Injured BASE jumper saved in daring rescue off Alberta mountain
CBC
First responders in Alberta coordinated a daring rescue on Sunday to save an injured BASE jumper stranded on the side of a Rocky Mountain cliff face, suspended about 200 metres above the earth by only a snagged parachute.
The call came in to Kananaskis Public Safety dispatch shortly before noon. A jumper had gone off a launch on the East End of Rundle, a mountain near Canmore, Alta., but his parachute malfunctioned, said Jeremy Mackenzie, a public safety specialist with the group.
The jumper was seriously injured in the accident, but Mackenzie said he'll survive.
BASE jumping is a sport in which you leap from a fixed object, such as a bridge or building or mountain cliff, with a parachute.
The jumper had leapt from the mountain launch, but when the man deployed his parachute, Mackenzie said it twisted and he was pushed violently into the rock face.
From there, the BASE jumper "basically cartwheeled" a significant distance down the side of a 400-metre cliff.
"His parachute was deployed, but it wasn't really inflated," Mackenzie said.
However, that chute miraculously snagged on a very small rock horn — and that was enough to stop his trajectory downwards, Mackenzie said.
"Essentially, he was stranded about halfway down the face [of the mountain]."
Rescuers eventually managed to reach the jumper, and he was lowered from a ledge into a rescue helicopter and flown to hospital.
Though the jumper had sustained traumatic injuries, emergency responders said they were not life-threatening, and he was in stable condition.
"He was in a lot of pain, had … fractures in his arms and legs," Mackenzie said.
Luckily, the mountain winds were calm on Sunday, and the jumper was with a friend, Mackenzie said.
"They were able to yell back and forth, and the BASE jumper indicated that he felt like he'd broken a leg, and that he was very precariously perched," Mackenzie said.
More than 100 workers at a steel plant in eastern Ontario are being laid off either temporarily or permanently, as a company with facilities in Quebec and Ontario cuts its workforce due to challenging market conditions — including U.S. tariffs.
A small town northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., has become the unlikely home for hundreds of foreign workers, but many may have to leave the community they've embraced after the end of a federal program put in place to fill gaps in Canada's labour market.
There's mixed reaction in Waterloo to an injuction allowing police to detain, arrest and charge anyone who is participating in unsanctioned street parties in that city this weekend.
Diabetes Canada is excited about Prince Edward Island's new pharmacare deal with the federal government, but hopes the province will reevaluate copays on diabetes supplies, says a senior manager with the organization.
After 26 years of accommodating guests from across the world, Faith Embleton says she and her husband Ken are ready to sell their bed and breakfast.
A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology's growing resurgence in popularity.
Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they've learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.
City staff would like Londoners to take a good look around their home and ask themselves a direct and possibly difficult question: Could everyone in your family survive at home, without leaving and with no other help, for a full 72 hours?
Liberal Leader Mark Carney will officially become Canada's next prime minister within a few hours, taking the reins as the country barrels toward a general election and continues to fend off verbal and economic attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Recent cyberattacks in Newfoundland and Labrador should have been a wake up call for the federal government about the reality of an increasingly hostile world, says one cybersecurity expert.
A recent CBC News analysis found that Nova Scotia is rapidly losing some of its most affordable apartments, but housing experts say there are ways to prevent that.
Premier Susan Holt is defending her decision to not use electricity exports to Maine as leverage against U.S. tariffs, arguing the move might cause long-term pain for New Brunswickers.
Montreal's St. Patrick's Day parade first started on Saint-Paul Street in 1824, and a couple centuries later, this annual tradition is still going strong.