The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 10
The case was different in 1966 when the evacuation of two young Germans from the West Face of the Dru precipitated one of the greatest rescue operations of its kind in the world, and hit the newspaper headlines with the impact of an international crisis.
The first ascent of the West Face of the Dru in 1952 had opened a new chapter in alpine climbing history, though there had been considerable controversy over the ethics of the first ascent. After ascending two-thirds of the wall, Guido Magnone, Lucien Berardini, Adrien Dagory and Marcel Lainé had to give up due to threatening weather and lack of water. When they returned to continue their assault, instead of going back up by their own ascent line, they took the North Face route to the point where their high point was within a hundred feet. This was frightening territory: blank, featureless rock falling sheer for some 2,000 feet above the base of the couloir. The only possible way to cross this smooth wall was by drilling the rock and inserting expansion bolts. The bolts are still there today, and have provided a providential escape route for climbers trapped on the West Face in bad weather.
Hermann Schriddel and Heinz Ramisch lacked both the experience and the ability to take advantage of this escape route when they joined forces with more enthusiasm than good sense to attempt the West Face in 1966. It was hardly the sort of climb on which to discover the limits of a new climbing partner, and they compounded their folly by failing to realise that the upper part of the mountain was sheathed in ice, something that was obvious even from Chamonix.
Hermann Schriddel, thirty-two, was a motor mechanic from Hanover. He was fit and experienced, though the West Face was by far the most serious climb he had ever contemplated. Heinz Ramisch was a twenty-three-year-old student from Karlsruhe who had recently completed the South Face of the Aiguille du Midi, the peak overlooking Chamonix up which the famous Mont Blanc cable car runs. The fact that this climb had taken him about eleven hours when it is often done in three should have acted as a deterrent to him, for in 1966 the West Face of the Dru was a very serious undertaking.
They bivouacked, as others before them, under the rock at the Rognon de Dru, had an early start and crossed the bergschrund in the couloir at 1.00 am. Their progress was slow and they must have had some trouble in climbing the slabs and terraces which form the initial part of the climb. Here the rock is loose and great care must be exercised.
Fortunately the weather was fine. Conditions, at least low on the face, were good, but when they decided to bivvy for the night they had only reached 10,700 feet (3,260 metres). Next day the weather still held but they were now involved with a different league of difficulty. Hermann had a thirty-foot fall, but didn’t injure himself. The weather was beginning to break, with a build-up of cloud to the south. Once again they decided to bivouac, for the day was well advanced. They had only ascended 350 feet and were now at the bottom of the 295-foot dièdre, one of the great features of the climb. It started to snow.
It was a cold night and their bivouac gear left much to be desired, a duvet jacket each, a simple two-man bivvy bag and waterproof anoraks. The next day the gods smiled on them but perhaps it was a somewhat ironical smile, for had the weather continued bad they would probably have decided to retreat and they could have done so without too much difficulty, but with blue skies they decided to press on. From where they were they couldn’t see the top of the face, which was plastered in ice.
Hermann had his second fall when a piton came out, but Heinz held him, burning and cutting his hands in the process. It took them all day to get to the top of the dièdre. They were both shattered and one wishes they had considered the escape route across the face on the expansion bolts to the North Face. The first bolt was only a few feet above them. However, they decided to bivvy on a minute ledge, which they knew from their route description was out of sight round a bulge. To get to this they had to do a tension traverse across a blank and vertical wall. A fixed rope hangs here and once down and across the slab, there is no way back except by climbing the rope, which is very strenuous and extremely exposed. Once over, they had really crossed their Rubicon.
With the closing of the day – 16 August – the cloud clamped in and their third bivouac on the wall was not a pleasant one, for their duvet jackets were now soaked, and they couldn’t lie down on the ledge as it was minute.
In a dawn of hanging cloud, they made a right traverse on very exposed rock which took them to the base of a 100-foot crack, wide and very difficult. From this pitch there is a sheer fall for over 2,000 feet to the couloir and it is very intimidating. Hermann encountered ice at the top of this section.
