The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Read online

  Until now the High Tatra had experienced a fine winter, but the previous night the weather had deteriorated rapidly. It was snowing heavily and persistently, as though making up for lost time. Even worse, the Wistr Halny, a warm, penetrating snow-melting wind, had accompanied the snowfall. Now a mass of wet soggy snow was poised on the faces, making avalanches a major hazard.

  We had retreated from our route not a minute too soon. Had we continued, the chances of finding a safe way down from the summit would have been minimal. But we abandoned our climb in the full realisation that discretion is the better part of valour.

  Now in this insulated world of the refuge, sipping our beer in steaming clothes and feeling our frozen feet painfully awaken, we were well aware of what things would be like up on the North Face of Mieguszowiecki, a gargantuan massif looming over a thousand metres above the slate-coloured ice of Morskie Oko Lake. I didn’t envy the rescuers their task. Helicopters couldn’t fly in this weather and in order to reach the trapped couple they would have to climb a long steep couloir and then traverse along an extended system of galleries and ledges, now swept by avalanches.

  We played poker, discussed politics and, inevitably, new routes that had been done recently and new ones to do. It was getting late and the benches at the tables were becoming vacant. The staircase creaked as people were filtering upstairs to get some sleep. The hut was overcrowded and people were having to sleep on the floors of the dormitories, so Jan and I decided to make ourselves comfortable on our benches downstairs.

  Just before crawling into our still-damp sleeping bags we went out on to the verandah to see if we could pick out any lights, but the swirling snow prevented us from seeing anything. As we were turning to go inside again and grab some overdue sleep, it cleared for an instant and we could see the torch lights of the rescue party, like remote fireflies, on the opposite side of the lake, still low, stretched out in a vertical column.

  “Not making much progress, are they?” Jan said. “They must be shitting bricks up there tonight – I would!”

  As I was lying in my sleeping bag I could hear and feel the wind pounding on the walls. The hut shuddered in the gusts. Every muscle in my body protested after the exertions of our climb, making me fully aware that I was very tired, but, as is often the case when one is shattered, you can’t drift off to sleep.

  I lit a cigarette and contemplated the difficulty of surviving such a storm as this, the icy fingers of spindrift searching for cold flesh through every minuscule opening in your wind-proofs, the blast tearing at the two climbers high above, and at the rescuers, consuming their energy and their hopes.

  I had never met Eva or Tomek in person. We had heard they were underprepared for such a serious climb. But the mountains act as a catalyst, giving our small climbing fraternity such a sense of unity that I had a twinge of guilt. I should have been out front with the rescue party. Granted, my presence, had I gone, wouldn’t have produced any spectacular result, but somehow I couldn’t help thinking that way.

  Vivid voices and thuds on the steps of the verandah stirred me into wakefulness, for I must have dropped off to sleep at last. It was 3.00 am. “Why the hell are people going out so early?” I asked myself in a daze. “Isn’t the weather ghastly?” I lay for a further couple of minutes snuggling deep into the down. But the realisation that this was the rescue party coming back percolated into my consciousness and my fingers groped for the zip of my sleeping bag.

  The rescuers were a sorry sight, veritable snowmen, their faces masks of sorrow and resignation. I got my butane stove going and made them scalding mugs of coffee while they told me their story.

  Crossing the open expanse of the frozen lake, the wind had buffeted their large rucksacks like sails. On the boulders of the scree slope beyond the gusts had stabbed at them so that they floundered into snow-covered holes, cursed, but kept going. It was well after 10.00 pm before they reached the foot of the couloir.

  Jan Gasienica was speaking, an old hand in the rescue team, a big man with the hint of a pot belly. He came from an old Górale family.

  “We entered the gully. It’s quite easy going for most of the thousand metres, but higher we were fighting through waist-deep snow. I was sure that we were all going to be carried down. The conditions were very unstable.

  “When we reached the bottleneck I was out in front. All I could see were the lights of the others below me and the reflection of their helmets. There was a thud. I was petrified. We’ve all had it, I thought, a bloody avalanche. But it wasn’t; it was the wet snow cover settling. I drove a couple of pegs in a rock crack, put karabiners on them, and clipped in the climbing rope before carrying on. I’m used to rescue work, Marek, I’m not a timid bastard, but I must admit that just then my hands were trembling. I felt sweat trickling down my back. I had now almost reached the point where you leave the couloir and start the long traverse across the North Face. I was forcing myself on.”

