The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 26

  It is not uncommon for parties traversing An Teallach to pitch camp to the east of the mountain as these three friends did, otherwise the traverse would be a long day. Furthermore, they welcomed the solitude of the Highland snows. The scenery alone pays dividends to those prepared to carry a tent into this hinterland. Few places can rival the sheer grandeur of the cirque of An Teallach, while to the north, the horizon is dotted by peak upon peak endowed with such magical names as Cuinneag, Bein Dearg and Cul Beag. Beyond Ullapool on the fringe of the North Atlantic are the Summer Isles, small idyllic jewel-like islands on a romantic sea-board.

  The object of this particular expedition was to go over all the ten tops of the An Teallach range. The first peak of the day was Sail Liath. Ahead, the peaks clustered in a series of icy pinnacles with a great precipice of 1,500 feet falling to Toll an Lochain. On their right they passed the gaping mouth of Constabulary Couloir, first climbed by Dr Tom Patey and members of a police rescue team. Presently the three climbers arrived at the main obstacle on the traverse, the face of Corrag Bhuidhe Buttress, in summer a steep rock face, in winter often plastered in snow and ice.

  It was lunchtime when Iain Ogilvie and his two companions reached the summit of Sgurr Fiona. During the morning they had enjoyed traversing the top of Sail Liath, the four pinnacles of Corrag Bhuidhe and Lord Berkeley’s Seat, a draughty and exposed “armchair” which is a promontory on the ridge. From below this last point an easy snow slope led them to the top of Sgurr Fiona and they realised that the main difficulties were now behind them.

  At this stage, Tommy and Peter decided to miss out a subsidiary summit to the west, Sgurr Creag an Eich. Iain, however, had finished his sandwiches before them and, as he was feeling fit, he decided to take in this top. He asked his friends if they would wait for him and this they agreed to do, Tommy adding, “But if we get cold, we’ll move on slowly and if there’s any difficulty – anywhere that needs a rope – we’ll wait for you.”

  So Iain set off to bag his peak.

  He had covered almost half the distance along the snowplastered ridge to Sgurr Creag an Eich before he looked back and saw that Tommy and Peter already had the rope on and were climbing down the ridge of Sgurr Fiona towards Bidean a’Ghlas Thuill. Since the understanding was that they would wait for him, should the rope be required, he concluded that they must have thought that the rope wasn’t really necessary for someone of his own ability, but that Tommy had thought it prudent to have Peter safeguarded as he wasn’t so experienced.

  As Iain considered this possibility, he turned and looked back again. He could see them quite clearly, silhouetted against the bright northern sky, now drawing slightly nearer as they bypassed a rocky step on the ridge. He stopped to watch them. Neither was moving now and he wondered if they were debating the best line of descent, or were they going to wait there for him? He went on but soon turned round again; for no obvious reason he was feeling distinctly uneasy. To his horror he saw they were both falling, sliding down the steep, hard snow at a high speed, hopelessly out of control. They shot over one low cliff, then over another where the rope caught and they were left hanging on the snow face. There was no movement, no sound, just silence. Iain Ogilvie describes what happened:

  I ran back to the col and put crampons on over my tricouninailed boots. I recalled as I ran that Peter Francis also had crampons and Tommy had nailed boots the same as mine. Once at the col I found that I was at their level, but to reach them involved a long but fairly straightforward traverse of a quarter of a mile over hard snow interspersed with scree patches. On a later visit in summer I found that there was a deer track along this line but, of course, with the snow cover there was no sign of it then. The snow was banked up against the upper cliff on which they hung and it was much steeper than it is in summer. Several jagged rocks protruded from the slope down which they had fallen and I saw, as I approached, that the rope was snagged on one of these, so that they were both hanging from it. The particular projection on which the rope caught was very small and obviously had only a hair-trigger grip. If, I told myself, I could get them onto safer ground, then the most sensible thing to do next would be to go for help.

