The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 22

  The first attempt ended twenty metres above the party; on the second we flew as fast as an express train over them, although I had chosen the same direction. During the following attempt, shortly before landing, we were caught in the down-current so badly that I had to open full throttle. The huge crevasses came towards us so fast that I believed we were going to crash. At the last moment I managed to pull away. The new turbine had to give its maximum power. I could not consult the confounded T4 instrument any more. This was the moment when I wanted to give up. What was the use of smashing the Alouette and risking our lives? Urs did not say a word, but as a glider pilot he knew what we were up against. We headed towards safety, but after thirty seconds I had to turn back and try once more. Finally, we succeeded in touching the ground with the nose-wheel. Urs opened the sliding door and I shouted at him to keep an eye on the rotor. We were in a cloud of whirling snow. I had to correct the Alouette’s position continually – it was like holding a bucking bronco. The silhouettes of the two men were my only landmark. Snow whirled through the cabin like dust. I was ready to take off at any moment before the rotor hit the snow.

  Now the incredible happened. The two men did not stir. One of them was lying in the snow, secured to a red rope. Both held their heads hidden behind their elbows. The extra blast of the rotor-blades seemed to take their breath away. Urs made signs, I shouted which only served to soothe my nerves; the others could not possibly hear anything, but it helped me. Now one of them looked back – he understood that we could not land. My starboard main wheel was half a metre above ground and the Alouette was bumping. Several times the stick was at the end of its travel. I wanted to take these men on board, fly away, never to return.

  Now one of them dragged the other over the snow to the helicopter. He was crawling like a worm over the ice. He must have been at the end of his tether. I wondered whether the two were tied together with the rope. If one of them was inside the helicopter and I had to take off suddenly, the other one would be left dangling on the rope, a potentially dangerous situation. However, it never came to that. When both men were at the level of the sliding door, outside my field of vision, I felt blinded. Everything around me was white, snow and ice.

  I was left without any landmark at all. I had to take off, called to Urs to check that nobody hung on to the helicopter – and we were away. Like this we would never get anywhere and the only alternative was to fetch a guide to help us. If only all went well! I gave a radio message asking for someone to be ready and flew back to Rosenlaui. There we met Fritz Immer and Peter Winterberger, both guides used to flying. For reasons of balance I only wanted one of them. We shed all unnecessary material in order to be as light as possible. I did not even switch the engine off as I had to turn back at once to rescue the men before the weather made this impossible.

  After starting I managed to warn Fritz Immer over the intercom to hold fast. The wind was as strong as before and snow eddies were whirling everywhere. The gusts from the Wellhorn shook us and I tried to meet them as well as I could. I was caught in an impossible situation where there was no way out; I simply had to carry on.

  After several further attempts I managed to touch down on the ice with the nose-wheel, choosing a blue, half-buried rucksack as a beacon. Fritz Immer jumped on the glacier and now everything happened very swiftly. The younger man almost flew into the cabin, the older one, completely exhausted, was hauled in. Over the radio I could hear Urs’ heavy breathing. Much strength was needed to carry the completely apathetic, almost paralysed man on board. I kept my eyes on the blue rucksack. Whether it was the wind or the moving men which caused my correcting manoeuvres, I did not know. I took off even before the door was shut properly, relieved to have rescued two. But during our descent I started to count: one raised the alarm, his companion is dead, two are on board – where are the remaining three?

  On arrival I needed to stretch my legs and left the Alouette for the first time. My stop-watch recorded sixty-five flight minutes. During this time one flies from Interlaken to Zermatt, round the Matterhorn and back again. Normally our flight would have lasted twenty minutes, but now time was immaterial. I talked to the seventeen-year-old boy, who seemed to me in a reasonably good state. He kept on saying: “Nous sommes sauvés,” (we have been rescued). He had spent two nights in the bivouac on the Dossen. This morning he had returned to the icefall and wanted to accompany the remaining three. However, only one was still alive – the forty-year-old man lying in the back of the helicopter. The woman had died during the first night. Marc, the seventeen-year-old companion, died the following day. Both lay buried under the snow.