At last the penny dropped and the two Germans realised that they were in serious trouble. Once up the next pitch, a crack which snakes up through the overhangs, they had verified what they already knew. The climb above was impossible for them. Fighting one’s way up ice-plastered vertical rock requires skill of a high order. That skill they didn’t have. With their tails metaphorically between their legs they retreated to the tiny ledge on the wrong side of the tension traverse. They were exhausted.
Their friends back in Chamonix, who had been monitoring their progress through gaps in the cloud, were a little concerned when Hermann and Heinz retreated from the overhangs and came to a prolonged halt on that tiny platform, and as soon as they got a prearranged signal from the climbers that they needed help they informed the rescue service. Hermann and Heinz settled into their eyrie, little knowing that they were going to be there for seven days. To make matters worse Heinz had developed a sore throat and couldn’t swallow, while Hermann was in pain with bruised ribs, a legacy of his falls.
With threatening weather, it was decided that a helicopter reconnaissance should be made, for it was assumed that one of them at least must be injured as they hadn’t moved. Though the chopper managed to hover quite close to the pair it was impossible for the crew to ascertain if the climbers were hurt.
Next day, Thursday 18 August, Colonel André Gonnet, Commanding Officer of the Ecole Militaire de Haute Montagne (EMHM), deployed a team of forty alpine troops and guides who reached the Charpoua hut by midday. He had decided to implement the rescue from above using wire rope to get to the two Germans, a distance of 1,000 feet from the top position, 500 feet down the North Face and 500 feet down the West Face, a formidable undertaking. There were others who did not agree with this strategy and they, too, would soon be swinging into action independently. In the meantime, the troops kept advancing up the South Face route, the vote normale, to reach their objective, the Quartz Ledge, which is a couple of rope lengths short of the summit. Here there is a hole through the peak running north and south. Others had stopped en route at prearranged spots, so that a human link could be maintained up this route to expedite the movement of equipment, but there was a great deal of snow above 11,000 feet and this hampered their progress. A further hazard to the alpine troops was electrical discharges, and several of them suffered burns.
It is normal for the media to swing into action in the wake of a big rescue operation. This case was no exception, and as the West Face of the Dru was one of the most formidable climbs in the Alps, the rescue was obviously going to provide good copy for several days. Paris Match, never regarded as sluggish when there is a tragedy in the offing, gave a wide spread to a photograph of the rescue helicopter hovering close to the two Germans huddled on the tiny ledge on that unique expanse of verticality.
Two climbers, one American and one French, were independently worried about the plight of Hermann and Heinz and both decided to do something about it. Rene Desmaison is a French guide with a long history of first ascents, who accurately describes himself as a maverick. Certainly his next adventure, rescuing Hermann and Heinz, was going to add to the controversy connected with him and lead to him being banned from the Company of Chamonix Guides.
On that Thursday afternoon, Gary Hemming was sipping coffee in a Courmayeur café, just across the Italian border from Chamonix, when he picked up a copy of Dauphiné Libéré and read an account of
the plight of the two Germans. He knew the West Face well. In fact, with fellow American Royal Robbins, he had made the first ascent of the American Direct, a line right up the face from the Dru Glacier which avoids going into the deadly couloir. It was an impressive climb. Gary turned to his German companion, Lothar Mauch, and asked if he wanted to come with him to try to rescue Hermann and Heinz by climbing the West Face from the bottom. Lothar was more than willing, so without even finishing their coffee, they set off for Chamonix.
I think perhaps I should say a few words about Gary, who was a bit of a cult figure at the time. Gareth Hemming was born in Pasadena, California in 1933 and, after finding life at San Diego State College boring, he hot-footed it to France, where he began studying philosophy, that subject which can camouflage other motives and interests so effectively.
Like many American climbers of that generation, he lived on a shoestring budget, a mere five dollars a week which his mother sent him, and acquired comprehensive bivouac training, as he slept under the Seine bridges for several winters and generally bummed around. His summer retreat was usually Chamonix where he was easily recognised by his thick long blond hair and six-foot six-inch height. In fact there is an account of a journalist asking him how tall he was and Gary telling him that way back he was only six foot four inches, but during internment by the Japanese in the Pacific war he was stretched as a punishment. After the reporter had dutifully taken note Gary said to him, “No, I’m kidding, I was actually this height at birth”.
