The Goodness of People: Rob Weisbaum and Erik Forsythe

Posted by Timothy Krause on

Rob Weisbaum has never forgotten how lucky he is to be alive, and that thought galvanizes his sense of duty. In his early twenties, he was making his second skydiving jump out of a plane near his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. During the jump he miscalculated a turn, starting it too low, and slammed into the ground at sixty miles per hour, shattering both legs. His feet were literally turned backwards by the impact, splintered bones protruding through his skin.

His dad, Jerry, was initially unfazed when he received news of Rob’s accident. Rob had been an adrenalin junkie all his life, played hockey, and was an extreme skier. His dad had seen nearly every kind of injury that could happen to his son. It wasn’t until the trauma doctor at the University of Michigan hospital said bluntly, “Jerry, it’s really bad,” that he realized this one was serious. Rob was fortunate to be alive.

When the same doctor explained to Rob he would never walk again the news changed the course of Rob’s life. The experience of his first ever ride on a CareFlight­–this one as a patient–had captivated him. He was so enthralled by the way the flight medics had worked with him, the ominous prognosis only flamed his motivation to prove the doctor wrong. More than anything, Rob knew he wanted to become a CareFlight medic.

The idea of being involved in emergency rescue services was not new to Rob. As a young boy growing up in suburban Detroit, he wanted to be a firefighter, similar to many other boys his age. But unlike most of the other boys, the idea did not fade as he grew older. When he was eighteen, he bravely strolled into a fire station situated just down the street from his house to ask them what he needed to do to become a fireman. “Get an Emergency Medical Technician’s license first,” they said–which he did. By the time he earned his license he had completely fallen in love with the field, and he continued his training to become a full paramedic. Ultimately, though, he thought, “I want to be a leader somehow–not a follower.”

After the sky diving accident, Rob endured a frustrating year of surgeries and grueling physical therapy. Remaining determined throughout, not only did he learn to walk again, he also met his goal to become a licensed flight medic. He was working for a flight rescue operation in Arizona when he saw a posting for a new job with CareFlight. He applied and was hired in 2009 to become the leader, not the follower, of a brand new CareFlight operation in Montrose, Colorado. Only a week after starting the job, he already had secured a helicopter, hired a nurse and a pilot, and was looking for additional support personnel.

Almost three years later, Rob’s good friend Erik Forsythe was newly appointed as Emergency Medical Services Chief at Gunnison Hospital, a role he had taken after retiring from a 19-year career as a ski patroller in Crested Butte.  Coincidentally, like Rob, Erik was also from Michigan, but the two had never met before working together in Colorado.

Erik Forsythe and the Colorado mountains had met each other, though, when he was twelve years old, on a family vacation. And, it was love at first sight. Back in Ann Arbor, Michigan, his heart was never again far from the wilderness and the mountains. Describing himself as a late bloomer in sports, he says he “took an unsuccessful shot at playing football” in the ninth grade, finally turning to track and specializing in the pole vault through high school. While he was good at pole vaulting, he still remained heavily involved in the Boy Scouts and spent most weekends camping or skiing.

Erik could easily have followed his father, who was a successful second-generation attorney, into the family business. Instead, as soon as high school was finished, Erik followed his heart to the Colorado mountains without any clear notion of what he wanted to do once he got there. He eventually landed at Colorado University in Boulder where he says he “hacked” his education, spending two painful years as an economics major. He dropped out of CU to concentrate on becoming a ski patroller.

Then a new degree program at CU in environmental conservation caught his eye. The structure of the program would afford him the flexibility to go to school in the summer and take the winters off to follow his passion for skiing. He returned to CU to complete his degree while still working toward his license as an Emergency Medical Technician, a requirement for ski patrollers. After college, armed with a degree in environmental conservation and his EMT license, he began to expand his expertise in wilderness rescue.

Today, Erik is recognized worldwide for his expertise in wilderness rescue as a member the Wilderness Medical Collateral Associates, an international group dedicated to specialized wilderness medical training. He continues to travel across the US and around the world teaching the specialized techniques involved in wilderness rescue.