  A fourteen-year-old boy was still at the Dossen bivouac. Twenty times at least we flew over this small hut, but there was no sign of anyone. Once more we flew back, Fritz Immer jumped out of the hovering helicopter, ran the fifty metres to the hut and fetched the shivering boy. He dragged him by his belt over the snow. The boy’s legs kept buckling under him. Into the cabin they went and we were off.

  The three unfortunates on the glacier would have needed a further thirty minutes in order to reach the safety of the Dossen bivouac. They were not fully equipped and totally unprepared for a change in the weather. The boy was merely dressed in blue jeans and walking shoes.

  We took the survivors to hospital. The forty-year-old man’s temperature had fallen to 32°C. He was completely exhausted and his will to live at a low ebb, I do not think that he would have lived to see the arrival of the rescue party. Nobody can imagine what he must have gone through; to be helpless at the mercy of a storm for two days and nights; to have to watch one’s wife dying and a cheerful seventeen-year-old collapsing, losing consciousness, never to wake again. It must have been terrible for him to wait and suffer up there, all alone. I am in no position to judge what they did wrong – nobody can do anything about that now.

  Three people died. The guides found the two women later and when the wind had abated, we flew them back. The Rosenlaui glacier is Marc’s grave. Officially, he is considered missing, but he is lying somewhere under the snow and has found his eternal rest in the mountains he loved. It is a sad story: in spite of having rescued several people and done our utmost, we cannot feel very happy.

  On landing after a difficult flight, before we switch the radio off, it’s customary to say thank you to each other over the intercom.

  Avalanche on Beinn a’Bhuird

  Hamish MacInnes

  Scottish hills to the visiting tourist, perhaps blessed with fine weather, may seem serene and gently inviting. Indeed they often are in summer and even in winter when the weather gods smile on these northern latitudes, but in storms they can reveal their Jekyll and Hyde character and be as savage as a rabid dog.

  This tale from the Cairngorms recounts one of the longest avalanche burials which anyone has survived in Britain.

  Visitors to Royal Dee-side generally get the impression that the valley of the Dee is a tranquil place – as indeed it is – while the gently rolling Cairngorms look no more forbidding than a school of slumbering whales. However, three distinct features, weather, altitude and sheer size, can transform those leviathan-like peaks into deadly killers of the unprepared.

  Much of the high ground is over 4,000 feet, but the height is deceptive because the mountains extend over a vast area; here one has much further to walk in order to reach a climbing area than in most other regions of Scotland. The weather is probably the most dangerous single factor. The Cairngorm tops form elevated plateaux whose height and open nature offer little obstruction to the high winds which, in winter especially, sweep in with alarming rapidity. These winds can soon sap a climber’s strength and have a dangerous chilling effect.

  The ferocity of Cairngorm storms has to be experienced to be believed. At the Ptarmigan Restaurant, on the forehead of Cairngorm, wind speeds of 150 mph have been recorded. It is not an exaggeration to say that severe weather in the Cairngorms rivals that found in any part of the world. In a blizzard it is an arctic no-man�
�s-land.

  Ben Macdhui (4,300 feet/1,300 metres) is the highest mountain in this range and, incidentally, the second highest in Britain. It is connected to Cairngorm by a broad plateau which nowhere falls below the 3,600-foot contour. The westerly slopes of Ben Macdhui fall steeply to the Lairig Ghru: this is a pass which connects Spey-side with Dee-side, and it lies between the portals of Braeriach and Cairn Toul on one side and Ben Macdhui on the other. It is twenty-seven miles from Aviemore to Braemar. No accommodation exists for twenty-two miles of this journey other than the odd bothy or barn. One such haven to the traveller, on the Braemar side, is Derry Lodge. For many years this isolated gamekeeper’s cottage was the home of Bob Scott who was head-keeper for Mar Estates. (Mar Lodge then a famous stalking and fishing centre near Braemar, is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland.)

