MOUNT SI, Wash. — A rescue effort Sunday night saved an injured hiker at Mount Si.
The man's ordeal ended just before 8 p.m. Sunday as wet and exhausted search and rescue volunteers carried him to safety.
"It was a difficult rescue," said Derek Newbern with Explorer Search and Rescue. "He had fallen from near the top."
Newbern could not confirm early reports that the 41-year-old hiker had a broken back. But he did confirm the man was conscious, talking and aware of what had happened to him.
The hiker is recovering at Harborview Medical Center.
The man was in a group of about 10 people, many of them tech workers, training to climb Mount Rainier. He had scrambled up nearby Haystack Rock after they summited Mount Si.
He was on his way down when he lost his footing.
"We were all trying to come back," said Srivalli, a hiker. "And there was a small rock that he put his foot on. And then he slipped."
Srivalli was in his group.
"I was two people behind him," she said. "And what I saw that his legs fell up and he slid down the rock."
Officials it was too windy for the rescue helicopter -- so he was rigged up into a rescue litter that sat atop a wheel.
"We wheeled him down the four miles down the trail," said Newbern. "It's a lot of work. We're all volunteers here. We do it because we love it. And we help the (King County) Sheriff's office and certainly help the people who are out who get hurt."
The rescuers said the man was too heavily sedated and in too much pain to talk about his ordeal.
He is expected to survive.
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