Strapped well into my seat and trying to catch instructions coming via radio into the flight helmet I'd been loaned, I meant to keep my mind on helping the pilot find a safe place to put us in. It was too easy to just stare at the crazy crevasses and steep slopes we were going to have to battle, too easy also to get hypnotized watching the big north wall of Rainier and its hanging glaciers, wondering just how long they were going to hang.

Avalanches had cut the sensible landing sites down to precious few where we needed to go: somewhere in between the piles of ice debris and the sure hazard of rockfall from "Lib Ridge," and its bergschrund. Within that limited space, there were a few flat spots, but I wanted to avoid those. Flat places on a tilted glacier are often crevasse bridges of unknown strength. It took some time to settle on the next best spot for a helicopter to set down. As it turned out, that spot didn't work out so great.

The pilot worked carefully to set the ship down facing into the mountain on the sloping glacier surface, and the tail came slowly down to match the slope. But then, for some reason, it continued to go down a bit more. Just as I was wondering what that reason was and how much room the tail rotor still had, my thoughts were rudely and violently interrupted. WHAP, WHAP, WHAP, THUD, THUD, WHUD, THAP!!!!! And we shot up into the air. Just how far, I can't tell you. Some said it was no more than 20 feet. I thought it was a mile or two, but I wasn't looking out the windows then.

I had been watching the pilot and I guess I kept looking at his hand on the stick during that surprisingly steady rise without a tail rotor. But when I felt the ship starting to shake and spin, I didn't like seeing his hand wrestling with that collective anymore. I believe I looked straight ahead then to see my life flash before my eyes. But the flash was selective, it wasn't my whole life at all, just the parts that involved drunken binges and nausea.

We didn't spin very long and it wasn't "spinning" like a gyroscope, more like a bucking bronco. The guys up at the rockfall injury watched us go around perhaps three times. I just remember a whole lot of my face piling up with centrifugal force against the inside of my helmet before we crashed hard.

That was one of those "moments" that goes on for a lifetime. There was the feeling of being thrown hard against the safety straps that were biting into my shoulders, all the muscles in my neck and back straining in an instant of arrested momentum. There was the snow of the glacial surface exploding through the Plexiglas that had been at my feet, depositing about 40 pounds of the Carbon Glacier around my boots and legs. There was my sure sense that some big sharp metal parts were going to intrude on my flesh before the moment was over, a certainty that we were just going to go BOOOOM in a big flash and cloud of burning fuel and Gore-Tex. But in that same particular moment was the quick stillness and the flood of relief in being alive and whole.

— Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Columnist