  Bob was a generous character, as free with his fund of tales as with his hospitality. He has been “father” to succeeding generations of young climbers from Aberdeen: such well-known mountaineers as Bill Brooker, Tom Patey and Jim McArtney started their climbing apprenticeship from his hay barn in the shadow of these hills. Bob took his role as guardian of the glen seriously. He felt that, living as he did in that remote yet popular area, he had a certain responsibility towards travellers. On a bad night he used to place a lighted candle in his window as a beacon for belated and lost walkers trudging through the Lairig Ghru down from those featureless tops.

  His candle was lit as usual one wet, autumn night some years ago when, between 1.30 and 2.00 am, there came a knocking at his door. As he jumped out of bed, dressed only in his shirt, he realised that it was a terrible night of rain. It was bouncing like bullets from the roof of his cottage.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted above the cacophony of wind and water.

  “We’re lost,” came a feeble reply.

  “Are ye ladies or men?” asked Bob.

  “Ladies.”

  “Weel, wait there a minute and I’ll put on ma plus-fours,” answered Bob, going back into his bedroom.

  When he opened the door he saw that they were two girls; both appeared in a bad way, shivering, saturated and obviously wishing that they had never heard of the Cairngorms.

  “I carina tak ye into the hoose,” he said in his broad Dee-side accent. “It’s full up. But we’ll go oot tae the bothy and I’ll soon get a fire going for ye.”

  In no time he had a big fire roaring in the bothy and went back to the house for food. After a few minutes he returned.

  “A’ve brought ye half a loaf and a’ve brought ye a bit o’ butter. A’ve got eggs and a’ve got cheese and a’ve got jam,” he added, “Noo, ah don’t think ye’ll starve!”

  One of the girls, who was as pale as plain flour, said, “We’ll have to take our clothes off and there’s no blind on the window.” She pointed up to the solitary pane of glass which rattled in the driving rain.

  “Och, ye don’t need to bother with a thing like that here,” he replied, laughing. “There’s naebody aboot and a’m a married man, ye ken.” Then he gave them two large great-coats which he said they could use to sleep in amongst the hay in the corner. From the doorway, he asked,

  “What time do you want wakened at?”

  “About seven would be fine,” said one of them, shaking water from her flimsy cotton anorak.

  “Goodnight then,” said Bob as he left them.

  In the morning when he went out to wake them up, they were sleeping, as he later recalled, “just like two corpses”. He invited them in to breakfast and over the meal they told him what had happened. They had stayed the previous night at the Youth Hostel at Aviemore. When they asked the warden there whether it was possible for them to cycle through the Lairig Ghru he had told them – probably jokingly – “Sure, people do it every day.” Since the girls came from Birmingham, they assumed that the route over the pass followed a rough road at least. However, as the going became progressively worse they were forced, much to their disgust, to carry the bicycles. Finally they decided to abandon them and continue on foot, intending to return to collect them the following day. But they were caught by darkness and became hopelessly lost. The rain had been growing steadily worse and eventually formed a seemingly unending downpour. At last, when they thought that they could go no further they saw the light in Bob Scott’s window.

  The next day, in better weather, they retraced their steps of the previous night and returned safely to Derry Lodge with their bicycles.

  Not all the tales associated with Derry have such happy endings. Climbing conditions were poor on the 28 December, 1964. Earlier that month snow had covered the tops, crisp and deep but not necessarily even. This had consolidated and formed a good, hard base in the gullies and on the faces. However, about the 27th a fresh fall of snow occurred and the hills were then plastered. But, despite this, the temperature was unusually high for December. It didn’t bode well for climbers. It didn’t bode well for four men, carrying heavy rucksacks. They asked Bob if they could use his bothy for a few days. As usual, he told them that they could stay as long as they liked – provided they kept it clean and tidy.

  “Whit dee ye hope to do, lads?” he asked.

  Robert Burnett, the eldest of the party at twenty-eight, replied, “We hope to do some hill-walking, we’ve got a few days’ holiday.”

  “Weel, watch the gullies just now,” warned Bob, kicking at the snow under his tackety boots. “This stuff is very wet still.”

