The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Read online

  On the 11 January, 1800 by the new calendar, but Old Yule according to the reckoning of the time, MacPherson and four other Highlanders went to Gaik, a remote bothy in the Cairngorms, to stalk. There were no witnesses to the catastrophe, other than perhaps a golden eagle or a red deer, when the avalanche thundered over that lonely lodge. The five men were buried and killed.

  It was probably a wet-snow avalanche and it took the lodge apart as if it were made from old orange boxes. When a search party went up to look for the overdue hunters they were flabbergasted at the devastation, but they didn’t have any tools with them to dig down to where the lodge had been, so they returned to Speyside and came back the next day with reinforcements, picks and shovels. They recovered four bodies including that of the Black Officer. The last man had been carried some way by the avalanche and was found much later in the year when the snow melted. The tremendous grinding force of the avalanche had twisted the hunters’ guns which were found in the debris of the building. The accident created a lot of speculation at the time, for the Black Officer was said to to have been a buddy of Auld Nick as well as having other nefarious associations. A predecessor of McGonagall wrote:

  . . . Gashed, torn by the demon, the merciless foe,

  In Gaick lie their corpses deeply swathed in the snow.

  It is said that to be involved in an avalanche is to have one foot in the grave. When I began to take an academic interest in snow structure and avalanches in the early 1960s, I had already fallen foul of three, so I had more than a passing interest in them and, presumably, I already had a foot in three graves. Abiding by the axiom “better late than never”, I read all I could on the subject. Some may wryly point out that as I’ve been engulfed in three more avalanches subsequently, these studies haven’t done me much good! But most of these personal encounters and rapid descents were either in the Himalayas when caught out in bad weather, or on actual rescues on ground where, like a sensible angel, I would normally have feared to tread.

  I resolved, however, to do something constructive about avalanche search in Scotland after looking for a buried climber, Professor Lata, who had been swept down in a small avalanche from the Aonach Eagach Ridge in Glencoe. It was really an apology for an avalanche – a narrow ribbon of snow which had slid down like a stair-runner for a thousand feet. But it was wet snow with virtually no air content. Burial in such liquid porridge, should there be no air trapped between the snow boulders, is fatal. The Professor’s companion got free and fortunately survived. I had my dog with me when we started searching for the buried climber, but in those days we had no dogs trained for avalanche search and when she started to dig enthusiastically at the edge of the debris, which I thought was an unlikely place, I called her away. Next day we found the Professor’s body where the dog had been digging.

  In 1965 the Scottish branch of the British Red Cross sponsored my visit to the Swiss Avalanche Dog Course based near Davos. When I returned I started the Search and Rescue Dog Association and we held the first training course in Glencoe that winter. Though the dogs were to be primarily used for avalanche search, we incorporated in their training summer search technique, for locating people lost on hill and moorland. We had made a start.

  I wasn’t the only person with an interest in snow structure. Eric Langmuir, then the Principal of Glenmore Lodge, a government training centre in the Cairngorms, was engrossed in the subject and later became a leading authority on avalanches in Britain.

  Eric made countless climbers and skiers aware of avalanche danger and also of the fascination of snow in all its varied forms. He invited Milo Vrba, a Czech, to visit Scotland and lecture on the subject. At that time Milo was an avalanche expert with the Czech Government and a member of the Horska Sluzba, their national mountain rescue service.

  I first met Milo when he came to Glencoe to talk to our rescue team and next day he gave us a demonstration on the hills. He surprised us, after he had taken a snow profile, by saying that he considered the snow unstable and dangerous. We were even more surprised next day when we found that he had been right. The snow had avalanched overnight.

