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  The 3 June had started as a routine day on shift at D Flt 202 Sqn, RAF Lossiemouth. I was the duty captain for the day and if nothing else happened I was going to fly a regular standardisation sortie with our Squadron instructor, Harry Watt. We had all heard about the rescue of the father and son from Surgeon’s Gully a few days previously and the report of the body in tights and a cardigan that was still supposedly lying in a pool below one of the waterfalls. You see and hear some odd things in Search and Rescue but this one still sticks in my mind many years later. Just after shift handover we were requested to go down to Ben Nevis to lift members of the Lochaber team into Surgeon’s Gully to allow them to search for and recover the body in the pool.

  We flew a recce of the southern side of the mountain to try and discern where exactly we would need to put the team, but from the air, without detailed on-the-ground knowledge, it was difficult trying to pick out the spot. We landed at West End car park in Fort William to pick up the team and get a brief from the police about any special requirements for the task. Fortunately the weather was kind with light southerly winds and good visibility. The team directed us to the area of Surgeon’s Gully they needed to access; it didn’t look especially promising; a deep, narrow gash, running back into the side of the mountain. The top of the gully looked slightly wider but it rapidly became vertically sided.

  This was likely to present a couple of challenges. We needed to make a closer assessment. Having brought the aircraft into a free air hover by the mouth of the gully, we examined the problem. The Sea King has a seventy-five-metre winch cable and we were going to need quite a lot of it if we could get into the gully. It was unlikely that we would be able to hold the winchman against the side, allowing him to treat the trip down as an abseil. So the winchman was probably going to get spun in the aircrafts downwash. That downwash was also likely to be the cause of other problems. A hovering helicopter pushes down a column of air as it sits in the hover, usually this dissipates outwards below the aircraft. In a tight steep-sided gully this 50 mph breeze would be concentrated, having no space to escape into, and could dislodge anything loose, potentially hazarding anyone below the aircraft. Furthermore, the little downwash that could escape could finish going up, round the sides of the rotor, and being reingested by the rotor. This aerodynamic phenomena is known as recirculation, and it can dramatically increase the power required to maintain the hover, sometimes beyond the available power.

  However, after spending a short time assessing the situation, we decided that it was worth seeing if we could safely manoeuvre into a position to deploy the team. In order to give ourselves, and everyone else on the aircraft, an escape option if things did not go as planned we needed to reverse into the gully. The winchman, Tony, and winch operator, Clive, were both very experienced, so with one of them kneeling by the large open door and the other peering out of the bubble window on the opposite side we began to back slowly into the gully. During a manoeuvre like this the pilot is flying the aircraft following as exactly as he can the guidance from his rear crew, as he can see nothing of the area he is manoeuvring into. A very particular form of words is used (a misunderstanding in such circumstances is not desirable!) to ensure that the aircraft is manoeuvred in exactly the right direction, in three axis, at the required speed to put it over a particular point and keep it there. Everyone must trust everyone else implicitly, this is very much a team game.

  Having carefully manoeuvred the aircraft to the required point, we were positioned well back in the confines of the gully. The clearance from the tips of the blades to the rock face on either side always looks to be less than it actually is – I would not have wished to be much closer. All I had to do now was stay put while Clive and Tony organised the deployment of the rescue team. We had decided to put Clive down on the ground and he was soon lowered on the winch cable, 180 feet later his feet touched the ground in the floor of the gully.

  The winchman went down first, close to the lip of the waterfall on which Reup and David had stood three days before. Five members of the team then repeated this descent, Terry Con-field, Ian Sutherland, Brian McDermott, Willie Anderson and Ed Grindley. The gully almost proved to be a death trap for the rescuers, on account of the downwash from the huge machine in this narrowing defile. The stream was whipped up and soaked the party. Worse, stones were falling, dislodged from the gully walls. Terry wondered, when he was being lowered, what was hitting his face – it was maggots!

