The pitch was about 130 feet and when I got higher the abseil rope hung almost horizontal behind me. The steeper it got the more precarious and strenuous it became to step up. Several times near the top I very nearly fell off.
After six hours of this hell I popped my head out through the roof exit and saw before me all the world. My world. The feeling of exultation was quite indescribable. I couldn’t believe that I had done it. I could see the glacier about 150 feet below me and the route back to camp. I was yelling and shouting like a mad thing, just shouting for no reason except perhaps relief. I wanted to cry but couldn’t.
It was about 12.30 pm on a bright sunny day. When I reached the glacier, I knew that Simon had returned presuming me dead. I saw his tracks and started to crawl after them. The rest was just crawling. For another three days I clawed my way down, getting weaker each day. Despite being out of it a lot of the time, hallucinating on the glacier, talking to myself, shouting then shouting some more, I just kept going mechanically, detached, like an automaton. I was very methodical about it. I am surprised in retrospect how controlled I was, fixing stages to reach, not thinking beyond them, snow holing and bivouacking when I wanted to keep going on yet knew the weather would kill me if I did. I know that if I had been in that situation at eighteen, I would not have survived. There was a lot of experience in me that made me do the right thing at the right time.
By far the hardest thing was being alone, having no one to talk to or to encourage me. The great temptation was to just lie still and say sod it, I’m going to sleep for a while. It was so hard to fight on my own. This was especially so the two days on the boulder field when I fell a lot; I always seemed to be lying still, waiting for pain to subside.
I had continuous conversations with myself as if I were talking with another person. On the last day, 1 June, I saw Simon’s and Richard’s footprints in the mud and was convinced that they were with me. There was an uncanny sense of someone else following along quietly. It felt very comforting. I was absolutely sure for about three hours that Richard was in front and Simon behind, out of sight because they didn’t want me to be embarrassed by my condition, but encouraging me along. When I fell over and it hurt badly they didn’t come to help. I thought it was because they wanted me to do this thing by myself and that seemed all right, really. I was just glad that they were there and someone knew I wasn’t dead.
Suddenly the bubble burst and I knew they had never been there and that I was alone and dead as far as they were concerned. That came as quite a blow to me mentally.
Until halfway through the third day dehydration was very bad. I had had no water or food since Sunday night. It now was Tuesday and I felt terrible. I couldn’t raise saliva and my tongue was swollen and dry. I had trouble breathing evenly, always being excessively out of breath. When I got to water I drank litres and litres. It tasted like nectar and at once I began to feel stronger and had less trouble breathing.
I knew having no food was bad but didn’t miss it and I was very much aware that I was getting progressively weaker and slower. That last, usually ten-minute, walk to camp took me six and a half hours! I could just shuffle a bit and then lie back shattered. I’ve never felt so fucked in my life.
Simon and Richard were meanwhile packing up camp:
The night before we had arranged to leave, just as it was getting dark, I heard a distant cry that sounded like “Simon”. I thought little of it as there had been a few locals about tending to their cattle. But Richard and I were awakened shortly after midnight by a clear call of “Simon, help me.”
We shot out of our sleeping bags and dashed outside the tent. It was an eerie sight that greeted us. The night was misty with gently falling snow. Joe was slumped on a rock about fifty yards from the tent. He was in an appalling physical state. His face was incredibly thin, his eyes sunken, he was covered in mud, stank of fleas and urine, with a smell of acetone on his breath from starvation.
Joe said later:
I believe that was as far as I would have got. When Simon’s and Richard’s torches came bobbing across the snow everything seemed to drain out of me; all the fight which had kept me going evaporated. There was no longer a need to boost myself, now others would help. I felt myself just give up and pain came rushing in, the exhaustion, everything. I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t the point at which I was most at risk, whether I could suddenly just have keeled over and died. I felt like death, and no doubt smelt like it as well.
At this point a helicopter would have been an answer to prayer, but this was not the Alps or Glencoe. It was one of the remoter corners of the High Andes, and evacuating Joe Simpson involved a tortuous haggling first with muleteers, then with police in the nearest town, followed by a truck ride to Lima with an obliviously drunken driver, before Joe was deposited in hospital three days later. He was not yet rid of the trauma of his ghastly experience and in hospital during pre-sedation had one more of those weird dreams he had suffered during the long nights and agonising days after the accident.
Joe:
I was back in the crevasse again and a passage from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure came to mind where a condemned man contemplates execution. I had had to learn it about fifteen years before and hadn’t seen or even thought about it since. It was a dream with words. When I woke up I wrote it on my plaster cast:
Death is a fearful thing . . .
. . . To die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice . . .
The Bogus Commander and the
Y-fronts Rescue
Hamish MacInnes
I find it intriguing that the most memorable rescues are not those reminiscent of trench warfare scenes, with a victim’s brains splattered over rocks or limbs distorted by a horrendous fall. The mind seems to have the ability to filter such horrific sights, at least to reduce the focus of memory. Only a few rescues are fun and the jokes and events are recalled with clarity and nostalgia.