  Milo is a stocky man with precise speech and a perpetual twinkle in his eye. We became good friends and later Eric and I visited him in Czechoslovakia. Our whistle-stop tour with the Horska Sluzba included a short stay in the Low Tatra; country not unlike the Cairngorms with rolling hills which seem to invite you to walk them. It winter they are snow-covered and give a feeling of infinite space; in the forests on the lower slopes silence prevails, only broken by the soughing of the pines. The sort of area where one could imagine Good King Wenceslas with foot-weary page hirpling through oxter-deep powder.

  But the sequence of events which Milo now relates are not tranquil. It all started on a day in 1956 when hell broke loose in a thunder like peal.

  The forester walked up and down in the roomy chamber of his old wooden lodge, hands in pockets, gloomy, nervous. Nobody remembered such a relentless snowstorm as this at the beginning of March. Yet there was no sign of any change. On the contrary, it had been getting from bad to worse. It was nearly dark in the room. The snowdrifts more than half covered the small windows and the cloudy daylight hardly got in. The cribs were empty and the deer were hungry. But it was quite impossible to think of going out with food for the poor animals. The best friend of the middle-aged bearded man did not share his master’s troubles. The dog slept quietly in a corner.

  If he could at least have a game of cards with the loggers above. In normal conditions twenty minutes’ walk would take him to their hut and he could have a good time in a warm smoky room with those hard woodsmen, some shuffling, cutting, dealing; others telling stories into the night. Now, only a fool would try to go there.

  Living in such a lonely place was not a simple matter. One must be constantly busy. Inactivity in solitude makes people nervous and quarrelsome. No doubt the loggers above did quarrel, especially at cards, but at least they had a choice. Among twenty people you can always find a new partner either for companionship or for a quarrel. However, to live only with a quarrelsome female under one roof, that’s martyrdom, the forester reflected. No pipe allowed, each microscopic bit of rubbish discussed. Now such a clattering of pots and pans in the kitchen; it gets on one’s nerves.

  The loggers could at least swear at each other, man to man, and give vent to their furies. Twenty lumberjacks have a rich verbal reserve! But there were not twenty today – only nineteen. Jim left yesterday. Did he make it, the forester wondered? Probably, he reached town all right. It must have been difficult, though. If one could but telephone. However, as usual, the wires were broken under heavy icing and snow. The underground telephone cable will probably never be laid. No-one worries about such a forgotten forest lodge in the mountains and who would spend money for twelve kilometres of telephone cable? Certainly not the telephone company.

  Time was dragging terribly. It was only half past nine in the morning.

  There was a deep-throated rumble and the dog suddenly jumped up. It was always afraid of thunderstorms. It was true, though, that long low roar was really strange and there was no lightning. A thunderstorm on the 8th March? It was not usual, he thought, but here, in the Low Tatra of Czechoslovakia, it was not exceptional. We sometimes even have them at Christmas and New Year, so it’s not so surprising, he assured himself.

  The dog showed no inclination to go on sleeping. On the contrary, he grew restless and was obviously frightened. He followed his master step by step as the forester paced the low room, for he too felt uneasy. Finally, he sat down. So did the dog; close to the chair, staring at his master’s face.

  “Did you hear the thunder?” the grey head of the forester’s wife appeared in the half opened door.

  “Yes.” The terse answer indicated that her husband did not feel like talking.

  Nevertheless, the woman continued, “It’s said to be a bad harvest when thunderstorms come so early.”

  Another deep thundering roar; this time stronger
. The old wooden house trembled on its foundations. Still, no lightning, though that thunder must have been very close.

  The dog howled and hid under the bed.

  Darkness fell and a great wind broke tree-tops, some of which fell on to the roof. There was a crash of glass in the loft. Even the forester was taken aback. In order to camouflage his concern he reached for the pipe which was normally strictly forbidden in the room because it produced an awful smell, but now his wife did not take any notice. She only crossed herself and prayed.

  “May be it’s the Last Day,” she said quietly, resigned to what may come.

  “Perhaps Old Nick will take you off to hell,” the forester replied jokingly in an attempt to boost their morale. He wanted to keep his wife in the room. Fear brings people together and they were both frightened. The dog slunk out from beneath the bed to under his master’s legs.