He had remarkable looks and a serene expression, yet beneath it I don’t think he had found the elusive Nirvana he was looking for. I met him several times and one couldn’t help being impressed by the man, both as an individual and as a climber. With his thick red pullover and the coloured patches on his trousers he reminded me of an impecunious knight errant.
In Chamonix, Gary called to see Colonel Gonnet and volunteered his services. He had met the colonel before, but in somewhat strained circumstances. Gary had been nominated to attend a special training course for talented climbers at the prestigious Ecole Nationale, but the long-haired American was refused admission unless he got a haircut and removed his beard; Gary did neither, so he didn’t get on the course. However, the colonel wasn’t one to bear grudges. He supplied the tall American with a walkie-talkie and other equipment and wished him “bonne chance”.
After enquiring at a climbing shop as to which top-ranking alpinists were in town, Gary tracked them down and enlisted their help. There was a German called Gehrad, two leading French climbers, François Guillot and Gilles Bodin, and lastly, a friend of mine, Mick Burke. Mick had been on the West Face before, but was forced back from the ninety-metre dièdre, one of the crux pitches, in nasty weather and with an injured companion. They had abseiled right down Gary’s route, the American Direct, a feat which Hermann and Heinz could have done had they been prudent enough. Mick was always willing to help a climber in need and I was later to respect him for this on an attempt to find a colleague who had been buried under séracs in the Everest Icefall.
While the military operation was being consolidated on the Quartz Ledge, high above in atrocious conditions, Gary’s party set off up the couloir at 10.00 am on 19 August. It was about 2.00 pm when they traversed left over a section known as the grey slabs. The weather was deteriorating and they prepared to bivouac on rock ledges there. Over a thousand feet above, Hermann and Heinz resigned themselves to another freezing night. Yet despite their prolonged incarceration, on their prison with one wall, they never lost hope and knew that they would be rescued.
Meanwhile, Rene Desmaison had also taken things into his own hands and landed by helicopter with his friend Vincent Mercie on the Dru Glacier. He had earlier volunteered his services to the Guides Bureau but had been told that the bureau hadn’t been consulted or asked to help, so they rather huffily hadn’t called out any of the guides.
Though conditions were desperate on the summit, it wasn’t exactly a picnic for those at the bottom of the face either. Cloud had a tenacious grip on the Dru and it was raining at the bottom of the couloir. Stones and rocks came whistling past, intent on destruction. Undeterred by these missiles, Rene and Vincent climbed quickly, using a 160-foot-long climbing rope. Higher up, the couloir narrows in a bottleneck and stone fall was so concentrated here that they realised they would never get through unscathed, so reluctantly decided to bivvy for the night. Rain turned to snow then back to rain again and a soggy mist made the gully an eerie place, but the ledge which they had found was reasonably missile-free even though it lacked creature comforts. At least they felt that in the cold of dawn the narrows of the gully would be safer with the rock debris above frozen in place, until the temperature rose.
That day, Gary’s party had seen the chopper coming in and later spied the two figures making their way up the couloir. Everybody on the mountain had had a miserable night, possibly those lower down suffering the worst.
On 20 August the weather hadn’t improved. Visibility wasn’t even the length of the climbing ropes. Rene and Vincent ran the gauntlet of the couloir narrows and they could see Gary’s party, only a hundred feet above them on the ledges where they had lodged for the night. To speed their progress over verglased rock, Gehrad, one of the Germans, dropped Rene a rope. With the addition of the two Frenchmen, the rescue party was now up to eight. It was 9.00 am, and Gary had perhaps optimistically said that they could reach the two trapped Germans in a day. That might have been possible on dry rock, but conditions were abysmal and not going to improve. Rene thought they were moving too slowly so they agreed to have the fastest climbers out front: Gary and François Guillot, followed by Rene and Vincent. The others were to follow, carrying the bulk of the equipment, and caching some of it on the ledges.