  There was another vertical drop below them, but about thirty feet away to one side there was a steep tongue of snow and ice leading through the difficult sections below. I couldn’t see to the bottom of it, but I realised that this was the best chance – my only hope of getting them down. This was essential, as I couldn’t leave them where they were to go for help; it would take hours and, though they both appeared to be unconscious, it was just possible that one of them would come round and any movement might have sent them crashing once more down the face.

  All this took only seconds to run through my mind. I quickly cramponed over to where they were hanging and discovered that they both had severe head injuries. With some difficulty I secured their rope where it was already caught. They were tied together with a fifty-foot length of full-weight nylon climbing rope and I had a further 120 feet in my rucksack. I went down to Tommy and tied him on to an end of my rope; as there was no suitable anchor to which I could tie him, I drove my ice axe into the steep slope for a belay. I then cut the rope on which he was hanging so that his weight came on to the ice axe on my rope. I had secured the other rope at the rock spike so that it wouldn’t run free with Peter on the end of it once it was cut.

  I then swung Tommy across the hard snow in a pendulum motion to the top of the tongue of snow – my only hope. Once he was on the correct line of descent, I proceeded to lower him until he was out of sight over a bulge. When all the rope ran out there was still considerable tension on it, so I knew that he hadn’t yet reached the bottom. I had no alternative but to descend the steep slope. Using my crampons, this stretched me to the limit of my capabilities, for I had no ice axe, as it was holding Tommy, and I dared not put any more weight on the rope because the belay wasn’t all that secure. My two friends had lost their ice axes in the fall and the only thing I had in lieu of an axe was a piton hammer. I tried to drive it in above me as I kicked the points of my crampons into the snow. Suddenly, as I was inching down, I slipped and fell over a short rock step of about six feet, landing on my chest on the slope beneath. The snow was still iron hard here and, even as I tried to regain my breath, I knew that it was imperative to stop: otherwise I would be killed. Putting my full body weight on to the head of the piton hammer, so that the short spike bit into the snow, I slowed up and scraped to a halt. I was shaken, bruised, but otherwise uninjured. I had been carrying two rock pitons which I had intended to use to bring Peter down, but these were lost during my fall.

  I worked my way over to where Tommy was hanging at the end of the rope and realised that I would have to secure him before I could go back up to release the rope and get my ice axe. I had with me an ice screw but the surrounding ice wasn’t suitable for it, so I had to jam it into a crack in the rock nearby. I realised that it had only a fifty-fifty chance of holding, but things were getting desperate; risks had to be run.

  I was now able to use the hanging rope as a handrail since Tommy’s weight had been transferred from it to the piton, and I quickly reached my ice axe and descended again without further incident. This time I lowered him a complete rope’s length, using the ice screw as a belay. When the rope was paid out its full length he had reached the foot of the Torridonian Sandstone rock bands and was at the top of another steep snow slope. I climbed down to him and started to cut out a ledge in the hard snow. All this, I later discovered, took a great deal of time, but eventually it was completed and I laid him out on this cold ledge and covered him with most of my clothing.

  I then started back up the slope for Peter. As I removed the rope from the screw at Tommy’s last belay on my way past, the screw actually fell out of the crack and bounced down the slope. I had been right – it wasn’t secure! However, I told myself that this was no time to think of narrow escapes.

  When I reached Peter I suspected that he was already
dead but, having come all this way, I decided to try and lower him down. As I now had both ropes available I could secure him from much further up the slope. Also, I had my axe which made my own position safer, though unfortunately, I had to use the axe again as a belay for the second lower to Tommy’s ledge, because the ice screw had vanished.

  After a lot of hard but uneventful work, I brought him down to Tommy’s level. I knew then that I would have to run the gauntlet once more and descend the treacherous slope without an ice axe. There was no alternative for once more the axe wasn’t safe enough to risk our combined weight.

  The last ten feet down to where Peter hung were at a steep angle. I slipped again. I might have saved myself with my hammer, I suppose, but I tripped on Peter’s body and pitched headlong over it. In seconds I was travelling at an alarmingly high speed. As soon as I tried to dig the hammer pick in, it was snatched from my hands by the force of my fall. I shot down about 500 feet, hitting two rocks sticking out of the snow en route. Fortunately, I stopped before running on to the scree and boulders at the bottom. I was badly bruised and skinned and, as I found out later, I had slipped a disc in my neck.

