In addition to answering questions about the throne speech in the Manitoba legislature Tuesday, Premier Brian Pallister recounted the hiking trip that resulted in him being the subject of a search and rescue effort.
READ MORE: Premier Brian Pallister broke arm while on solo hike in New Mexico
Pallister described the adventure as a wilderness hike in New Mexico that he and his wife had thoroughly researched, just as they had with previous trips.
“We had researched the trek – we’ve hiked thousands of kilometres together.”
He said they asked local hiking enthusiasts and that was one that had been highly recommended. “Unfortunately the guy we talked to hadn’t hiked it for a couple of years so he wasn’t aware of the lack of maintenance on the trail, but you go blind all the time, stuff can happen. Not a lot of trails tougher than this one as it turned out. They had had fires, and they had some flooding as well. There were trees down over the trail. The trail hadn’t been cleared – we weren’t made aware of that,” he said.
Pallister described the trek as a shuttle hike, where one person starts at one of the trail and the other starts at the opposite end.
“I dropped Esther off on the north-end, I go to the south end… we are going to meet and high-five each other and maybe have some trail mix,” he said. “We allocated for approximately 2.2 miles per hour. And we were going about, well she was going slower than I do normally, so she gets dropped off first… long story short we fell behind on schedule and I ran out of light.”
That’s when what he described as a relatively demanding hike became more demanding. He said he fell a couple of dozen times, ran into barbed wire and cacti, to which he credits his 70 or so lacerations. But the real injuries came at the end of trail.
READ MORE: Premier Brian Pallister answers staffer questions about injury
He saw the spotlight and made his way toward it. He couldn’t see more than two metres in front of him. Pallister said he screamed when he saw the spot light because he knew he’d been found. Unfortunately the officer shone the light directly on him, blinding him. He worked his way toward the light and hit a barbed wire fence. He climbed over it and within steps started to slide down an embankment. As he slid, he tried to stop the fall which is when he broke his arm.
Pallister made a point of correcting previous reports that he suffered a compound fracture in which a broken bone breaks the skin. Instead, he has a complex fracture in his humorous bone. He has been advised to rest and take pain medication but doesn’t expect he will need surgery. He said he will be going for more tests on his knee and also has bruised ribs. Pallister spent two days in hospital.
Pallister gave strong praise to his wife Esther for her actions.
“She had her cell phone, which had a flashlight. We were probably less than a mile apart, but I didn’t know it”.
Pallister said when his wife completed the trek and got to the car, she waited for him for as short time and then called dispatch at State police for help. She gave explicit directions, but it took three attempts for dispatch to get the directions right. State police arrived about an hour later with two cars. One went to either end of the trail.
When asked if he would ever go hiking again, “absolutely, no trail beats me. I’m going back,” Pallister said.
The final word on the holiday was that he had had better.
“We had a chance to get away for four days and we had one and a half. All in all, 2017 has been a pretty sh—y year for vacations for me and my wife,” Pallister said.
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