  He paused for a moment, wiped his brow and took another gulp of coffee. “The snow was up to my armpits. I half climbed, half swam through it. I didn’t pray, I just cursed that snow, willing it to stay in place and not avalanche.

  “There was a huge cornice at the edge of the gallery; I don’t know how I got through it, but I did. I saw rocks very close by. I could almost touch them. Then I felt something like an approaching train just above me. The avalanche swallowed me and I went with it faster and faster. I was in a vortex of snow particles, spinning, rolling and jerking wildly round and round. I felt the powder being rammed down my windpipe, choking me, and at the same time the snow round my neck was trying to strangle me. I was experiencing the horrors of a drowning man. Then there was this God Almighty jerk and the rope hauled me out of it just like a landed fish. I thought my back was broken, for it had taken the full force of me being hauled out of that wet heavy avalanching snow. I realised that I had pissed myself in shock and my clothes were stuffed solid with snow. What the hell did it matter? I thought. I was alive, just happy to be alive . . .”

  Jan Gasienica took off his snow-encrusted gaiters.

  “Everything was wonderfully calm and my senses were slowly coming back. I heard Kazek calling to all the team members to shout out their names to see if anyone had been swept away. Everybody called, the voices snatched away by the fury of the wind. Thank God, no one was missing.”

  The hut was slowly coming back to life with the accompaniment of the early-morning music from the bogs and the creaks and muttering from the upper floor. Then came the familiar banging of pots and tin plates from the kitchen. Now a maid bustled in to kindle the stove, her hair still awry. The rattle of coal being poured into the stove violated the last delightful minutes of that early-morning quiet.

  At dawn the rescue party went out again, leaving us in a state of silent inertia, with the prospect of long hours of waiting. I peered at the world beyond the windows. The snow had stopped, but the wind showed no signs of abating. It howled round the refuge. Visibility was abysmal.

  “This is going to be a bloody games day today. It’s not fit for dogs out there!” grumbled my partner, jerking his thumb in the general direction of Mieguszowiecki’s North Wall. “I wouldn’t give them high odds surviving this lot, Marek. Last night in the gully the rescue team went beyond the call of duty, the risk factor was too high. I know it’s courageous, but it’s also silly.”

  People were playing cards – poker, pontoon, canasta – as if their very existence depended on the outcome. From time to time one or two would give a glance at the window facing the North Wall and look down at their cards again.

  Somewhere up there, high on the windswept face, were two helpless people. Were they still alive? Were they still feebly calling for help? Help which couldn’t come.

  “What about going out for a walk, Jan? I need to stretch my legs,” I suggested. My companion was shuffling a pack of cards. He had joined the poker school about an hour before but it was obvious that he wasn’t paying much attention to the game for he
had been losing steadily.

  “Good idea,” he agreed, “and a good time to pull out. Take my hand, mate.” He gave the pack to one of the spectators and stood up.

  It was warm outside. It always is with the Halny, but its strength had lessened somewhat by now. Clouds were rising and we could see the lower white skirts of the mountains. We spotted the rescue party, tiny orange dots, very low in the couloir, moving as if in slow motion. They were coming down.

  We hurried towards them and twenty minutes later met them halfway across the lake. Kazek Byrcyn, the volunteer team leader, told us, “We intended to fix ropes the entire way up the couloir so that we would have a handrail, but it proved impossible.” He looked depressed and exhausted. Indeed they all looked as if they had had enough.

  “The couloir is worse than ever, a death alley for avalanches,” he said. “They come down every few minutes. Also most of the cracks on the rock walls are jammed with snow and ice and you can’t get pegs in. I think every one of us has been avalanched at one time or another in that bloody couloir today. It’s Russian roulette. We’re all soaked to the skin. I’ve radioed back to base that we can’t go on in these conditions. I’m not prepared to expose the team to this sort of danger any longer.”

  We stood there, a shabby group on the ice. After Kazek’s long speech nobody said anything for a while. It isn’t an easy decision, forsaking climbers who still perhaps have a spark of life in them. You feel it’s almost like passing a death sentence.