  By this time it was after 1.00 pm. There was no possibility of getting up again. Even if I had managed to reach them there was nothing more that I could do. The only course left open was to go down for assistance and return with help. I knew also that I must get down for my own survival, as there was no shelter and it promised to be a very cold night. All my warm clothes were covering Tommy. Even the prospect of going for help was a bleak one. I had five miles to travel and 2,000 feet to descend down the rough valley from Coire Mor an Teallach. It was 5.30 pm before I reached a crofthouse at Ardessie, from where I telephoned to Dr Tom Patey in Ullapool.

  As soon as Tom had the message from Iain Ogilvie, he alerted the local police sergeant, Roddie Lovat, who in turn contacted his headquarters in Dingwall. Both Ross and Sutherland Police Rescue Team and the RAF Kinloss team were told of the accident.

  Tom arrived in his Renault at the croft house at 6.30 pm. Meanwhile, Iain Ogilvie had not been idle: he had marked on his map the exact location of the accident.

  Iain had not met Tom before. “My first impressions of Dr Tom were very true of the man. He took my map, listened patiently to me for about half a minute, and then said, ‘If you got yourself all the way down from there on your own, the district nurse can deal with you. I must get up before it’s too dark. Tell the rescue party to follow.’”

  Tom Patey was born in the small township of Ellen in 1932. With the wild Cairngorms as his playground in his early years, he grew up with a high degree of physical fitness which, combined with his natural musical talents, made him the ideal companion for hard, long climbs, followed by nights of song. Tom was a song-writer and a singer who had a magical touch on his accordion. He was involved in quite a number of rescues in north-west Scotland and devoted a considerable amount of his precious spare time in helping to train the local police, for he shared my view that you can’t teach people to rescue on mountains until they have learned to climb.

  Tom set off dressed as usual in a pullover, an old pair of dark trousers, with an anorak tied about his middle, and a great coil of rope slung over his shoulder, grasping his old ice axe. He followed the trail of blood left by Iain Ogilvie. In an hour he had covered the distance – which gives some indication of his fitness – but he had trouble in locating the two men. They were both dead when he found them. It was 8.30 pm as he started to cut steps down the slope for another 500 feet in order to help the other rescuers.

  He saw them coming up the valley below – a small band of figures in red anoraks: the Ross and Sutherland Police team, led by Donnie Smith. As darkness was now close at hand Tom decided that he had better start lowering the bodies, since the police party had only limited experience on snow and ice and he didn’t want any further accidents. Combining the length of his rope with the 170 feet which Iain had left by the bodies, he succeeded in lowering the first corpse. The length of this lower was exactly 500 feet – the distance that Iain had fallen.

  Tom quickly climbed down the face and joined the police as they were strapping Peter’s body to the stretcher. The next day the RAF team recovered the other body.

  Iain Ogilvie was awarded the MBE for his part in the attempted rescue of his friends, while Tom received the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct.

  Not a Place for People

  Pete Sinclair and Al Read

  We were slumming in what must be the most despicable “hotel” in the length of the Andean chain: the place, the Ecuadorian town of Ambato. In the courtyard idle peons whittled wood with keen knives, whilst others played cards with our gaunt, wily deponcho’ed landlord. The game was strategically conducted at the bottom of rickety stairs which led to the balcony from which our room sulked in shadow.

  This cell, for it resembled a cell more than a room, had at one time, perhaps when Pizarro was a breadsnapper, boasted white walls. The remaining plaster bore witness to this. The only furniture was three wooden platforms serving as beds. On these lay Joe Brown, Yvon Chouinard and I. We swotted flies and absorbed the incessant cacophony of the market crowd; assailed by a proliferation of smells which is South America. The other “fixture” in the room was a large rat – it hadn’t moved for ten minutes. It looked me over with a calculating eye from its sanctuary beneath Yvon’s bed.

