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  Dave and Jim and I started down into Murdering Gully, from time to time calling and listening. Meanwhile the canyon crew was ready to go to Echo Head to assist with calling/listening and communications. As we descended, calling, echoes played games with our calls, then, about halfway down (about 300 metres change in altitude), we got replies, free of echoes. They were above to the east, in the cliff ledges.

  We redirected the canyon crew to follow the base of Kanangra Walls east, and dispatch a team from Bathurst City State Emergency Service across the top of the walls to locate the overdue party from there. Meanwhile we started the climb.

  The slopes below the main face of Kanangra Walls are steep, loose and heavily vegetated. As well as climbing we also had to traverse eastwards. The surface here is a mix of loose soil – sometimes mud, scree, small cliff steps and obnoxious but friendly vegetation – typically lomandra (cutty grass), hawthorn bush and wait-a-while vines under a broken canopy of trees.

  By 10.00 am we knew where they were within 100 metres. My team and Matt’s canyon crew met up about 50–100 metres below them. The Bathurst Group were directly above the missing party and were able to communicate with them after a fashion. They estimated that they were about fifty metres below them. We knew, however, that there was nowhere on this face where main wall, above the cliff steps, was as little as fifty metres. We gathered that the party were uninjured but suffering from hypothermia. The fog ruled out visual contact. After several attempts to get them to descend, it became apparent they weren’t going to move. They knew they had hypothermia, they also knew they were uncoordinated as a result and were not prepared to risk a mistake under the circumstances. A fair enough call, we considered.

  We decided to access them from the top. The difficulty of the climb and the subsequent evacuation from that point was not the best option if they didn’t feel confident enough to abseil to us anyway. Without knowing how far down from the top they really were, we immediately called for Hawkesbury to roll, to back us up. If we required to set up another vertical rescue system down the face, we’d need them to drive the system at the top. While we navigated out of Murdering Gully, Army cadets, who had been on exercise in the area associated with the overdue instructors, began carrying our rescue gear in to the location.

  On the walk in the Commanding Officer was telling one of the Oberon crew about how fit and capable his blokes were, but that they didn’t know the area. “Just the opposite of our guys!” was the tongue in cheek reply!

  Once above, we spent some time trying to determine where exactly the cragfast party was located. If we picked the wrong spot to commence operations, we might not be in line with the right ledge. With good fortune we had a small break in the fog and were able to get a brief glimpse of where they were. It looked as if they were on the second ledge down. This part of the Walls is renowned for a lack of suitable anchors on the top of the plateau. Recreationally it is not uncommon to use small heath bushes as anchors, but for a rescue we require something beefier. A large natural rock bollard suited our needs, situated about fifty metres back from the edge, and a couple of smaller rock formations closer to the edge would form the basis of our anchor system.

  Normally we would dispatch a first responder to access the casualties by abseiling. With some doubt as to whether a 200-metre rope would reach, we opted to rig a full V3 system. This was made up of a load line rigged through a rescue descender for lowering, a removable haul system, and a reversible safety to allow the load line to be held while the haul system was reset. With this set-up we could lower a rescuer, rather than have him abseiling on a rope which might possibly be too short or directionally misplaced. Abseiling could also mean a lengthy prusik back up. The extra time in rigging would make it far easier to handle any error of height or position. Another factor that we kept in mind when making this decision was that of suspension syndrome. Prusikers are at risk most of suspension syndrome when performing long or difficult ascents when stressed, fatigued, hypothermic, dehydrated, etc. Given our subjects were too hypothermic to risk a descent, we didn’t want them perhaps considering a prusik out as a way to save face and build their body heat.

  The loadline was 200 metres of 11-mm kernmantle. Edge management was provided by a Larkin rescue frame. This would cut down on friction over the edges and give more control. The power was eight Army cadets. Craig Gibbons was lowered 120 metres to the party below, fifty metres of this was overhanging. Matthew McMahon was edge manager, I was team leader. The ledge between ourselves and the overdue party was not a ledge at all, just a steep sloping band of rock face. As a result we were able to raise the first two men solo, returning the rope to the bottom each time using a spare rope pack on the end for weight.