  Steve

  From a flying point of view, we did our best to keep it nice and accurate; concentrating on being relaxed is allegedly the secret of a good hover. Brian and Ian Sutherland landed about twenty feet up from the edge of the big pitch and, as there were so many rocks crashing down, Willie, who was the next lowered, was pulled by Brian beneath a small overhang on the gully wall where there was a degree of protection. They then climbed the rocks above and peered over a lip at eye-level with a pool. Floating a few feet away was the body of a dead man and a plague of beetles. Brian and Ian pulled him to the edge, while the others took the stretcher, which had also been lowered, up closer to the pool.

  It was now a matter of getting everybody to hell out of there, including the corpse, which they installed in a yellow bivvy bag. Willie and Brian where the first to be winched up together on two strops – again the winch cable was almost at full extent. Rocks rained down just as they were spiralling upwards. Then there was blur and a tremendous crash, heard above the roar of the turbines, a large rock flake shattered on the gully bed between Ian Sutherland and the stretcher with its new customer aboard. It was a close call! Amazingly, everyone got winched out without injury, thanks to the skill of the pilot and crew and, as the last man swung aboard, the Sea King nosed its way out into the vast air space of Glen Nevis.

  One of the team said later, “What that chopper did represented the best rescue flying I’ve ever been involved with – and that’s going back thirty years.”

  Chief Inspector John MacFadzean, who is also a keen hill man was called on a team radio. “Line up the drinks, John. We have the body.”

  There is a footnote to this last phase of the Surgeon’s Gully affair. The helicopter landed at Corpach, a village near Fort William whose name appropriately translates as The Place of the Dead. As they got out of the Sea King, Willie Anderson jokingly remarked to John MacFadzean that the police would probably manage to identify the body by the next millennium. The Chief Inspector retorted that he would bet him a pint of beer he would know all about the deceased before teatime.

  True to his word he did just that, but not without a few setbacks. At the mortuary the man’s name was discovered in the remains of his wallet, found in the back pocket of his trousers. When the name John O’Brien, with a Putney address, was fed into the Missing Person’s Index on the Police National Computer nineteen missing O’Briens came up! But not a John. As the Chief Inspector later pointed out, “You would have expected this number of missing individuals with a common name like Smith or Brown, but not an O’Brien.” He went back on the computer for clarification and was asked for a Personal Description File. Supplying this and contacting the closest police station to the Putney address, and checking other evidence found on the body, a railway ticket and a bank withdrawal slip, the investigation leapt forward. He quickly had the Fort William banks checked and found that a John Michael Joseph O’Brien had withdrawn cash from the Royal Bank of Scotland, possibly on the very day he died on Ben Nevis. These clues had survived being submerged in water for three months. It transpired that his relatives were not too concerned at not hearing from John, for he tended to keep himself to himself and would often go on protracted walkabouts.

  That evening John MacFadzean enjoyed a well earned pint at the Nevis Bank.

  Steve – a postscript

  The Sea King crew, when it landed at Corpach, had only two hours of their twenty-four-hour shift left; they were then re-tasked to a helicopter crash south of Aberdeen . . . but that’s another story.

 
We Recover the

  Bodies of our Comrades

  Ludwig Gramminger

  The Eiger North Face, the Nordwand, will for ever stand as a milestone for those formative years of mountaineering, the 1930s, but it has also served as a gravestone for the unlucky who died on its flanks. The popular press had their first taste of mountaineering tragedy some fifty years before when Edward Whymper’s party crashed to their deaths on the Matterhorn. Though Whymper himself survived, he was obsessed with the stigma of this tragedy for the remainder of his days.

  Most of the climbing fraternity as well as the public condemned those Eiger North Face climbers who, they said, risked their lives and the lives of the rescuers who went to help them when they got into trouble. Yet those tigers of yesteryear were sensible young men who were only exercising an urge basic to all of us, to try something new to conquer the frigid vertical heights by the most direct route to the summit. They were mostly of German or Austrian origin, possibly because the use of pitons and slings as climbing aids first evolved in the Eastern Alps and, without their assistance, such ambitious goals as the Eigerwand were then out of the question. Those who condemned this new breed of climber were themselves too timid to contemplate tackling such routes.

