Big Four Ice Caves: The Payphone Connection

Last week’s story about a fatal collapse at the Big Four Ice Caves near Verlot, Washington, includes an interesting payphone-related footnote that may have eluded most readers. Not Val Vashon, who has contributed to The Payphone Project a number of times to report Working Payphones in Seattle, Deadphone News from across Washington state, and Payphones Across America.

The Big Four Ice Caves are a popular tourist attraction near the remote Mt. Pilchuck State Park, where cell phone signal does not exist and neither, it seems, do public telephones. As reported by numerous sources it took about 45 minutes for anyone to contact emergency personnel to report the collapse. This is because the first person at the scene who was able to locate a payphone had to drive about 15 miles to find it.

Val Vashon’s account details how the press covering the incident dealt with the same lack of cell phone signal. They went looking for a payphone:

The Verlot Ranger Station is located east of Everett, Washington in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. If you search for Verlot, WA on a map you will find it along the Mountain Loop Highway. On July 7 a woman was killed and several people injured when they were climbing in the nearby Big 4 ice caves, despite posted warnings not to do so.

There is absolutely no cell service at the Verlot Station. It disappears shortly after you leave Granite Falls, about 8 miles to the west.

I was there along with several other local TV crews and also NBC News. I was lucky enough to have a mounted satellite phone in my truck as was the vendor truck that was working for NBC. I saw two TV News people walking around trying to get a signal on their Iridium phones, but everybody else was forced to use the Pay Phone at this location. Both the Verizon phones in the truck as well as the Sprint phone showed “No Service” and I can’t imagine that T-Mobile phones were working out there either.

These photos were taken July 7, 2015 at the Verlot Ranger Station in Washington State. They show an unidentified TV News employee calling back to the facility they work for. There was no other form of communication. They were giving the satellite coordinates of the “pool feed” video that the NBC News camera operator was shooting after being taken to the actual site of the ice caves.

This shows the importance of maintaining the land line and Pay Phone infrastructure. Distance down a rural highway disabled dozens of both simple cell phones and fancy smart phones, leaving a single wired device as the (almost) only remaining means of communications.

We have a 1-800 number to our newsroom, but I wonder how others were able to call out. I lost my “Long Distance Calling Card” years ago.

If reporters on the scene happened to be carrying around jars filled with quarters then they might have been in luck, though the laborious ritual of feeding coins into a payphone might have intruded upon the urgency of the matter. Additionally, if they had credit cards such as Visa or Discover and the relatively arcane knowledge of how to use them to pay for calls from public pay telephones then they should have been able to do so. This is not advised except for full bore emergencies, since credit card calls from payphones can be extremely costly.

If the Ice Caves are to remain open to the public then it might behoove state officials to make an emergency public telephone available. This would not necessarily be a coin- or credit card-fed payphone but a simple dumbphone (perhaps solar-powered) programmed to allow only emergency 911 and certain local calls.

If such phones presently exist at the Ice Caves then as far as I can tell they pass without mention in the press coverage of this incident.