So while René and Vincent got a brew going, Gary and François set off. But Gary went off route. Though he had done the much harder American Direct to the left, he hadn’t in fact done the lower part of the West Face route and a couple of pitches up Rene and Vincent caught them up. Gary’s error was soon corrected and he carried on, leading towards the Fissure Vignes, one of the hard sections of the climb.
About this time, 12.00 noon, down in Chamonix another decision was taken. The Ecole Nationale and the Guides Bureau agreed to send a group of top guides and instructors up the North Face of the Dru to try to reach Hermann and Heinz from that side. Now the Germans were being approached by every possible way. The media were having a banquet of drama and they made the most of it with national television coverage and international press saturation. As always in such situations, there are individuals willing to crawl out of the woodwork to pass supercilious judgment, and Rene fell victim to a great deal of this by his act in pre-empting what in fact his organisation, the Guides Bureau, did later.
The North Face party had one of the most dangerous approaches, for they were in direct line of fire from above, where ledges were being excavated in the snow and belays installed. All debris from these operations came right down their route.
The group climbing the West Face weren’t now subjected to objective danger – the huge overhangs above ensured that, but it was still unpleasant and difficult climbing, with icy water running down their sleeves. Even so Gary was laid back and expounded his philosophy of life to an exasperated François.
Higher up on a pitch called the Forty Metre Wall, Rene had a twenty-foot fall when a peg came out, but he was unhurt. The rock on this section is so steep that he fell clear, but it must have been disturbing to peel with such a dramatic backdrop and only air below, for 1,800 feet.
It was dusk by the time Gary had ascended the Jammed Block pitch. This derives its name from a huge chockstone jammed into a very steep chimney. The boulder effectively blocks the chimney and has to be climbed by a thirty-foot overhang. Needless to say the scalp of this huge rock holds snow, as the sun doesn’t reach it. But as temperature rises during the day some does melt and with a night frost, ice forms, sometimes in quantity. That evenin
g it was meltwater which was cascading down, directly on top of the climbers so that they were soaked to the skin. They settled down for the next bivouac there – another uncomfortable night. It was 11.00 pm. They shouted up to the two Germans, who they knew were now quite close, but there was no reply.
That day the weather had been so severe on the summit that virtually nothing was done. The helicopter which was scheduled to transport the winch to the Quartz Ledge party couldn’t fly.
The Hemming/Desmaison party still had 300 feet to go to reach the Germans, but this involved some very hard climbing. Above was the ninety-metre dièdre. It was now 21 August and Gary started up at 6.00 am with François. The cloud had cleared and they hoped their luck was going to change. Alas, this wasn’t to be. Rene and Vincent delayed their departure from the Jammed Block to organise equipment ready to assist the Germans back across the pendulum pitch. Meantime, down below, Mick Burke and the others were busy hauling up ropes and equipment for the abseil down the face.
By the time Rene and Vincent had climbed the dièdre, Gary was moving across the pendulum pitch. He was now very close to Hermann and Heinz. He shouted to them, “I’m coming.” They replied but their call was unintelligible. In a few minutes Gary had reached their ledge, followed quickly by François. It was midday.
Hermann offered Gary a nut. For six days they had been on a starvation ration. Gary dryly mentioned to Desmaison when he arrived that had the Germans been French they would have gobbled all their nuts on the first day.
One is tempted to compare this rescue to spiders converging on a pair of flies. Just at this moment the two separate ropes from the North Face gained a ledge not more than a hundred feet away and slightly higher. Yves Pollet-Villard was in charge of this group and he had direct radio contact with Chamonix. Now developed a discourse on how to dispose of the prey. Yves, as representing the establishment and the official rescue party, was all for taking the two uninjured Germans down the North Face. Rene pointed out that this route was too strenuous for the weak and shattered climbers, and Gary, who had been the first to reach the Germans, was given the casting vote. He advocated abseiling down the West Face. In the meantime, high above, Wolfgang Egle, a young German friend of Hermann and Heinz, somehow got snarled up in his rope while abseiling and was strangled.