the hand of Henderson, who has led all of the trips taken by the church group during the past six years. When it came the turn of climbers Bob Kudwa of Lake Forest and Lydon Neumann of Lake Bluff, handshakes were not enough.
An emotional embrace was the order of the day.
It had been one year ago–almost to the day–that Kudwa and Neumann, joined by a rope as if Siamese twins, shared a horrifying, life-threatening experience on this same Oregon trip. And Henderson, like a St. Bernard, came to their rescue.
Kudwa and Neumann were picking their way along a steep west slope of Mt. Hood when one misstepped, the other slipped, and both went tumbling. They joke now about how it started, but then, unable to arrest their slide with pickaxes and bound to each other by the rope, they collected momentum like rocks rolling down a hill.
For 20 seconds of terror, they bounced off boulders, struck hard chunks of ice, hit tree stumps and turned somersaults for a thousand feet. They rolled onto a narrow, flat section of Reid Glacier that kept them from going another thousand feet and, surely, to their deaths.
They were two bloodied heaps of broken bones, cracked ribs, torn ligaments, abrasions, contusions and one concussion between them, unable to move but–before pain, shock and numbing cold set in–laughing hysterically over the “good fortune” of the fall’s ending.
Henderson, an ex-president of Portland Mountain Rescue, a volunteer organization, had been about 50 feet away when their terror began. Within minutes of unhooking from two other 1st Presbyterian climbers, he was down the slope and at the sides of Kudwa and Neumann, calling for help via his cellular phone and directing the rescue.
Kudwa, who suffered a collapsed lung and serious internal bleeding, slipped in and out of coherency during the frigid wait for the helicopter. “I never want to see anything like that again,” Henderson said of his first close-up look at the battered climbers.
Ed Hamming, a Lake Forest orthopedic surgeon who was on previous Mt. Hood trips but missed this one, would later say after working with his two fellow climbers during rehabilitation that it was as if they had been in “a very bad car accident.”
The Oregon experience in 1994 was Swicegood’s “worst nightmare.” A skilled climber, this was the fifth year the Presbyterian pastor, who moved to Lake Forest from Portland, had led a group to his beloved mountains of the Northwest. About 30 male and female parishioners enthusiastically have joined him through the years.
On this trip, he had been on Mt. Hood’s opposite side with other church members on another route to the summit when the accident happened.
The pastor had to make agonizing telephone calls to wives Nancy Kudwa and Linda Neumann. The climbers each have two school-age children. There would be questions asked by church officials. And the media, which later was mollified with a press conference, would be on the scent.
Making the situation touchier was this: Kudwa, a 46-year-old gung-ho colonel in the Marine Reserves as well as an American Airlines pilot, and the 47-year-old Neumann, a top-notch swimmer at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, were among his most capable and fit participants each year.
But soon after they were en route to the hospital and everyone else was left behind in a parking lot at Mt. Hood’s base, trip veterans Bob Shaw and John Messervey, both of Lake Forest, walked up to Swicegood. They told him to make a date for 1995 because he absolutely was not canceling future trips, a sentiment echoed by everyone involved.
“The confidence and support they showed,” the pastor later said, “was what got me through.”
Kudwa was taken to Emanuel Hospital in Portland, where he remained for a week. At one point in the hospital, when he still suffered memory loss, he awoke from a deep sleep, noticed several elderly patients, fuzzily thought he was in a senior citizens home, got dressed, made the bed (his Marine training, undoubtedly) and tried to check out.
He was intercepted by a nurse.
Eventually, Kudwa did move from the hospital and into the home of friends in Oregon, where, unable to fly because of his condition–an ominous development for a pilot–he remained for several weeks with Nancy at his side.
Neumann checked out of University Hospital in Portland in a few days and returned to Lake Bluff. Soon he began coughing up blood and needed more hospitalization.
Their eventual comebacks, marked by lengthy walks together in Lake Forest and Lake Bluff, were long and slow.
“We would piece it all together–exactly what did happen–as we walked,” Neumann said. “Of course, I always told Bob he pulled me down, and he recalled it just the opposite.”
Neumann’s return was delicate. He had been in final interviews to join Ernst & Young as a consulting partner. These were put off until mid-July, when, in bandages, he did accept an offer from the accounting firm.
Kudwa was lost for a huge Marine Reserves operation that summer–something he had been planning for months. He also had to recertify as a pilot for American, but in September, when he took the tests, he racked up some of the highest scores in the examinations’ history.
“We both had better-than-average stories to tell on the party circuit,” Kudwa said. “I don’t think I’d recommend acquiring them quite that way, though.”
Notices for the sixth annual 1st Prebyterian climb in ’95 were sent by Swicegood in April.
Son Jeremy Swicegood, 22, a student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and a skilled climber in his own right, would help lead. Making the trip would be fellow repeat climbers Chuck Bunting of Lake Forest, Messervey, Shaw, and, of course, Kudwa and Neumann. First-timers Scott Bermingham of Lake Bluff, Chris Carolin and Ted Rojahn, both of Lake Forest, undeterred by what happened in ’94, signed up.
“When we first got something in the mail, Lydon thought he’d have a conflict, and I joked that I couldn’t believe he would actually go anyway,” Linda Neumann said. “Then I felt kind of bad I said it.
“This would give him a goal for recovery, and I knew he’d go back,” she added. “I knew he’d be triple cautious and, besides, something like this couldn’t happen twice. I didn’t have our affairs in any better order this time than last year.”
Neumann, in lingering pain, had surgery on his knee in December. He was advised by his therapist not to make the trip, but got a yellow light from Hamming. Before each outing on this year’s four-day trip, Neumann got up an hour earlier than everyone else to begin rigorous stretching exercises before donning a brace.
“Obviously we talked a lot about him going back,” Nancy Kudwa said of how the trip was handled in their household. “After all these years in the Marines, Kud’s done some strange things to himself more than once. I didn’t want a repeat performance from last year, but I knew he wanted to go for all the right reasons. He wasn’t going to prove anything. He just liked the guys and the camaraderie.”
Swicegood, bypassing Mt. Hood this year–“Call me superstitious,” he said–made Unicorn Peak in Washington’s Tatoosh Range the first goal.
With rugged Mt. Rainier as a backdrop, this 7,900-foot mountain was a nasty opening test. After several hours of slogging upward through bushes and trees in deep, wet snow, there were long traverses to negotiate along snow-laden canyon walls that stretched for a half-mile or so below.
This brought everyone to the final test: a 200-foot rock wall to the summit that required several tricky moves.
“Like getting back on a horse,” said Neumann, who was among the first to scale his way to the top after hitching his harness to the ropes laid out by the Swicegoods. Several climbers later, Kudwa effortlessly followed Neumann to the top and back.
This was followed by three more days of activity–a climb of nearby Pinnacle Peak, rafting the White Salmon River and rock climbing. Several members of the party ran with 4,000 other runners in the Festival of Roses 5K in Portland on the next-to-last day, and Kudwa finished 47th overall.
But there was one detail that put a final wrap on everything.
Most of the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff residents returned to O’Hare on an early-morning American Airlines flight, and flying the plane was Kudwa, who also captained the flight to Portland for the climbers.
The comeback was complete.