  The forester finally filled his pipe and lit a match. His hand shook. Neither of them could think of anything to say – it seemed as if time had stopped. They were not able to share their anxiety and to express their emotions. They both, however, instinctively felt that something must have happened, something quite terrible.

  Their uncertainty was shattered by a heavy blow on the lodge door. The dog ran to it barking like mad, followed by the forester and his wife. When he opened it, a cloud of whirling snow burst into the passage and a man fell over the doorstep. They drew him in and quickly closed the door.

  It was John, one of the loggers from the hut above. He was covered in blood and dressed only in a torn night-shirt. His bare legs were partially wrapped up in material obviously torn off the shirt. He was now unconscious, having passed out as soon as he fell through the doorway, and had multiple bleeding surface wounds but, at first sight, nothing more serious. They laid him gently on the bed.

  He soon came round and opened his eyes.

  “Tell me, Johnny, what has happened?” the forester asked quietly, but urgently.

  “Explosion . . . There was this great blast . . .” John said with difficulty and closed his eyes again.

  “Take care of him,” the forester ordered his wife, “I’m going up there with the dog!”

  The walk in deep powder snow and through muscle-aching drifts reaching a height of two metres was exhausting for both man and dog. The forester had the advantage as he wore snow-shoes, while the dog’s paws sank deeply into the powder and his master was obliged to help and even carry the poor animal over deep sections.

  The snowstorm permitted only limited visibility – a mere couple of steps and the forester quickly lost any idea of distance and time. It seemed to be an endless white hell. He felt tired and was obliged to have a rest and leant against a tree. Immediately he was alarmed for he realised that it was one of the last trees and beyond nothing but a white emptiness. Where is the forest, he asked himself? Where are the old high spruces? He must have lost the way, he thought. But that was out of the question. He knew the way as well in darkness as in daylight, summer or winter. The forest had simply disappeared!

  He stepped forward like a sleepwalker, having forgotten about his dog. The beast followed, wallowing through the snow masses. Fighting on through the whirling whiteness the forester reached a drift that looked like a swelling wave. Up until now he had sunk deeply into the white cover despite his snow-shoes, now the walking was surprisingly easy. He felt a hard base lightly covered with powder snow. He scraped away that thin surface layer and saw an ice-hard brownish snow beneath, full of stones, earth, twigs and needles. Incredible! What had happened, he wondered? Everything around had changed and now this strange snow! An explosion? What sort of explosion?

  The dog sniffed, barked briefly and ran uphill, quickly disappearing in the whirling snow. The forester followed the dog’s prints and soon he heard the sharp bark that he knew was a sign of some important discovery. Indeed, when he saw the dog it was digging and sniffing the snow.

  When the forester came nearer he shuddered. The dog had uncovered two human bodies buried in the surface snowlayer. He quickly removed the snow from their heads and recognised two of the loggers. They were alive. He shook them and thumped their backs hard. This crude treatment seemed to have the desired effect for they opened their eyes, and stared dully but did not respond to the forester’s questions. The dog did not mind their miserable condition. He jumped, barked, wagged his short tail with joy and licked the cheeks of his good friends.

  The forester praised the dog and was about to tell it to sit when the animal disappeared. It had got a fresh scent. The warning barks changed to friendly ones and in a couple of minutes it returned out of the white snow-screen, jumping cheerfully in front of two men – evidently people it knew. The forester saw it was two young lumberjacks from another forest camp close by.

  It was chance that they had left their mountain hut in a neighbouring forest, for they had run out of food. Taking shelter from the storm on the way back they, too, had been frightened by the “thunder”. They had been heading back to their hut when the forester’s dog scented them. Just as well it did, for its master would not have been able to evacuate the two men who were buried and they would surely have died if left.

