Braton Jurasevich was working his way across a rough patch of ice on Mount Hood at 10,300 feet when he spotted the trail of blood. He traced the stains down the slope and noticed a climber lying motionless down the mountain from him. He called 911. A female dispatcher answered, and Jurasevich said he was calling from Mount Hood. “I’m the only one with eyes on the individual right now and I’m still 200 feet above the climber. He is not moving. I’m working my way down on a bad spot. I came across blood. There’s a big blood trail,” he told the dispatcher.
Miha Sumi, 35, had been descending from the summit of Mount Hood with three other climbers when he slipped on the ice at about 10:30 a.m. He fell about 1,000 feet down the slope to his death. Mount Hood is the most visited snow-covered peak in the nation. The dormant volcano draws more than 10,000 climbers per year. But it is also very dangerous. More than 130 climbers have died while trying to climb the mountain. Sumi, an avid climber, had reached the top of the mountain before. One of the other climbers in Sumi’s group, Kimberly Anderson, said when they began their ascent, conditions were “perfect.” But the sun came out and temperatures rose, and the sun loosened the mountain’s rocks and created thick layers of ice. After Sumi’s fall, the others in his group decided to stay in place at 10,500 feet and wait for a rescue team. Jurasevich made his way to Sumi who appeared to still be alive at the time, and for two hours, Jurasevich remained on the phone with the dispatcher as he and other climbers tried to save Sumi, even as rocks cascaded down the slope around them. The stranded climbers — there were seven including Sumi, his three team members, and the climbers who stopped to help him — were rescued at 1 p.m. It took eight hours for all the stranded climbers to descend the mountain.
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