  One can expostulate on the pros and cons of big wall climbing, but the courage of those who attempted those north faces as well as the courage of their rescuers is beyond question. For decades the Eiger drama has been re-enacted on page and screen, yet it will always demonstrate an extraordinary facet of human nature, this deep-rooted desire to attempt a problem, knowing full well the odds are against one.

  Austria and Germany have always been in the forefront of mountain rescue development, especially in the pioneering days of big cliff rescue, where steel cables were first used in place of conventional ropes. The German Bergwacht, the Mountain Guard, were then the stars of rescues where the stage was some great alpine north face. Ludwig Gramminger was the leader of this determined band involved in what will remain probably the greatest sequence of mountain rescue operations of all time, in days when the helicopter wasn’t the bird of mercy it is today. I have made many landings by winch wire on the Eiger North Face and I can vouch for the skill and the daring of the pilots on those operations. But their exposure to danger is brief, compared with the hours and even days spent by rescue teams in the past on the icy ramparts of this hostile mountain.

  During the war most of Ludwig Gramminger’s companions were away in the forces when in 1942 he got a call to go to the Eiskarlspitze in the Karwendal of the Austrian Tirol. A climber had fallen and was subsequently killed. It meant abseiling down a 350-metre face with the corpse. Perhaps the best introduction to Ludwig is to listen to his own description of how, when almost down the wall, his colleague, who had gone first to prepare the anchors for the ropes, had failed to complete the final belay on one of the steepest sections:

  For the last abseil, I asked myself, had Stadler only put in one peg? I could only see one, but this was inconceivable. Was it an oversight as we were nearing the foot of the cliff? But there was no excuse for a single piton. It’s dangerous enough roping off a solitary peg at the best of times, but frightening when carrying the additional weight of the body of a large man. Perhaps, I thought, the eight pitches which Max Stadler had already organised from the top had taken too much out of him? Anyhow, I secured myself to the peg using a sling, but didn’t take off my abseil rope. When Michel, the other member of our rescue trio, arrived alongside using his own abseil rope, he could hardly get a footing as the wall was so steep. He too clipped onto the peg. As well as staying on my abseil rope I had taken the precaution of knotting it so that it couldn’t creep through the karabiner brake I was using. Michel now came off his abseil rope, for he had to help me to change over to another rope for the final descent. To our horror we saw that his extra weight was making the peg bend and as if in slow motion it came out of the crack. I grabbed him and in so doing took some of his weight. In desperation he linked himself to me with a karabiner so that we were all hanging, two climbers and a corpse, on my abseil rope. After recovering from the initial shock we had to do some slick thinking. It was a good thing that I hadn’t trusted that peg and also that I was attached to it by a sling, otherwise we would have lost the rope that Michel had transfered to it. We yelled down to Stadler to tie some pegs and a hammer to the end of this and in a short space of time we had sound anchors in place. We then lowered the dead man to the bottom of the face and quickly followed, glad ourselves to be down alive.

  To climbers that’s the sort of stuff that nightmares are made from, but it is only a small incident in the long rescue career of Ludwig Gramminger. The following adventures have been narrated before in various forms, but seldom by the rescuers themselves.

  In 1936 the Eiger North Face was the last main unclimbed face in the Western Alps. German climbers had been much to the fore in the other great ascents; the Matterhorn North Face was climbed by the brothers Schmid in 1931 and the Grandes Jorasses in 1935 by Rudi Peters and Martin Meir. That same year Wiggerl Steinauer and Hans Ellner scaled the North Face of the Aletschhorn. All these climbers came from Munich.

  Climbing was just beginning to get public attention and the Eiger North Face represented to many a vertical arena of drama and tragedy to which the accidents of 1933–6 were the curtain raisers. For this was the time of the first attempts on that notorious wall and the press were to have many a bonanza reporting and misreporting the assaults on the 1,800-metre high face.

