Briton forced to abandon girlfriend to die in blizzard

A more painful decision is difficult to imagine. Marooned in the frozen canyonlands of southern Utah, George Metcalfe and his girlfriend Rachel Crowley had hiked through snowdrifts for nearly 24 hours dressed only in jeans, sweatshirts and casual shoes. Then she collapsed with exhaustion and he faced a choice that could kill one or both of them – or save them. Should he stay with her, or continue alone in search of help?

"I didn't want to leave her," Mr Metcalfe said yesterday from hospital in Utah, where he was suffering from dehydration, exhaustion, hypothermia and suspected frostbite. "I wanted to stay with her, but Rachel said our only hope was if someone went for help. She kept saying 'You've got to go'."

He did – and she died.

The couple had realised that nobody would find them; they barely knew themselves where they were. On a whim, they had travelled from Las Vegas in the Nevada desert to Utah's Grand Staircase National Monument, one of America's most beautiful – but rugged and unforgiving – park areas.

"There's no entrance gate; it's always open," said the park's recreation management office yesterday. "Nobody would know that you'd gone in."

In their hired Jeep, the two drove further into the park, passing the town of Henrieville and then going deeper into the winding ridges along the high mound-like formations that typify the park's northern area. In the summer, it is a desert; but in the winter, temperatures plummet and snow falls suddenly and thickly.

On Wednesday of last week – Mr Metcalfe's 27th birthday – the snow began, turning the ridges into quagmires. The car bogged down on a two-track road, and the car was soon half-buried in snow at a point known as Death Ridge. It was 4C (39F) by day, minus 6C by night.

Ms Crowley was an unusual American in that she had travelled widely in Europe, South Africa, the Caribbean and Mexico. She had decided already that she did not want to spend another winter in the US; instead she was to come with Mr Metcalfe to live in Europe. Her friends called her "a ball of energy". Besides working in a nursery, she had a second job with Delta Airlines for the perk of cheap flights, such was her love of travel. Mr Metcalfe was taking a holiday before beginning a new job in financial services; it was due to start on the following Monday.

But now they were going nowhere, and time was passing. "The worst part was waiting to die and not knowing what to do until we did," he said.

"We both thought we would die there in the Jeep as no one had come to rescue us, and we wanted it to happen there and then. We were stuck in the Jeep and all we had to eat was a packet of Skittles [sugar-coated chocolate sweets] and some sunflower seeds. We kept refilling our water bottle with ice to drink, but the worst part was the cold."

In their inadequate clothes, the idea of leaving the car looked insane. It was their only refuge. "We would turn the car engine on every one and a half hours for ten minutes to keep warm, and at night-time we turned it on every hour as it was so much colder," Mr Metcalfe said. They stayed there for two days.

Last Saturday – 28 February – was Ms Crowley's 26th birthday (she was actually born on the 29th). They had planned to be celebrating back in London with flatmates, amidst warmth and friendly faces, laughing and dancing. Instead they were starving, freezing and uncertain what to do. Then the petrol ran out. "We knew we could either freeze to death in the Jeep or go for it," recalled Mr Metcalfe. And so they set off on Saturday afternoon, hoping to hike back to Henrieville, roughly 20 miles distant.

They made it part of the way, sleeping under a tree on Saturday night. But on Sunday Ms Crowley collapsed. She implored him to carry on. He agonised over the dilemma, and tried to compensate by leaving her with a chocolate dissolved in water; but she was too weak to drink it. He dithered. Ms Crowley said: "There's no point both of us dying."

And so on Sunday afternoon Mr Metcalfe faced his worst dilemma – and made his choice. He left her and continued walking. They had travelled about four miles from their car.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, his friends grew concerned when he was not on the Friday flight back from Boston. They had gone to meet him at Heathrow but been told by British Airways that he was "definitely" on the flight.

When he didn't arrive for his birthday party on the Saturday evening they contacted the police, who broke into his flat on Sunday and found his credit card details. They checked and found his cards had not been used since the previous Wednesday, which was unusual for someone travelling in the US. By 10pm GMT – 2pm Utah time – they had alerted the authorities in the United States, but nobody knew where to start looking. They weren't at Ms Crowley's family home in Massachusetts, and they weren't in Las Vegas.

It was probably at exactly this time that Rachel finally weakened and the pair split up.

Vance and Shanon Pollock, a father and son, are ranchers in the area. On Monday morning they were out looking for stray sheep, wrapped up and carving through the snow on their four-wheel all-terrain vehicle. Instead they saw a man, staggering towards them, still sunburnt from the Nevada sunshine he had enjoyed just a few days before, wearing only a jacket, a sweatshirt, trousers soaked through from the snow, and "Oxford shoes like you go to work in", as Shanon put it. "From the sound of his voice and the look in his eye, you could tell he was struggling."

It was Mr Metcalfe, who had now walked a further 11 miles. Despite his exhausted state, he managed to tell them about Ms Crowley. "She was the first thing on his mind," said Shanon. Vance drove Mr Metcalfe back and raised the alarm; Shanon headed in the direction that Mr Metcalfe had come to see if he could find the missing woman. Than Cooper, the Garfield County sheriff, called out a helicopter to help the search, because the roads that Mr Metcalfe had hiked were still covered in a metre of snow. And finally on Monday they found Ms Crowley – but she was dead.

"[Mr Metcalfe] made a valiant effort, but he couldn't make it in time to help her," Sheriff Cooper said. "He would not have made it a heck of a lot further."

Ms Crowley's mother talked to Mr Metcalfe by phone earlier this week. "He's distraught," she said. "He didn't want to leave her. I think it took a lot of convincing on Rachel's part. He wishes he would have been the one not to survive."

One question lingered yesterday: if they had left the car sooner, might Ms Crowley have been stronger and perhaps survived the harsh conditions to reach Henrieville or some other shelter?

When Shanon Pollock and his father visited the hospital on the Monday evening, Mr Metcalfe asked him: had he taken the right decision?

Shanon considered it briefly. "I told him that in this land there are many decisions to be made and that he made the right one," he said. "That what happened wasn't his fault."