The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Read online

  I looked forward to a few quiet days in the ranger station as Dave and I walked and hitch-hiked back to Jenny Lake. The climbers would be out of the mountains and the campers would be heading for motels or the desert. The back of the ranger station would be warm, full of climbers drinking tea. The guides would be in, looking at our photographs of the peaks, planning one more climb, swapping stories.

  When we got to the ranger station I was told that the other ranger on duty, George Kelly, had been sent out to check on an overdue party of ten from the Appalachian Mountain Club. This was an annoyance but couldn’t be serious. Ten people can’t just vanish in a range as small as the Tetons.

  The failure of the Appies to return as they had planned was irritating to us. People often get benighted in the Tetons in circumstances like those attending this climb: a large party, composed of people of varying experience, climbing a route that is reputed to be easy but is seldom climbed. In fact, those circumstances are guaranteed to produce a bivouac. At the ranger station we would normally give the party plenty of time to extricate itself from the route and get back before we did anything dramatic. Often there was another party in the same general area who would spot the late party. From where they were last seen, we could make a reasonable guess of how long it would take them to get back. If the missing party exceeded our estimated time of return, as well as their own, then we’d set things in motion. Even then we wouldn’t scramble a full scale search. Our first action would be to send out one ranger, or two if there was to be technical climbing, and combine the search with some other activity such as a patrol, if possible. We might also pass the word around to one or two key rescue types that such and such a party was overdue. What that meant to them was that they’d be where they could be easily reached and maybe pass up the second beer until the word went about that everybody was out of the mountains.

  Sometimes the worried family or concerned friends who were waiting in the valley would take exception to this stalling for time. But there really is no other way to do it. If we’d scrambled a full-scale search and rescue operation every time a party was overdue, the expense would have been enormous but, most important, tremendous pressure would be put on the party in the mountains to get back in the time estimated and the result would be many more injuries and deaths.

  In the case at hand, we actually did not stall as long as we normally would have. There were a lot of people in the Appalachian Mountain Club encampment who were concerned enough to bring down word to us of the overdue party. They certainly expected a response from us. Second, the storm increased the possibility that the party could be stuck for some time. One detail was worrisome, the party was not well equipped for cold weather. So, very soon after we were notified, Ranger George Kelly was on his way into the mountains on a patrol. He would stall by organising a search party from the Appalachian Mountain Club encampment. It’s not that we didn’t worry. We always worried. Worrying was a major component of our work. It is not difficult to imagine the worst, even after a hundred repetitions of one’s imagining’s turning out to be worse than the reality. We worried, but we had learned an orderly, logical procedure to follow in these cases and kept our imagining at a distance.

  The leader of the party was Ellis Blade, not himself an Appie but a recognised leader. Blade was not really what Europeans would regard as a guide. Americans do not hire guides in America, they hire authorities. Glenn Exum, the founder of the Exum Guides, has a kind of genius for spotting young men who carry an aura of personal authority. And that is part of the reason for the success of his guide service, a success which is unparalleled in America. The Exum Guides at that time ranged in age around late twenties to early thirties. Blade was in his fifties. The rest of the party varied greatly in experience. Steven Smith, quite young but a good rock climber, was the assistant leader. The other able rock climber was Lester Germer, who was sixty-five. Charles Joyce was a good recreational rock climber, very respectful of the Western mountains because his experience had been mainly on the cliffbands of the East. Janet Buckingham was an experienced hiker, with Lydia and Griffith June, Charles Kellogg and John Fenniman in various stages of learning rock climbing. Mary Blade, Ellis’s wife, was also along and was an experienced mountaineer. The route they were to climb was known as the Otter Body Route, after the shape of a snowfield in the middle of the east face of the Grand Teton.