  Around 1.00 pm Hawkesbury rescue crew arrived, just in time to see the successful rescue of the first of the overdue canyoners, and assist with the remaining rescues and derigging. By 2.00 pm, all of them were on top of the walls and the system was derigged. They were checked out by ambulance officers but suffered no injuries apart from hypothermia and embarrassment at being rescued.

  Talking with them later, we found that the weather had closed in severely about 3.00 pm on Sunday afternoon. With poor visibility they had relied on the canyon guide book which advises to bear left when the gully gets too steep. This and the omission of any mention of the side gullies feeding Murdering Gully (which, though normally dry, were now running due to heavy rain), and the lack of visibility to allow for any checking and correction, resulted in them going approximately 800 metres east. It’s not uncommon for parties negotiating Murdering Gully to do this, finding themselves in the rock steps at the base of the main face of Kanangra Walls. This is indeed the cause of the plethora of tracks leading to nowhere, which results in further confusion.

  Twice the canyoners realised they had made navigational errors and descended to attempt a correction. Finally, with their determination to get out and not be the subject of a search and rescue, they pushed hard up into the rock steps below Kanangra Walls before spending the night camped in a small overhang on the face of the main Wall. Most of the climbs up the rock steps were free climbed by the Army instructor, who then belayed his companions as they ascended, several of these pitches being completed in the dark. Gutsy moves to no avail!

  Kanangra may not be a Kilimanjaro or K2, but just a short drive from the city, it quietly challenges thousands of adventures of all walks of life and abilities each year. It’s a place of rugged beauty. Awesome. Inspiring. Luring. Potentially treacherous to the ill-prepared, and sometimes to the well prepared! A place that demands respect. Kanangra is the type of place where almost anyone can push themselves to their limits, on a good day, and still be within 1.5 kilometres of the car if they want to! On a bad day? Well, when you’re doing what you love, is there any better place to have a bad day?

  Lucky Joe

  Hamish MacInnes, Joe Simpson, Simon Yates

  Joe Simpson fell the best part of 2,000 feet in the Alps in an avalanche on the North-East Face of Les Courtes. “I didn’t have any helmet on. Only my legs were buried when I finally came to rest, and apart from a cut head and bruising, I was otherwise unhurt . . . I was bloody stupid and I deserved to die.”

  Joe Simpson had already had one dramatic demonstration that someone somewhere was keeping half an eye on him when climbing the Bonatti Pillar in 1984, and in 1985 he was to survive an even more spectacular climbing accident on the other side of the world on the West Face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes.

  But first the Bonatti Pillar.

  Joe and his climbing partner, Ian Whittaker, had virtually finished the climb and managed to get to a bivouac ledge in gathering darkness and swirling cloud. Probing the corners of their lair for the night with the aid of their headlamps, they saw that it was in fact a huge pedestal which formed the right wall of a high-angled corner they had just ascended. Above the pedestal there was no continuing corner, only a vertical smooth wall. There was no way up there, so they counted themselv
es lucky that they had come across this providential ledge when they did.

  Joe found an old piton above the ledge, which he decided to use for a belay, but this wasn’t much good for protecting Ian, who was further along. Ian tied a belay rope to a rock flake which was close to him and passed the end to Joe who secured it to the peg. The rope now acted as a sort of handrail between the two of them. Joe also found an additional spike behind him and put a couple of slings over this to which he tied himself for added security, then he clipped on to the handrail and settled in for the night, the great void beneath them masked in the darkness. Joe had zizzed off when he heard Ian’s voice.

  “Do you think we’re safe from rocks here? I was going to sleep without my helmet on.”