  We had come to look for treasure and to find emptiness in the Upper Amazon. So far we had discovered flies and had been engulfed by numerous, gregarious, but essentially friendly Ecuadorians – but that is another story.

  “ You know you were asking about that rescue in the Tetons, Hamish.” It was Yvon speaking. I looked up expectantly. He continued, “There’s a guy, Pete Sinclair, who can possibly help you. I think he was involved. He’s a profossor of English now, I’ll give you his address.”

  Well, Pete Sinclair did help. He knew about the rescue all right, he was on it. So was another American climber that I knew, Al Read, who then lived in Kathmandu where he ran Mountain Travel, the trekking organisation.

  Both Pete and Al had done a lot of climbing in the Tetons, the range on the Wyoming-Idaho border; compact mountains rising up to 6,000 feet from an alluvial carpet of river flats interspersed with aspen and cottonwood, a veritable rock candy upthrust, studded with pearly lakes. From both sides of the massif water drains to the great Snake River, which, true to its name wriggles 900 tortuous miles to the Pacific. Early trappers called the three main peaks the Grand, Middle and South Teton – Les Trois Tetons, the three breasts, which makes one speculate on the suggested angular profile of pioneering maidens!

  Unlike those in the bum’s song, these are real peaks, they can be hard, cold and unrelenting. There is snow and the wind does blow in these mountains.

  The back room of the Jenny Lake ranger station served as a country store on stormy days or rest days. The cabin had a stove because in the winter it was used as a patrol cabin; there was also running water. It was a good place to make tea and to talk. Leigh Ortenburger spent quite a bit of his research time there when he was in the valley and since he was our historian, the back room became one of the two storytelling places in the valley. The climbers’ campground was the other one. Once Yosemite climbers started coming to the Tetons to rest from the intensity of the Yosemite walls, the campground and ranger station became the communications hub of American climbing through most of the ’sixties.

  Late in July, 1962, there was one storytelling session going on with Leigh Ortenburger and Dave Dornan in the group. Dave wanted me to work on No Escape Buttress with him. Mount Moran’s south buttresses presented Teton climbers with a chance to do something that resembled Yosemite wall climbing. The easternmost of these buttresses, No Escape Buttress, was the last and most difficult of these problems. I was not in any way prepared for a climb of this difficulty but I had to try. Dornan wanted this climb. He was born in the valley, had been a climbing ranger with me and was now an Exum
Guide. He had accepted the Yosemite challenge. That is, he did not expect to become as good as Chouinard or Robbins but he wanted to be good enough to carry on a conversation with them.

  There were encouraging signs in the heavens as we rowed across Leigh Lake in a rotting plywood skiff, one rowing, one bailing. I had never seen clouds so massive or as black as those which were piling up on the Idaho side of the range. Such clouds in the morning indicated that this was not to be an ordinary storm; we were sure to be stormed off the climb. The prospect pleased me, we’d do a couple of pitches and then go home. That would give me time to psyche myself up for a serious attempt later. As it turned out, I was to be busy for a while.

  In a different part of the range, another climber was discovering that he had backed himself into a commitment which was to prove very serious. Ellis Blade had led a group of nine Appalachian Mountain Club climbers up Teepe’s Snowfield on the Grand Teton. The snowfield is steep though not extreme. But the snowfield had become Blade’s personal Rubicon.

  Dornan was near the top of the first lead when the storm hit us. He rappelled off and we ran for the lake. Crossing the lake in that storm is one of the sillier things I’ve done. Fortunately, the energy of the storm was released in impulses rather than as a sustained force. The wind and rain combined to beat the surface of the lake down instead of lifting it into breaking whitecaps or we would have been in trouble. Dave, chortling because he was no longer a rescuer, remarked that if there was anybody in the mountains, my day was not over. I wasn’t much worried. This storm was severe enough that the most desperate vacationing climber with one day left on his vacation and fifty weeks of being chained to a desk facing him, could not pretend that it was a passing summer shower. It was not only violent, it was cold. There was a smell of the Gulf of Alaska about it. You could tell that an Arctic air mass had penetrated south.