The Y-fronts rescue was one such. It certainly was unusual and had an added element of farce about it. Also the weather was balmy, which always helps. We weren’t involved in struggling up avalanche-prone slopes looking for buried bodies, or subjected to running the gauntlet of falling rocks, invisible in the dark.
The Y-fronts call-out still resides in that compartment of our memory labelled Fun things: instant recall, whereas many tragedies are fortunately blurred and seemingly of another time and place.
Its chapter companion, the tale of the bogus Commander, though not X-certificate, is remembered for the frustration it generated, and the precious time wasted. It too is unique in its own perverted way and is an interesting study of human behaviour.
It was Easter weekend 1987 that the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team was called out to an incident on Stob Coire nan Beith, a mountain on the south side of the glen. It towers above Loch Achtriochtan and resembles a hurriedly assembled pyramid, as if created just before the Almighty’s coffee break. Severing its flanks of red rhyolite is a gully deep and straight, rising steeply from scree at its base to the very summit. It was down this defile, Summit Gully, that a climber fell 1,000 feet and suffered fatal head injuries. His companion miraculously survived and hobbled down to raise the alarm. Easter weekend normally presages the tail end of winter, though it can also be a time of snap frosts as it was on this occasion. The gully resembled a slick high-angled bob sleigh run plunging down to rock-studded snow slopes at the base.
I had asked for a helicopter for the call-out, as the carry down to the A82 through Glencoe is both boulder-strewn and arm-stretching with a loaded stretcher.
By this time we had gone up through the steep narrow mouth of the corrie before we received a radio call from Police Constable Stewart O’Bree at our base truck. The truck was parked
close to the Elliots’ cottage at Loch Achtriochtan.
“Base to hill party, base to hill party, Sea King helicopter ETA forty-five minutes.”
“Copied that, Stewart,” I replied.
Meantime we had located the fallen climber, partly buried in snow debris. We lowered him to easier ground, then, putting him in a body bag, strapped him on to the stretcher.
The day was cold and wintry with a stiff south-westerly curling over the ridges high above. The blast collected confetti-like snow particles and infused them into the clear air. The corrie, which often doubles as nature’s centrifuge, a virtual wind generator when a strong south-westerly blows, is a nightmare for chopper pilots. Flying conditions weren’t good and I remembered that the wind direction had veered to the southwest overnight. When the Sea King arrived and tried to nudge its way into the corrie it was as if the big yellow machine was being repeatedly struck by a huge invisible hammer. We realised with resignation that it was now a case of all hands on shafts and shanks’s pony to base. However, as usual, there was the happy prospect of a pint at the Clachaig Inn some 2,000 feet below after our toil.
What unfolded next was the strangest series of events ever to befall the Glencoe team. It started with a garbled message over the RT.
“Hello, Glencoe base, this is Navy 71, Navy 71 . . .”
This was followed by the flak of static. We didn’t receive Stewart’s reply to this as we were now in a blind spot close to the stream which plunges out of Coire Beith, beside the waterfall known as Ossian’s Shower Bath.
“Come in, Navy 71, this is Glencoe base.”
There was a long pause.
“Base to hill party, base to hill party. A brief message has been received reporting a further incident to a naval party of eight persons. As far as I can gather there’s one casualty – a broken leg. Can you advise on procedure please?”
“Got that, Stewart. Also heard a bit of it direct. Try and get more info on their location. But they’ll have to wait in the queue. We’ll have the dead climber down in about an hour.”
“Roger, I’ll try and raise them again, out.”
“Hello, Navy 71, this is Glencoe base, please identify yourself.”
In a few minutes Stewart relayed to us the reply.
“Hello, Hamish, the naval Commander says he’s not sure of their position as the only map they have is in a rucksack with the cadet who’s fallen. They can’t get down to him. He also asked if it’s possible to pinpoint their position using a radio detection finder. I told him the team doesn’t have one.”
“Thanks, Stewart, we got that.”
Then came a call from the 202 Squadron Sea King of RAF Lossiemouth. It was being driven by Flight Lieutenant Stephen Hodgson, his co-pilot was Flight Lieutenant Harry Watt. They too had intercepted the cryptic message identified as Navy 71.
The tone of these messages confirmed the Commander’s military background, the procedure was impeccable, the accent English and clipped, and there was that bona fide call sign, Navy 71.
Two other members of the rescue team had arrived at base. Walter Elliot with his brother Willie and their father before them had been engaged on rescues long before we had an official rescue team in the area. With him was John Hardie, then a climbing instructor. Walter with a shepherd’s intimate knowledge of the glen tried to get a more accurate description of the location from the naval caller but was frustrated, both by the failure to get a sensible reply to his questions, or even an acknowledgement. The only clues he got were: “As far as I can determine my party’s reached the fourth peak on the left after the National Trust for Scotland Centre.”
When we heard this from Walter on the radio, we came to the conclusion that this probably put the location of the accident on the south side of the Aonach Eagach Ridge.
The question about the location detector was curious, to say the least, and we discussed it as we negotiated the steep rocky descent, for it was an unusual thing to ask and Stewart’s accurate but negative reply that we didn’t have one may have escalated the following sequence of events.