  The party got off as planned at 4.00 am Thursday morning, a good sign.1 There had only been a couple of minor problems in the days prior to setting out. Blade hadn’t been able to generate much enthusiasm for conditioning climbs. The time to get the party into condition had been scheduled, but things hadn’t quite worked out. This is not surprising in view of the fact that the encampment was the size of a tribe, but one with random membership. Going into the wilderness to set up a new society is an American passion, but it takes a lot of energy just to eat, sleep and talk in a situation like that. There are new people to meet and hierarchies, liaisons and enmities to be established before the group can truly focus on its stated purpose. It requires the genius of a leader like Shackleton to select team members who accomplish the settling-in work quickly and in such a manner that the resulting organisation is the one that’s needed to do the job.

  The problem, other than conditioning, that Blade might have had on his mind at 4.00 am that Thursday morning was that Steven Smith, the young assistant leader, was suffering from an attack of no confidence. He didn’t like the looks of the weather. He had vomited the evening before, and had confided his doubts to Charles Joyce. Blade was fifty-four and Steven Smith twenty-one. They never became co-leaders in any meaningful sense. It was Joyce who broached Smith’s worries to Blade. If there was to be any rapport established between these two, it would have been up to Blade to establish it. Presumably part of his responsibility was to train the next generation of leaders. It is also true that mountaineering in America was undergoing a tremendous growth in rock-climbing skills; hundreds of good young climbers were, within three years, learning to do moves on rock routes that older climbers had thought only feasible on boulders in campgrounds. Blade would be an unusual man indeed if he did not feel his authority somewhat undermined by this new generation.

  As for Smith, it’s possible that he had a touch of the ‘flu or had picked up a bug from the water. It happened to me at least once a season in the Tetons and to all the guides and climbing rangers I know. Whatever the cause of Smith’s loss of confidence, the events of the first day conspired to keep it that way. They did however make an early start.

  Four and a half hours later, at 8.30, they started up Teepe’s Snowfield. A pace twice that fast would be regarded as slow by most climbers. Blade had plotted the climb with a five-hour margin of daylight. Half of his margin was gone before the party roped up.

  Janet Buckingham broke out of her steps in the snow, and although Smith held the fall easily, Janet’s feet flailed away at the snow uselessly. Anybody who has taught climbing beginners is familiar with the scene. The student or client literally loses contact with his/her feet and thrashes away hoping that a miracle will occur and one of them will stick. Perhaps Smith didn’t know how to deal with the situation, perhaps he hadn’t the chance. It was Blade, leaving his own rope, who talked her back into confidence in her steps again. The incident with Janet would have been soon forgotten by all involved except that disturbing incidents began to accumulate.

  The lead rope of five made it to the top of the snowfield half an hour before noon. The second rope, Smith’s, didn’t join the lead rope at the top before lunch. They stopped on an outcropping about three rope lengths below. This area is scarred by debris fallen from the cliffband and two snowfields above. This detail did not go unnoticed by Joyce at least, and he was the one who spotted the falling ice first and gave the warning yell. One block carried away Fenniman’s ice axe. Another glanced off Kellogg’s foot. Joyce had two blocks to dodge and only managed to dodge one. He was hit hard and knocked into the air. Though briefly stu
nned, he was uninjured.

  To this point, Joyce, though he was Smith’s confidant, had been maintaining a neutral stance on the question of whether the climb was advisable or not. After being hit, he still wasn’t as shaken as Smith, whose hands were trembling, but he was now of Smith’s opinion that this was an ill-fated climb and they ought to go down.

  Blade had gone down to check that everybody was all right and then quickly climbed back up to his rope, before a discussion could ensue. The lower party, wanting to get out of the track of falling debris even more than they wanted to go down, followed quickly.

  While they were getting underway, Joyce said to Smith, “Let’s get out of here.” Smith replied, “He’ll kill us all.”

  As the entire party reached the top of the snowfield, a storm hit. It was noon. This was not the familiar late afternoon thunderstorm but the arrival of one that had been threatening since the previous evening. The party took refuge in the moat between the top of the snowfield and the rock which at least sheltered them from the wind. Smith finally confronted Blade with his desire to retreat. Blade responded that the snowfield was hardening and had become dangerous. As the heavy rainfall and hail from the first huge cumulus cloud passed and the rain moderated, Blade gave the word for everyone to put on their packs and start moving up. Joyce sought out Smith.