  All of a sudden the face came into view. The clouds rolled up in the wind like a great roller blind. The last remnants licked the high ridges and surrounding peaks. The sun burst through in a blaze of harsh winter glory. One of the team members had his binoculars to his eyes and gave a gasp of astonishment. Immediately we all caught sight of a minute black dot spinning through the air. The body seemed to glide over the rocks and snowfields like a feather, over bands and down chimneys. It disappeared in a snow-filled basin, then took off into the air again, crashing down an icefall. It appeared to be going faster as it fell. It ricocheted off the bottom snowfield and came to a halt on the edge of the lake. We stared at it as if mesmerised, then all took off in a wild gallop in its direction.

  It was alive. It was Eva. We could hardly believe our eyes. “So many of you . . . how awfully good you’ve come . . . Tomek’s dead,” she managed to mumble before she passed out.

  Within an hour she was under anaesthetic and having her leg pinned in the Zakopane General Hospital, after a hair-raising journey down the hairpins on a snow-choked road.

  What actually happened was this: on the brink of unconsciousness, Eva caught hold of a karabiner and accidentally pressed the gate open, which released her from her belay piton and precipitated her over 300 metres down the face. What is almost as miraculous as her surviving the fall was the fact that we were all there at the bottom to witness it at the very instant the cloud cleared, for she didn’t cry out, and could have lain there at the foot of the cliff until the spring thaw.

  A few weeks later a helicopter went back to the face, and Tomek’s body was winched aboard. He was taken down on this his last journey to the sanctuary of the green flowering valleys. There at the helipad his mother was waiting.

  The first crocuses were just blooming.

  Self-help on the Ogre

  Doug Scott

  In 1977 Doug was a member of an expedition to the Ogre, a savage mountain in the Pakistan Karakoram. Doug’s account of this trip, which is probably one of the most outstanding examples of self-help in the annals of mountaineering, is in striking contrast to the attitude of potential snow-holers and certified climbers who are churned out by institutions. Doug, like me, abhors this approach to mountaineering, which is after all basically a sport of self-reliance.

  If I think back to the British Ogre Himalayan expedition 1977, one man stands out in my mind – the Balti porter, Taki, who, after carrying a sixty-pound box throughout a twelve-mile approach march, some of it over moraine waste, produced from the folds of his shorts, smocks and assorted rags thirty-one eggs, none of which was even cracked. How he did it I’ll never know. Ostensibly he did it for thirty-one rupees and our favour, but how do you walk over a shifting chaos of moraine rock without breaking such a cargo? Well, I suppose, much more carefully than I could. Eight weeks later, eight more Balti came up the Biafo Glacier to Base Camp and, with as much care as Taki had for his eggs, carried me down some of the roughest terrain imaginable, with hardly a jolt to my broken legs.

  Back in June, fit and full of optimism, six of us entered Baltistan, ready to climb the Ogre. The Ogre is the highest point in the Biafo Glacier region of the Karakoram. It was noted by Europeans in 1861, when Godwin Austen first surveyed the area, and again in 1892 when Conway came down the Biafo from the Hispar Glacier and named it. Then, during the 1930s, Eric Shipton and his friends carefully surveyed the whole region. The height of the Ogre stands at 23,900 feet (7,285 metres) and a local name was found for it – Baintha Brakk – but climbers seem to prefer the shorter and more intelligible “Ogre”.

  During the last six years, two British and two Japanese expeditions have attempted the mountain. All four attempts failed in the face of avalanching snow, steep rock and ferocious storms. The highest point reached was 21,500 feet, which was achieved last year when the Japanese explored the South-West Flank. Above their high-point there reared 1,000 feet of steep granite and, beyond that, sheer ice faces, long corniced ridges and a final 800-foot summit rock pinnacle. The technical problems would be quite something in the Alps, but here, at nearly 24,000 feet, the climbing would become a race against physical and mental deterioration in the rarefied air.