A particular piece of that teaching curriculum guided him on the afternoon of September 17, 2017 when he fielded a 9-1-1 call about an injured mountain biker on Doctor Park Trail. “Most EMT training is designed around metropolitan ambulance services, where you are always a relatively short distance from a hospital,” he explained. “No matter how bad it is, you get them into an ambulance and take them to the nearest hospital. But in wilderness rescue you have to make some big decisions based on the complexity of the situation which can make life and death differences.”

His immediate decision to bring Rob Weisbaum into the rescue operation may have made that kind of difference. Having made the call to Rob, Erik raced to spearhead the mission and join the rescue party on Doctor Park Trail. After reaching Theo and triaging his injury, he began exchanging text messages with Rob, who was already in range in the helicopter but was desperately trying to identify a suitable landing spot.

It became clear that Erik, at the bottom of a ravine in the forest, was in no position to direct the pilot to an appropriate landing site, which would have been their normal protocol. Erik and Rob agreed, finally, that the pilot would break convention and find his own landing space. The rescue team, then, carried Theo down the trail to start, then followed the sound of the rotors up the side of the ravine to the landing site to deliver him into Rob’s care.

When Erik looks back on Theo’s rescue, what makes him most proud is the way the multiple agencies worked as a team. “We just worked together, and we problem solved,” Erik told me. “By doing that, I think we saved Theo four or five hours in the time it took to get him to a surgeon.”

As the helicopter lifted off and headed towards Grand Junction, Rob looked down at Theo lying on the deck beneath him, and his memory flashed briefly back to that very first CareFlight. He understood exactly how Theo felt. Rob encouraged him to hope for the best, telling him that often things turn out to be completely different than what was presenting, and proclaimed, “Theo, let’s just do it.” Rob knew what he was talking about.

To learn more about Theo’s extraordinary rescue and recovery, buy the book, FINDING THEO: A Father’s True Story of Loss, Courage, and Discovery

The Goodness of People: Farid Tabaian

Posted by Timothy Krause on

Tuesday, September 17, 2013 was shaping up to be special. After all, it was Farid Tabaian’s thirty-third birthday. He was living in the mountains, and he intended to honor his mother’s advice. A native son of Colorado, born and raised in Boulder, Farid was particularly close to his mother.

She met Farid’s father at Northwestern University, after he immigrated from Iran, escaping the country’s 1979 Revolution, to attend college. The two later moved to Boulder, where Farid’s father earned a PhD in linguistics at the University of Colorado and then spent a long career in manufacturing. Farid’s mother, a teacher, became a Montessori school director.

Farid’s voice softens, though, when he speaks about his mother. “Any time we talked about what I should do in life,” he said, “her advice was always simply: ‘Follow your passion and do what you like.’” Never sure what that meant for him, Farid cruised through high school without any particular focus. He decided to attend the University of Colorado mostly because it was near home and the mountains he loved.

Growing up, he was always that kid in the car navigating and holding a map on family vacations. He had first been introduced to cartography through a high school geography teacher who piqued Farid’s interest in maps. But Farid didn’t fully connect with making maps as a vocation until he registered for a couple of geography courses at the University of Colorado–just because it sounded kind of interesting. “I stumbled upon a world there,” he recalled, “that I never knew existed.”

Jim Robb, who became Farid’s mentor, was the director of the cartography lab, and he encouraged Farid to consider the field as a profession. “I got to college,” Farid said, “and discovered you could learn to make maps and make a living from it. And I fell in love with it.” He took a corporate job for a few years after graduating with a degree in Cartography in 2003 making maps of the U.S. power line grid.

The job helped develop his skill, but Farid grew tired of the big company environment. He preferred being outdoors and craved having more time to ride. He just wasn’t sure how to do that and still make a living. When his mother became ill, finally succumbing to cancer at the young age of sixty-four, he began to understand what she truly meant with her advice: “You have to work, but you have to enjoy life too.”