  It was again a Munich party that first set their hopes on this great North Face. Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer were both members of the High Level Group of the German and Austrian Alpine Club. They left Bavaria in August, travelling by car to Grindelwald and took up residence in a hayshed at Alpiglen. Alpiglen snuggles in meadows at the bottom of the Eigerwand on the Kleine Scheidegg railway. Here they spent some time carefully studying the possible lines on the face. It was no easier then than now to keep your objective secret if the Eiger North Face featured in your itinerary and news leaked out that they were to attempt a direct route up the westerly section of the wall – straight to the summit.

  They set off at 3.00 am on Wednesday, 21 August and after three days of hard rock climbing they reached the Second Icefield. Due to heavy stone fall here they had to bivouac early.

  It was on that Friday night that the whole Eiger region was subjected to a savage storm. The face, which forms a northern bastion of the Alps, is a buffer to all the foul weather from that quarter; it attracts storms as a magnet attracts pins.

  On the Saturday the telescopes of Kleine Scheidegg and Alpiglen were trained on the face looking for signs of the two men, but nothing further could be seen. They were known to be excellent climbers and were well equipped, so it was generally thought that they would have survived the blizzard. Unfortunately, dense cloud rolled in and blanketed the whole face and a heavy snowfall commenced. It got increasingly colder (–8°C at Kleine Scheidegg) and the danger of avalanche on the face was considerable. On the Sunday around midday a portion of the wall was visible for a short while and then the two climbers were spotted higher up, presumably continuing the climb. But very soon the cloud closed in again and for the next few days not much more was seen.

  Now with the continuing bad weather, the position of the two was critical and in Grindelwald preparations for a possible rescue were being made. In Munich our rescue group, the Bergwacht, received the following report at 9.30 am: “The weather conditions on the Eiger North Face are extremely bad. Today, Wednesday, 28 August it has snowed lightly on the upper slopes; in the valley it was raining. The snow is lying about fifty centimetres deep on the upper section of the face.” A Swiss military plane had to give up a search on the following day because of poor visibility. There was nothing to be seen or heard, no signs at all. The face was under the constant observation of the Grindelwald rescue post, but the prevailing conditions precluded any mercy mission for the time being. Further reports ar
rived. In Munich our group was preparing to go to the aid of the missing climbers who would by now obviously be in a very serious condition. As soon as the conditions allowed, nothing would stop us doing everything we could to rescue our friends. We left Munich that same day at 9.30 pm in the Bergwacht Mercedes Kompressorwagen, driving through the night for Grindelwald. We had the best of equipment and rations and we departed in streaming rain convinced that we would bring help to our colleagues. There were four of us – Rudi Peters, Franz Hausstätter, Heine Sedlmayer and myself.

  We arrived at Grindelwald around 9.30 am and our first call was at the rescue post which was also the guides’ bureau, where we were given the run-down on developments to date. From this moment we were supported in every possible way. Herr Moser, President of the Grindelwald section of the Swiss Alpine Club and the manager of the Hotel Oberland, took care of our equipment and vehicle. Herr Direktor Grob from the travel office gave us lots of photographic material of the Eigerwand to study. Herr Direktor Luchtu gave us complimentary tickets for the Jungfrau railway. From photographs the guide, Fritz Steuri, and others showed us the line of the Sedlmayr-Mehringer climb and we weighed up the possibilities for rescue and recovery. In a short period of time we acquired a lot of facts. Later we took the train to Alpiglen where the missing men had made their headquarters. The bulk of their equipment – bivouac clothes, the second petrol cooker, spare sleeping bags, etc – was still in their hayshed. On Tuesday the 20th, we were told, they had established a food dump on the summit, and, according to reports, set off on the climb on the Wednesday at 3.00 am. From observations made from the West Flank when taking up the food dump, they had formed the impression that they could climb the face in three days and had therefore taken less equipment and emergency food with them. From the hotel owner at Alpiglen we learned more about their proposed climb. One thing that was absolutely clear was that everyone who had seen them climbing was very impressed with their ability. The news of the first attempt on the Eigerwand had spread like wildfire. Two other Munich climbers, Haber and Prosel, who were holidaying in the vicinity, had already begun searching the day before, but due to the snow and stone falls they had had to give up.