  During the spring of 1975, Clive Rowland and I reconnoitred the south side of the Ogre. Our high point then had been 16,000 feet on the Uzun Brakk Glacier, where we stood bogged down in wet, sloppy snow, lost in amazement at the sight of the great lumps of rock, 8,000 feet high and liberally covered with snowy ramps and steep ice faces, that characterise the Ogre from the south. It is not a beautiful mountain from down there, being squat and having three small cones, like misplaced nipples, defining the summit, with the centre cone the highest. Yet there is one elegant feature, and that is the South Pillar, a prow of rock 3,000 feet high. While I was excited about the prospect of climbing that, Clive was clearly attracted by the South-West Flank, where there was a possible route up ridges and snowfields that looked the most likely way to the summit area. As a result of this divergence of interest, we put together an expedition with these two routes in mind.

  The expedition finally resolved itself into a party of six: Tut Braithwaite and I were to try the South Pillar, while Chris Bonington, Nick Estcourt, Mo Anthoine and Clive attempted the South-West Flank. We were, mercifully, without a leader. The inclusion of such a personage would have been laughable, seeing that all members of the team had had so much expedition experience that they could easily arrive at decisions communally. For some this was their first leaderless expedition and they no doubt found it stimulating to work things out for themselves, while former leaders perhaps found it restful to be without the burden of total responsibility.

  Despite an apparent lack of organisation, we had worked hard preparing for our respective routes, but these well-made plans foundered in our case when a big rock smashed into Tut’s leg at the start of our South Pillar route. After two weeks of waiting for a large blood clot to move, Tut could still not use his leg for rock climbing. Laboriously, we recovered all our food, equipment and a special hanging tent from the base of the pillar (at 19,000 feet). So ended a two-year obsession – an obsession which had caused me to catch my breath a few times at the thought of taking off to climb with just two climbing ropes and none back down to the ground. But for me, at least, there were still alternatives, while Tut had no choice but to sit the trip out in Base Camp. For someone as active as he is, that wait must have been one of the most frustrating periods of his life.

  “Mountain one, climbers none,�
� as Mo put it.

  Round Two had already begun, with Chris, Nick, Clive and Mo busy climbing and fixing ropes up the ice rib leading to the West Col. In less than a week they climbed from above Advance Base, at 17,000 feet to 20,000 feet on the col. At the end of this period, Chris and Nick took off for the top, with about five days’ food. Finding themselves suddenly alone, the other two descended – Clive because he wanted to reconnoitre a different way via the West Ridge, and Mo because he felt they needed more supplies and more time to acclimatise. Nick and Chris pushed out from the col along a ramp and round on to the South Face. Up to a point above the South Pillar they had followed a line pioneered by the 1976 Japanese expedition. Four days later, they returned, having failed in a very bold attempt to reach the summit. Faced with depleted food stocks and lack of climbing equipment, and suffering from the effects of altitude, they had not felt up to climbing the 800-foot summit cone. They did, however, traverse up on steep snow to the West Summit, before reversing their route of ascent. They set off back down to Base Camp, but on their way came across Mo, Clive, Tut and me at the West Col. We were in the process of making an attempt on the West Ridge which started with a 1000-foot rock pillar. This rekindled Chris’s ambition for the top, and he persuaded us to return to Base to give him a rest and also to collect more food.

  A few days later, on 6 July, Mo, Clive and I returned to the col and went up to a smaller shoulder, about 1000 feet higher and just under the 1000-foot pillar, where we made a camp. Tut and Nick (unknown to us at the time) had decided not to rejoin the attempt, as Tut’s leg seemed to be getting worse and Nick had still not recovered from his attempt with Chris. Chris therefore started out alone, knowing we would be waiting below the pillar. As we put the tents up at Camp 2 on the top shoulder I would have given anything to have been at home. Half an hour later, inside my tent supping hot tea, I looked out of the entrance as the sun set and decided that there was nowhere else I’d rather be but up there at 22,000 feet, watching that sun dipping down, silver lining strands of cloud strung out over Snow Lake and the Hispar Glacier beyond. Range after range of bristling mountain peaks stood out silhouetted against each other, the nearer ranges sharply and darkly defined, while those in the distance faded into the sun’s diffused haze of yellow light. Above them all, some 150 miles away, Nanga Parbat caught the last of the sun, whilst everywhere else was plunged into gloom. We zipped up the tent against a strong wind and snuggled content into our feathers.