By the time Farid lost his mother in 2010, he had left the safety net of corporate life and had found his way to Salida, Colorado to start his own business making maps for mountain bikers. He specialized in small sized water proof, tear proof, fold proof and what he likes to call “fool proof” Colorado mountain biking trail maps that he sells only through locally owned stores or his website, where he also dispenses advice, news and facilitates discussion forums. Farid is meticulous in his work, usually taking four to six months to finish a map project. Rarely satisfied, he considers his first map, the one of Durango, to be his best.

His mother’s words of advice echoing in his memory, Farid planned to take the day off on his birthday to ride the Monarch Crest trail, near his home in Salida.  A shuttle bus would drop him off for a 6,000-foot descent through some of Colorado’s best scenery.  Undeterred by news his brother couldn’t make the trip with him, Farid called anyway to reserve his seat on the shuttle bus for the next morning. But he ran into a generally uncooperative reservation agent. The call ended unceremoniously and without a reservation for Farid.

Unwilling to let the experience sour the mood, he decided to scuttle the Monarch Crest ride in favor of another trip down Doctor Park Trail.  He had ridden Doctor Park dozens of times before, but it was still his favorite, and he wasn’t going to waste what promised to be a “chamber of commerce” fall day.

Farid packed his gear and bike into his van, followed the familiar hour-long highway west to Gunnison, turned north on the Gunnison National Forest road winding along the Taylor River, and made camp. He slept in the van at the North Bank Campground, just at the end of Doctor Park Trail where he would finish the next day.

The next morning, he set off on the road to the trail-head on his mountain bike as he had done so many times before. But on this day, he came upon a group of four women who had spent the night at Taylor Canyon campground, just a half mile down the road. They were attractive, looked interesting, and he was single. “Happy birthday to me,” he thought to himself, and he stopped to say hello. Farid was easy to look at himself, so the ladies took notice as he slowed to a stop next to their campsite. He stands a little over six feet, is mountain bike fit, and sports a black, perennial three-day beard. His dark, Persian eyes add a shadow of mystery to his laid-back demeanor behind an easy smile.

The women told him they were from Switzerland, vacationing together for a couple of weeks. The women had never been to the Crested Butte area but heard it was a required destination for avid mountain bikers. Farid mentioned he was in the trail map business, and when they quizzed him on recommendations for their trip, he gave them one of his popular water proof pocket maps of Crested Butte mountain biking trails.

Intent on riding alone at his own pace since it was his birthday, Farid was anxious to get on the trail. He parted ways with the group, but not before exchanging contact information and agreeing to meet up for dinner later that night.  But they did encounter each other at least one more time, at a resting point about half way up the trail, at the end of a very steep and technical section. As they chatted and absorbed the scenery, four young men came blasting up the hill one by one and paused at the same spot to catch their breath and exchange a few pleasantries before moving on.

Farid soon followed, and he was cruising through the same cool forest air shaded by an aspen grove and the steep embankments of a deep gulch, when he came upon a figure lying motionless on his side near two aspen trees just where the trail takes an awkward turn. He intuitively knew something was very, very wrong and jumped off his bike to ask the fallen rider, “Hey man, are you ok?”

And then, Farid decided to help. “I just knew we needed to get people in there as quickly as possible,” he explained. “I am a map maker, and I know that area very well. It’s a narrow gulch where he was–very hard to reach, twenty miles from the nearest town, and there was no cell phone service.  But I knew I had service at the top of the trail.  So, I knew the best was to hoof up the hillside as far as I could go. I Called 9-1-1 probably ten times until I could connect.  I was running on pure adrenaline, breathing so hard, because that hill was extremely steep.”

***

Find out more by visiting www.findingtheo.comor buy the book Finding Theo: A Father’s True Story of Loss, Courage, and Discoveryanywhere books are sold, and check out Farid Tabaian’s website at www.singltrackmaps.com.