Nepal earthquake: Calgary couple describe harrowing escape from mountainside

Ancient temples brought to their knees. Foreign rescue teams combing great piles of rubble in search of survivors. And funeral pyres burning 24 hours a day as the dead are counted and cremated.

There are a lot shell-shocked faces wandering the streets of Kathmandu, Nepal, as people struggle to make sense of what's happened here.

A young woman from Calgary is one of them. Jacq Warrell and her husband, Cam Dobranski, were married in Nepal just two days before the earthquake hit.

When it did, they say, they had little time to think of anything beyond survival.

When we were calling from the mountain, trying to save our lives, they just put us on hold and gave us an email [address].— Jacq Warrell and Cam Dobranski

"We were at about probably 3,300 metres on the side of the mountain when the quake struck, and we were actually pretty lucky where we were. We watched a lot of rock slides happen around us, and we crawled over rock slides to get out," said Warrell. 

"We've been in refugee camps and watched people die, and it's time to go home."

'We walked, ran, crawled, scrambled'

The pair were hiking in the Langtang region of Nepal, which stretches north of Kathmandu up to the border with Tibet.

"The mountains literally shook," said Dobranski. "It was like Jell-O. You had to lie down."

Five days later, they have made it down from the mountain.

"We walked, ran, crawled, scrambled," they said, until they made it here — to a city they expected to be flattened.

Their time on the mountain was an informational black hole, they said.

They were not impressed with Canada's services for citizens abroad, despite managing to get through to the emergency help line when their cellphone found a signal.

"But when we were calling from the mountain, trying to save our lives, they just put us on hold and gave us an email [address] to email them," they said.  

The consular service is much better now that they're in the city, they said.

"To sit on a mountain and have no information. Everybody's scared. There's people screaming, dying. It's scary," said Dobranski. "We know of four Canadians still out there."

Hard-to-reach areas wait for help

The focus on trekkers in Nepal has so far been on those trapped near or on Mount Everest. But the Calgary pair say there are many hikers — not to mention the local population — stuck in the Langtang Valley.

People from nearby villages helped the couple, offering them food, even though their own homes had been swept away.

The Calgary couple's testimony paints a picture of the devastation wrought by the quake in areas still difficult to access.  

"All the houses are destroyed." said Dobranski of the village they had been staying in. "It looks kind of somewhat normal here. [But] everything where we were is destroyed … every village is destroyed, every house is destroyed or damaged."

The couple had decided to leave Nepal on a commercial flight instead of the military plane offered up by the Canadian government, which will fly citizens to New Delhi. But that flight fell victim to congestion at Kathmandu's tiny airport and was cancelled. So, Wednesday night, along with 96 other passengers of different nationalities, they boarded the C-17 sent by Canada.

How will they remember their wedding?

"Maybe in 10 years for our anniversary, we'll come back and complete the trek," Warrell said.

For now, their thoughts are with those they met on the trail who didn't make it and for the people of Nepal.

"We get to leave, we get to get on a plane and get home … but to think about all the people who are still here and have to deal with the devastation and rebuild … that's hard," Warrell said.