  “What’s he doing? Is he nuts? We’ve got to go down. You’re a leader. Tell him we’ve got to go down.”

  Eventually it would be Joyce who would take command and make the decision to go down, but that was to be two days hence.

  The party traversed the top of the snowfield to the base of a rock couloir. Blade sent Germer ahead to scout the route, asking him to report “how it would go”. The wording is significant. Phrased that way, it is not the same as asking “Ought we attempt it?”

  This couloir, carved in the interstice of the east face and the east side of the Grand joins the Otter Body Snowfield to Teepe’s Snowfield. It is rather alarmingly free of the debris which packs the bottom of most Teton couloirs. It is too steep, too water, ice- and rock-washed to hold anything much in it for long. Obviously the rock is not particularly sound which is why a couloir developed. Griffith June saw the couloir first as a bowling alley and then found in his mind the inscription from the Inferno, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Wet, cold, late, tired, with weather threatening and tension in the group growing, it can not have been a cheerful party that geared themselves up for rock climbing.

  Germer returned with his report which he recalls thus: “I told him it looked easy. I know now he was asking for advice, and I gave him a rock-climbing opinion. It was easy rock climbing. I was not considering the safety of the party. The camp had chosen Blade as a leader, but I should have said something.” Possibly there was something else at work here. The opening sentence in the description of the route in Ortenburger’s, A Climber’s Guide to the Teton Range (1956 edition) is: “Petzoldt (who did the first ascent) ranks this as one of the easiest routes on the Grand Teton.” Twenty-seven years after the first ascent, an Eastern cliff climber of Germer’s stature could not in good conscience rate this climb as more difficult than the first ascent party found it to be. Unless Blade had reason to think that he was seriously off route, which was unlikely, he knew what Germer’s reply was to be.

  Ellis Blade retorted when Smith once again said that they ought to go down, “I’ve been on that glacier before in weather like this. It’s as hard as ice. If we go down, someone will get killed.”

  Smith pressed the point. “We can’t climb the mountain now.”

  Blade’s response was, “You keep your mouth shut.”

  “Well, I’m assistant leader of this group,” said Smith, “and I think my opinion should be considered.”

  “Well, don’t you forget that I am the leader and I know it is safer to go up.”

  In the hours that follow, they all got soaked, Lydia June had a shock from a lightning bolt, Smith avoided a rock avalanche only by leaping across the couloir into the arms of Griffith June, and Kellogg was hit by a rock which drove his crampons through his pack and into his back. Griffith June considered leading a splinter group back, a serious responsibility. He had the authority within the AMC organisation, but not as a mountaineer, and they were very much in the mountains now. He urged Blade to lead them back but Blade replied that they were committed.

  Blade now climbed quickly and well, getting the party three-fourths of the way up the couloir. Griffith June arrived at a huge boulder two pitches from the top, big enough for them all to sit on. Joyce secured them with pitons and they all bivouacked there except Blade who had reached the wide ledges and easy slabs at the top of the couloir. There was no reconsideration of Blade’s decision. There were complaints, perhaps fewer than there might have been had Mary Blade not been part of the group. A decision to go down would have been a decision to abandon Blade on the mountain.

  Three inches of wet snow fell during the night. They had no down garments, no dry clothes, and virtually no food. In the morning, Germer asked Smith what he thought, Germer didn’t like the rotten rock and had been weakened by the bivouac. Smith replied that he didn’t know the route.

  It took all of the next day, Friday, to get the party up the remaining two pitches to the top of the couloir. Joyce and Fenniman climbed up to Blade. June slipped on the ice just below the point where the angle of the couloir eased. He tried repeatedly and fell repeatedly. He cut steps, almost made it, and fell again, this time further and over an overhang. There was danger of his being strangled by the rope. Smith muscled him over to the bivouac pillar where June collapsed exhausted.