  “Safe as houses,” Joe returned, for above them were great overhangs and any rocks falling would be well out from the face and their ledge. “But,” he continued, hedging his bets, “I’ll keep mine on just the same.” In the light of his headlight Joe watched Ian take off his helmet and place it beside him, then clip himself on to the handrail in case he literally dozed off during the night.

  As if on cue there was a frightening noise, a sort of groaning followed by a violent tug on both their safety ropes. They were falling, cocooned in their bivvy bags. Then they jerked to a halt on their handrail rope, both hanging like socks on a clothesline. The old peg and the rock spike had fortuitously held. The ledge, now disintegrated, crashed 2,000 vertical feet down the face to the couloir, then bounced another 1,000 feet to the glacier.

  Presently in the anonymous darkness all was quiet. Joe wondered about his companion, he seemed to recall a cry. Had Ian plunged to his death? But Ian’s reassuring Lancastrian accent floated out of the night. He was all right and needed a drink! He had a head injury and, hanging there, Joe examined his scalp by the light of his headlamp. It wasn’t too serious. They were grateful to be alive. Had the ledge collapsed only five minutes before, when they weren’t belayed, they would now be mutilated messes on the Dru Glacier.

  Gradually they took stock of their position and found that they had lost all their gear, even their boots. Joe in fact still had one and he now disgustedly tossed this useless item in the wake of the rock fall. Ian had even lost one of his socks and had to utilise a woollen climbing mitt in lieu.

  With the beam of Joe’s headlamp they saw that their climbing rope, their lifeline, was shredded by the fallen rocks and hung uselessly down the corner below them. The two young men then examined their belays with some trepidation. They saw to their consternation that the spike which Joe had put the slings over as an added safety precaution had disappeared, though the karabiners were still clipped to his harness. The slings must have parted when the ledge went. Joe next examined the old ring peg to which they were attached at his end of the now V’d handrail. He observed that it had bent and then, pulling sideways on it to get a better look, he saw to his horror that it moved. On Ian’s side the case was no better. The other handrail belay, the spike, had sheared off at the bottom with the ledge but somehow still held, even though they saw splinters of rock still falling out of the gap surrounding it.

  The climbers were now in an unenviable position, unable to move, with a loose peg at one end of the rope and a shaky spike on the other. They had no gear left to help safeguard themselves and any violent movement could send them both crashing down the face. Even to climb up the rope would involve too much disturbance and anyhow they were still trapped in their bivvy bags.

  Joe and Ian hung on their line for twelve hours, frightening themselves when they had to move to overcome cramps. They were both forced together at the bottom of the V in the rope. It was like Russian roulette where any movement could trigger off the vibration which would dislodge the peg or loosen the flake further.

  They shouted throughout the night and signalled with their headlamp to the Charpoua hut, for it was in line of sight from where they were. In the cold light of dawn the frightening drop they could now see below worked overtime on the imagination. Salvation came in the form of an Alouette III helicopter. Their distress signals had been seen. It eased its way towards the face until it hovered like a giant humming-bird not fifty feet away. The two climbers pointed at their stockinged feet, then held their arms up in a “V” to indicate that they required help. Possibly the understatement of the year. The pilot took all this in and after giving a thumbs up he swung down towards Chamonix.

  Members of the Chamonix rescue team were dropped by helicopter on a ledge above the pair and set up a hand winch. Some time later a guide came down on the steel winch wire to evacuate them. After they were both taken up to the ledge, the Alouette came in and they were picked up on a helicopter winch and lifted up into the cabin.

  Joe has since speculated on his rashness in throwing away his remaining boot, for he heard a few days later that a French climber had found a climbing boot in the couloir at the bottom of the Dru and it worried him to think that this may have been the other one of the pair.

  The scene changes to the Peruvian Andes in 1985. Joe’s companion is twenty-two-year-old Leicestershire-bred Simon Yates, then living in Sheffield. Their objective was one of the highest unclimbed mountain walls in Peru, the 6,360-metre (17,447-foot) West Face of Siula Grande. They set up their Base Camp at 4,500 metres at the top of the high Quebrada Sarapoquoucha, a superbly isolated place.

