ANCHORAGE (CP) A North Vancouver firefighter may lose fingers to frostbite after he and two other men survived a ferocious storm near the peak Mount Logan in southwest Yukon Canada's highest mountain.

The three experienced mountaineers, all veteran members of the North Shore Search and Rescue team, were slinged to safety by helicopter on Saturday after being trapped at 5,500 metres on Prospectors Col, which forms part of Logan's King Trench route.

During their 48-hour ordeal, temperatures dropped to -30 C.

We're lucky the storm ended when it did or it would have been a different outcome,'' building contractor Don Jardine, 51, said from his hospital bed in Anchorage.

Officials with Kluane National Park received the alert of a climbing team in trouble at 9:35 Friday morning, through radio contact with another team who'd been in touch by radio with the troubled climbers.

Altogether, 24 personnel from the Kluane park and Alaska took part in the operation, involving five helicopters, including a high-altitude Llama provided by the Denali National Park that was used to short-line Jardine and his two colleagues off the mountain.

Park warden Terry Skjonsberg said the Llama made three trips to the 5,500-metre elavation. Each time, it hovered above the pick-up location while the three climbers took turns securing themselves in the harness for the 10 to 15 minute flight off the mountain, dangling 30 metres below the chopper.

The three men were flown to a base camp at confluence of the Ogilvie and Logan glaciers, at the 1,830-metre elevation. They were then transported by a large Pavehawk helicopter to Anchorage.

Officials with Kluane explained today the decision to send the three to Anchorage was based on the abundance of experience the Anchorage Hospital has in treating frostbite, and the Pavehawk was going that way to begin with.

Such was the ferociousness of the storm that not all of the three who remained trapped on Prospector's Col were convinced everything would be OK in the end.

As more than 100 kilometre-an-hour winds raged and more than a metre of snow fell on the shivering trio, Jardine wrote a note to his family.

He said he wanted to say goodbye to his wife, Jane, daughter, Kate, 20, and son, Jeff, 18, to tell them he thought the world of them.''

Jardine set out May 7 for Mount Logan's summit along with six others from B.C.

It began well. Barry Mason made the 5,959-metre peak and three others topped the secondary summit.

It wasn't until the descent, when Jardine and two others were surmounting an exposed ridge last Wednesday evening, that the storm struck.

We were in the worst place you could be when it hit,'' Jardine said.

You couldn't see a thing. It was just coming at you from everywhere.''

Jardine, along with 40-year-old North Vancouver firefighter Erik Bjarnason and 45-year-old ambulance paramedic Alex Snigurowicz, put up their tent and secured it with ice screws.

Snigurowicz said he would likely spend three more days in hospital.

Unlike Jardine, Snigurowicz was confident the three would be rescued because they were prepared with radio equipment.

At the worst, I thought we'd just lose some toes or something like that but for me it's OK and so is it for Don but Eric's hands are a bit of a problem,'' he said.

A hospital spokesperson could not confirm whether Bjarnason would lose some of his fingers.

Roaring blasts of wind pummeled the tent all night, at times so powerfully that the 175-pound Jardine, sitting by the tent's edge, was lifted right up.

Bjarnason lost his overmitts leaving his hands exposed for the three days.

When the storm began tearing the tent apart around noon last Thursday, Jardine and Snigurowicz left the shelter to dig a snow cave. Bjarnason, his already-frostbitten fingers of no use in digging, remained inside.

Without the weight of the two other men, the tent flipped despite Bjarnason's 240 pounds.

His companions hauled him out and the wind sucked the tent away, along with a sleeping bag, both shovels, their stove and a pack.

With Bjarnason wrapped in his sleeping bag and propped on skis and a foam pad in a rock niche, Jardine and Snigurowicz spent six hours digging and scraping with a pot lid and ice axe to make the cave.

When your life depends on it, you just work as hard as you can,'' Jardine said.

Kluane park spokeswoman Rhonda Markel said a team of two climbers went to the assistance of the three and were able to assist with providing shelter and reassurance. They provided crucial assistance at a crucial time, Markel emphasized. The two are currently descending the mountain.

'The group was very well experienced, and they were well prepared,' she said of the rescue workers from the North Shore. 'It is just when you are in an environment like Mount Logan, there is a lot of inherent risk.'

Markel said there are 16 groups involving 42 climbers on Mount Logan right now.

The search and rescue expenses are not billed back to the climbers, and the cost of the rescue will be paid by the federal government, she said.

The climbers' plight attracted media interest across Canada over the weekend.

The Star's Chuck Tobin contributed to this story.