  Early next morning Bob was over collecting wood from the stick shed close to the bothy when the four lads emerged. The weather, though better, still had a damp, muggy feel about it; there had been no overnight frost.

  “Morning, boys,” he greeted them as they shouldered their rucksacks. He could see that they were well equipped. “heading off?”

  “We’ll just take a walk up Beinn a’Bhuird,” answered Burnett.

  “Ah well, take care then, as I telt ye,” warned Bob. “I dinna like these conditions.”

  “Oh, we’ll be all right,” rejoined one of the others. “It’s an easy climb.”

  They set off for the hill but one of them – he looked the youngest – came running back for something he had forgotten. Bob watched him as he hurriedly departed again to catch up with the others. He never imagined that, within four hours, the lad would be dead.

  That day Bob and one of his gillies were traversing the lower slopes of Beinn a’Bhuird hind shooting. They saw no sign of the four lads, although they must have been descending from the summit while the keepers were on the southern slopes of the mountain. The climbers came off the South Top and were at this time in a gully which had a very big build-up of snow on the true right bank. One of the party, Alister Murray, was slightly to one side of the rest.

  Few mountaineers, even today, take sufficient heed of possible avalanche danger. In 1964, though many climbers had been involved in avalanches, these didn’t receive much publicity. People accepted them fatalistically – largely as an act of God – if they ever thought about them at all, just as they accepted unpredictable stone fall. I don’t suppose it entered the boys’ heads whilst they were walking over the snow cover, that the mass of snow in the gully was poised, only requiring the smallest vibration to trigger an avalanche. Avalanche it did. Starting with a fracture twenty feet wide, then extending across the slope as if severed by an invisible guillotine. It was a classical, wet-snow avalanche, starting initially from a fracture of wind slab.

  Murray managed to keep clear of the main force of the avalanche but his companions were swept away. With considerable presence of mind he noted where he had last seen them and stumbled down the avalanche tip which extended several hundred yards down the gully. There was no sign of his companions but he shouted for them as he descended. The avalanche he judged to be about ten or eleven feet deep. He eventually gave up the search and did the only thing possible; he went down to find help at Mar Lodge. From there, at 5.50 pm, he telephoned Braemar Police Station.

  In Braem
ar PC John Bruce answered the call. There was no organised rescue team in the area; in those days there were just a few locals who would go out in an emergency and evacuate a casualty, even though they themselves were inadequately equipped. Jim Fraser, a quiet-spoken Aberdonian, was then living in Braemar; a few years previously he had started a horn-carving business in the village. As he was a keen hill man, always willing to help, John Bruce went round to see him as soon as he had contacted headquarters. He also told John Duff, the other policeman in Braemar, who had recently arrived there. There was no police Land Rover in the district then, but a local farmer, Mr Pottinger, had one, so John Bruce contacted him to see if he could assist. This small party, with Gordon Fraser, a Mar Lodge gamekeeper, PC Alexander Souter from Ballater and Jock Farquharson, who worked at Mar Lodge, climbed into the vehicle which spun up a rough track to just beyond a wood, close to the bottom of the gully. They considered themselves fortunate that the accident was so accessible; a most unusual occurrence on Cairngorm rescues. Gordon Fraser, the game-keeper, was the most familiar with the area so he acted as guide.

  It wasn’t a bad night, though there was no moon, but the stars gave enough light to allow them to see the outline of the peaks. There were, however, a few black areas in the night sky which indicated clouds and this didn’t suggest any improvement in the weather. They found the bottom of the avalanche tip without much trouble. In those days even the official rescue teams which had already been established in the Highlands had only a vague notion of how to conduct a proper avalanche search. Nevertheless, the Braemar party worked their way up the avalanche tip, probing at random with some long, bamboo poles they had brought along, and about a hundred yards from the bottom of the avalanche they located the first man. They found him by pure chance in their random probing, buried three feet deep in avalanche debris. It was Alex McLeod who at twenty was the youngest member of the group. He was dead.