  After one abortive attempt on the wall, driven back by bad weather, they set off again on Tuesday, 4 June. They were now on their own, in a remote spot and on a serious climb, their only contact with the outside world being non-climbing Richard Hawkins, down at Base Camp.

  They climbed to the high point of their first attempt and found the equipment they had cached in a snow hole. The snow hole itself had been destroyed in an avalanche and Simon and Joe were lucky to recover their gear. In view of the avalanche danger at this spot, they dug out a safer snow cave to the south, which was also closer to the face.

  The route began up an avalanche cone which was fortunately consolidated. The climbing proper then started with a bang. It was unrelentingly steep and an icefield which they ascended was a constant 80°. They slanted to the right as they climbed and the angle eased to about 65–70°, then got through a rock band via a steep twenty-metre cascade pitch of ice.

  Difficulty after difficulty presented itself, often with avalanche risk. To the right a 300-metre yellow rock wall dropped to the base of the icefield. Their problem was to get across this wall by a ramp, access to which was blocked by séracs. It was dark by the time they got to a very steep fall of ice at the foot of a secondary ramp line.

  But there were no bivvy sites, so Joe carried on up this. It started as overhanging honeycombed ice for about eight metres, and thereafter was hard ice leading up through a galaxy of large icicles. This pitch was vertical in places and exited in a frightening funnel pitch on to a snow gully. Simon came up then and led through. They were amazed to see on the left of the gully a twenty-metre-diameter “golf ball” of snow just stuck on to the face, apparently defying the force of gravity. Fate smiled on them now, for they found a huge natural cave inside.

  In the morning the difficulties continued unrelenting. From the cave they traversed right and fought their way up another cascade of ice at a high angle. After a further pitch, they at last managed to get on to the main ramp, their key to the higher part of the route.

  The ramp was in fact an enormous hanging gully with fortifications at each end in the form of séracs and cornices. Getting there had been desperate and by the looks of things getting out at the other end would be equally exacting. Now they did a rope length to the right, followed by 250 metres up the left side of the gully. This wasn’t so steep, between 50° and 60°, by far the easiest climbing so far.

  They stopped to take stock of this next problem: the exit from the gully ramp. There was a broken rock wall on the left with a nasty icefall running down parallel with the gully. This looked just possible if they avoided some large icicles on its left, but t
he snow and ice looked like unstable nougat.

  It was Simon who started up this pitch, thrutching up the rotten snow which was plastered at a high angle, but he had to give up after fifteen metres and abseiled from an icicle – not the most reassuring anchor. He next moved left on to the rock face in the hope that this would get him high enough to make a traverse into the gully beyond the ice. He managed to insert a Friend, (a cam-type device which he used as a running belay) and was about three or four metres above it when both of his handholds came away and he peeled off the rock. It was his good Friend which possibly saved his life.

  The two young men were now faced with the last option in this dicey trinity. They would have to climb the icicles direct. With care, Joe took the lead up the overhanging ice, and soon it eased to vertical, when he paused for an instant, hanging by the wrist loop of his ice axe. With his other hand he put in an ice peg called a Snarg. It was then a matter of smashing a mass of icicles to enable him to get over this crux. Whilst engaged in this risky occupation he cut his chin. He made a rush to climb the remainder of the steep section which was strenuous and hard. Beyond lay an eighty-metre ice funnel which led to a ridge, a ridge both sharp and airy.

  Simon came up and Joe then led on, traversing once more to the right, looking for a way through to the top. It was hair-raising stuff, the basic material for future nightmares. He was back on rock now, it was loose as well as being covered with crappy snow. Tantalisingly, he could see the summit cornices less than 300 metres from him, but en route were ghastly steep powder snow-flutings, like a ploughed field, huge furrows tilted at a ridiculous angle. They found that once in a chosen channel it was almost impossible to change lanes. Just a hundred metres of this took all of five hours!