  “Hello, Charlie!” the older of the two men addressed the forester, “what the blazes has happened here? It doesn’t make sense. We called at your lodge. Your wife’s crossing herself and talking about Doomsday, John’s lying on the bed bleeding and blabbering something about an explosion and these two blokes here looking as if they have just fallen from the moon. What the hell is going on?”

  “As I see it, lads, a big avalanche must have come down. I’ve never known anything like it. I can’t even imagine how it could be possible in this deep forest and so far from the mountains. But, no doubt, it was an avalanche. And I’m afraid that all the others from the hut must have been buried. You had better get these two to the lodge quickly, in case they are seriously injured.”

  “Right,” said one of the woodsmen. “We’ll take care of these two.”

  “Good. Then I’ll have a quick look round with the dog,” returned Charlie, “to see if there is anyone else to be found. Afterwards I’ll go down to the village to ring for help. Our phone’s out of order, as usual.”

  Though the dog worked well, it didn’t find anything else. Finally it went out of the avalanche cone and sniffed at the base of one of the remaining trees. The forester assumed that the dog had lost interest, so decided to discontinue the search and go down to phone. However, just then the dog barked, calling him.

  “What’s the matter, you old fool?” he spoke to the dog good-naturedly. “You’re outside the avalanche path here.” But nevertheless he unwillingly went over to it, and quickly changed his opinion of his canine friend. The dog was no fool, for under a thin powder layer there were dark red spots of blood in the snow. Not only blood but also traces, shapes, strange impressions: not from bare feet, nor boots, nor snow-shoes. Simply shapeless hollows leading away from the tree, but surely made by a human being not by an animal.

  The dog went on sniffing at the tree. However, he did not lift up his hind leg, as he would have done had another animal left its visiting card, but stood up on his back legs, his fore paws against the tree trunk and continued sniffing. The forester was puzzled because he saw above only broken branches, as on the other remaining trees. However, with careful examination he found hanging from the tree trunk a long drop of freezing congealing blood, almost black in appearance. Looking up again he saw a weird sight: a piece of John’s night-shirt on a broken branch, high above the snow level.

  What on earth had made John climb the tree? he asked himself. He had presumably fallen down from that branch, hurt himself and afterwards crawled downhill, leaving those strange hollow indentations with his knees which he had protected with torn pieces of his night-shirt.

  There were too many unknown factors about this whole tragedy; he must get help urgently. Before noon the forester rushed into the village headman’s house and described t
he situation, whilst still getting his breath.

  “Charlie, I cannot believe that it was an avalanche,” the headman said. “Couldn’t it, after all, have been an explosion as John said? Tell me, have you ever seen or heard from your father or grandfather of an avalanche in the neighbourhood of your lodge? Don’t forget that great barrier of forest separating you from the avalanche slopes higher up! I’m almost sure . . .”

  “You’re quite right, Tom,” Charlie interrupted, “but time is running out. Whether it was an avalanche or an explosion is all the same now. Sixteen people are very likely still buried and another three lie in my lodge, perhaps critically injured. Do something! Telephone for help!”

  “But, I’ve no idea what to do. Who’ve I got to call?”

  “Everyone! Mountain rescue service, police, army, hospital, fire brigades. Simply everyone. The more the better! We need a lot of people, shovels, picks, saws, axes, food, bulldozers and I don’t know what else. They will know. But, for heaven’s sake, make those phone calls, Tom! Every minute is vital.”

  “Yes, I understand, Charlie. But I think you had better do it yourself!”

  That day, in the early afternoon, I received a cable: AVALANCHE ACCIDENT LOW TATRA SOUTH. NINETEEN PEOPLE BURIED. AVALANCHE EXPERT NEEDED. COME PROMPTLY BY AIR-TAXI. CAR WAITING AIRPORT BANSKA BYSTRICA. The cable was signed by Joe, Rescue Chief of the Low Tatra South district. Joe was my good friend.