  Germer then went up and set up an intermediate belay position where he stayed until all six remaining climbers were up the couloir. (This was during the time when Dornan and I were being driven from Mount Moran a few miles to the north.) Though fit enough, Germer was in his sixties and this was too much; he had lost all reserves. His hands were claws; he clutched a piton in each and made it up the ice. Blade moved on but was called back. Germer announced he was dying.

  Blade assessed the situation and had a new plan, but not a new direction. There can be an infinite number of situations, tactics and explanations but there can only be one conclusion. He, Joyce and Smith would go up. They might find climbers at the top. If not, they’d go down the Owen-Spaulding Route and get help.

  There was twice as much snow above them as they climbed on Teepe’s Snowfield and beyond was another cliffband.

  When duty ranger, George Kelly, got to the AMC camp at the Petzoldt’s Caves, there was no word of the missing party. By the time he radioed this news down, we were back in the ranger station and instructed him to organise a search. We were getting a little nervous. The search was to a certain extent window-dressing. These people couldn’t be sent up on any difficult terrain. In other words, any place they could be allowed to search would be a place where the missing party could get out of by themselves. What they could do was to look and listen. They did and what they saw was three members of the party up on the Otter Body Snowfield.

  The need for a plausible explanation for what was happening with that party was increasing by the moment, while the prospects for getting such an explanation were decreasing. At their present rate, it would be two days before they got to the top. We were at first inclined to believe that these three could not be from the party we were seeking, but a review of the facts available to us convinced us that they had to be three of the ten. There was no way to make sense of it. It was hard to believe that if there had been an injury, accident or a fatality someone couldn’t have gotten out to tell us. If there had been some kind of horrible disaster and these were the only survivors, that would explain why we hadn’t heard from them, but not why they were going up. Only one thing was clear, we had to get serious about finding out what was going on.

  There had been a short rescue the evening before involving a client of the guide service. The guide service had provided most of the manp
ower for the rescue. Barry Corbet was one of those who had helped. He was to take a group up the Grand on Saturday but another guide had taken his party to the high camp at the Lower Saddle earlier in the day while he got some rest. He was on his way up to join them when he met George Kelly and was pressed into service. As they followed the track of the party up the snowfield and into the couloir, the storm renewed itself. Barry was equipped and George wasn’t. They were, as we later determined, within 400 feet of Blade’s group when they turned back, Barry to join his party.

  Doug McLaren, a district ranger and member of the rescue team when it was originally organised a decade earlier, was our supervisor, though no longer an active climber. It was he who organised and co-ordinated rescue activities. Doug ordered a pack team to move as much equipment as we could reasonably muster up to Garnet Canyon. Garnet Canyon is the cirque rimmed anticlockwise from north to south by Disappointment Peak, the Grand Teton, the Middle Teton, the South Teton and Nez Perce. Doug, Sterling Neale, Jim Greig and I left in the advance party at 7.00 pm. Rick Horn and Mike Ermarth, the remaining strong climbers on the park team were to follow with more equipment. All the available Exum Guides volunteered, Jake Breitenbach, Pete Lev, Fred Wright, and Al Read; and they were joined by four other volunteers, Dr Roland Fleck, Bill Briggs and Dave Dornan, who were soon to become guides, and Peter Koedt, who later helped me in organising the Jackson Hole Mountain Guides until the Vietnam disaster forced him into Canadian exile. These guides and volunteers were to come up in the morning. Another guide, Herb Swedlund, was holding at the Petzoldt’s Caves, awaiting developments. The majority of the professional mountaineers in America at the time were to carry out this operation.

  The four of us got a little sleep at the end of the horse trail about an hour’s climb below the encampment at the Caves and started up around 4.00 am. We arrived at the top of the snowfield at about 10.30. Here I made a serious mistake in route-finding. The party had to be either on the cliffband between Teepe’s Snowfield and the Otter Body Snowfield, or possibly at the top of the Otter Body just above the point where the three climbers had been spotted. There were two obvious routes up the cliffband. One was the couloir to the right of the cliffband, dark, wet, rotten, and the other was a nice sunlit rock line straight up from where we were.