We arrived at base with the fallen climber and the ambulance reversed up to the truck to collect the stretcher. As I watched the body bag being slid into the vehicle I thought another mountain rescue statistic which never considers the trauma of a young life lost and the destitution and grief of the relatives. He had been a social worker from Devon, taking in Glencoe for the Easter break. Meanwhile the Sea King had landed close by on the field in front of Achnabeitach, the Elliots’ cottage.
In the poor light and squalls Willie Elliot, Walter’s brother, with his stalking telescope, or glass as he calls it, spied a group of climbers near the west end of the Aonach Eagach Ridge across the glen. They were invisible to the naked eye. This was a chance for us to use our secret weapon, a beefy directional amplifier system which echoes round the crags like a sonic boom. We managed to contact the climbers 3,000 feet above and a mile or so away. Base was of course too distant to hear any replies, but the climbers were asked to make arm signals in reply to our specific questions. In this way, with powerful binoculars, we established that, despite traversing most of the ridge, they had seen no sign of another party. Willie Elliot, with the solemnity of a Highland seer, was the first really to cast doubt on the authenticity of this latest call-out.
“Aye,” he said, sliding his glass closed in one deft movement and putting it back in its case, “it seems a funny business to me!” I learned later that those at base felt that they were being watched, for it was uncanny how the calls from the naval party seemed to synchronise with movements at base.
We had a quick fix of lemonade and Mars bars at the truck, then rustled up a hurried search plan. Within a couple of hours of receiving the first call from the naval party we were once again, like the Grand Old Duke of York’s ten thousand men, only rather fewer, toiling up the mountain opposite.
Despite the negative message from the climbers on the crest, we concentrated our search on the Aonach Eagach Ridge which is on the north side of the glen. We knew that due to the steepness of the face much of it isn’t visible from the top. This ridge stretches in four miles like a great jagged barrier reef. It is the narrowest ridge on the British mainland and a popular venue for walkers to fall from. Now it had shed most of the winter’s snow and the black rock pinnacles above resembled unhealthy molars in the fading light. In this setting it was easy to visualise it as a remnant of the power of the last ice age. Even to this day there are erratics poised on the summit crest.
We also sent four of the team, Davy Gunn, John Hardie, Bob Hamilton and Peter Harrop, to search the narrow ridge of Gearr Aonach, which is one of the Three Sisters, so called by the tour drivers who can’t pronounce the Gaelic names of these aloof rocky maidens. This ridge too was exposed to the icy blast.
All the team was now out, as well as some volunteer climbers. There was no further response from the phantom caller, however, despite repeated requests from base or from the team walkie-talkies at their higher elevation. The trouble was, we realised, that the distress call could have come from anywhere over a wide area and it would take many more rescuers and volunteers than we could muster to search every valley, gully and buttress within walkie-talkie range. It was a daunting task.
There was an unusual report of a naval officer being seen at Clachaig Hotel by Doris Elliot, Walter and Willie’s sister. She saw this official looking figure operating a walkie-talkie and he seemed to be spasmodically driving about in a naval vehicle, as if trying to get a better signal. Naturally she didn’t think anything of it at the time as there are often military parties in the area.
Meantime PC Stewart O’Bree, now relieved by Willie Elliot at base, was making official enquiries at road level, trying to glean more information on the naval party who must be staying at some centre or camping in the region and have at least one vehicle.
A frigid twilight had given way to inky bodges in hollows which spread to envelope the slopes of the Aonach Eagach and
merged into a uniform blackness. By the time we had descended from our various search sectors it was 1.00 am. Our headlights formed pinpricks in the night and on the A82 vehicle headlamps stabbed the darkness, creating long arcs of light on the corners. There was still no sign of the missing cadets.
We were now highly sceptical of the radio calls. First there was the question asking about a radio detection finder at the very start of the scenario; then the convenient uncanny silences when specific questions were asked. Also it is very difficult to make eight aspirant sailors vanish into thin air, even in such a vast area as Glencoe.
When I got back home there was little chance of grabbing sleep. Despite our deepest misgivings we had to continue the search. An extra helicopter, a Wessex from RAF Leuchars in Fife, was scheduled for dawn, together with an RAF Mountain Rescue Team and three civilian teams. This made a total of a hundred rescuers.
Next day we continued searching; we consoled ourselves with the fact that hoaxes in the realm of mountain rescue are rare, and the knowledge that you just can’t take impetuous decisions to abandon an operation prematurely when lives may be involved. The media inadvertently assisted. The story had captured the headlines. Mystery coupled with possible tragedy is irresistible fodder for the tabloids.
Further down the glen, at the Forestry Commission campsite, some progress was made. It was discovered that a man in naval uniform had spent the night at the camp. He had since vanished. Stewart O’Bree, now back at the local police station, had received a telephone call via Police Headquarters in Fort William from a Mr McCubbin who operated a small store at the Forestry campsite – only about a mile from where our base truck was parked. He gave a statement to Stewart that both he and Robert Fordham, the camp warden, had been told by campers about a “naval person” who had been acting strangely. The naval officer had bought provisions at the shop and had paid for them by cheque, signed “A. Wilson”. This, we realised could be our bogus Commander.
The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 43