I decided to call an old friend, consultant and expert in sports medicine, Donald MacLeod. “Could there be a psychiatric explanation for this strange behaviour, Donald?” I asked, and added, “Is he in any other danger than falling over a cliff?”
“I think that’s possible, Hamish,” said Donald slowly, “but, hold on, I’ll give a colleague a ring. He’s an expert in this sort of behaviour. Your missing man may be on medication, or even drugs, which doesn’t always agree with alcohol.”
It transpired that I knew Donald’s colleague, Dr Martin Plant, who was also a climber. Our suspicions were confirmed by Martin.
“Yes, in certain circumstances someone with a specific mental condition, and under medication, and having taken alcohol, could be more or less immune to physical pain and quite capable of taking the unusual hike.”
Though this theorising didn’t help us much, it did put another slant on the dilemma. A fine heat haze was forming; Glencoe was unusually busy with an assortment of groups and individuals heading up Coire na Tulaich and other routes to the summit of the Buachaille. Some continued over the three main tops running from north-east to south-west.
At 1.45 pm came what we thought was a positive sighting. A man fitting Dave’s description had been spotted heading south to the second peak, Stob na Doire. How this came about was as follows: members of the Glencoe team who had ascended the long drag towards the summit ridge were fanned out across the vast expanse of the eastern wall of the mountain, checking every likely and unlikely depression and boulderfield. Bob Hamilton, a fisherman by trade, spotted a couple above, dressed in black motorcycling leathers, an even more bizarre sight than someone sporting only Y-fronts in a heat wave!
Bob has a charming apologetic way of asking questions, but I think he probably surprised himself when this one came out as, “Are you wearing underpants?” He realised that this was a pointless enquiry, considering the heavy neck to riding boot apparel of both riders. But before he could rephrase things one of the men responded as if it was a perfectly common question to be asked on top of a mountain.
“If it’s underpants you’re after, there’s a chap up above wearing only Y-fronts.”
That’s when an embarrassed Bob came on the radio and alerted us at base. From our truck I relayed this message to all rescue teams, some on other frequencies. The helicopter crews pricked up their ears – action at last.
Shortly afterwards, Ronnie Rogers, dressed only in white shorts, a rucksack and climbing boots, who was above Bob and to the south a bit, spotted Y-fronted Dave about half a mile ahead on the summit ridge. With renewed effort he set off in pursuit. Ronnie’s fleeting figure was then seen by another member of our team, Peter Weir, who at the distance mistook Ronnie’s shorts for Y-fronts. Peter then too shifted up a gear and started running along the wide easy crest. At this point Dave was out of Peter’s sight as he had dropped into a dip on the ridge. David Cooper, a local business man who helps the team from time to time in search operations, also joined the pursuit.
Ronnie caught up with the genuine Y-fronts at last and, to his relief, saw that Dave appeared uninjured, even his feet seemed fine. Dave was under a rocky outcrop when Ronnie, swiftly followed by Peter and then Bob and David, reached him. He had his hands on a large slab of rock when Ronnie, ever polite, asked, “What are you doing, Dave?”
“Having a shower – give me a hand!” was the immediate retort.
“Where did you spend the night?” asked the incredulous Ronnie.
“I had a terrible time,” Dave blurted out. “There were monstrous cats going round me all night, some of them had huge heads . . .”
“How’s your back?” a breathless Peter asked, for he saw it was an angry red with sunburn.
“Oh, I slept in the snow last night. It was cool, my back was burning.”
Others soon joined them, but Ronnie couldn’t contact base to give us the glad tidings as they were in a radio blind spot. David Cooper went up to a higher point and from there was able to get a signal out. A helicopter was fired up. The Sea King landed on the ridge close by and Dave and some of the rescuers were picked up. On the way down to base, Dave, who had been given a headset by the winchman, told the crew, “This is the best trip I ever had.”
When he landed he was quickly checked over and there was no sign of serious injury other than sunburn. I gave him the loan of a jacket and a pair of overtrousers for his flight to the Belford Hospital in Fort William. It surprised us all when Dave was released later that day.
Windy Mountain Epic
Alison Osius
The following story is of two young men who, with hindsight, could be accused of acting foolishly and of not observing the basic rules of mountain safety. It is always easy to be wise after the event and there is always a battery of armchair experts ready to point the accusing finger. However, we all make mistakes, especially when young and in the mountains, where often experience is gained through errors. Sometimes these are minor and go into one’s memory bank for future use, occasionally they have far-reaching consequences, as they did with Hugh Herr and Jeff Batzer. They will have to live with their mistake for the rest of their lives.
A friend of mine, Paul Ross, was a member of the rescue team involved in this incident, and he was also one of the principal actors in our 1958 excursion on the Bonatti Pillar.
Alison Osius worked for Paul in his mountaineering school as a climbing instructor and she knew many of the rescuers as well as the two rescued men. Paul suggested to me that she could write an unbiased report of what was a very controversial incident.
Thirty feet up a rock wall, nineteen-year-old Hugh Herr presses hard with the three fingertips he has fitted on to a quarter-inch quartzite edge, and reaches right to pinch a sloping pebble. He thrusts his upper lip out in ferocious concentration, then swiftly moves his feet up on to two crystals jutting out like small thorns. He slaps left to palm a dent in the rock.
His last piece of protection is below his feet: if he falls, he would drop in a “winger” of at least ten feet before his rope pulled taut. His left hand crosses over to a three-quarter-inch hold, his right to one bigger yet, and he cruises to a ledge.
With an exultant whoop, Huey ties himself to metal wedges he inserts into the rock, the climb over: a new 5.12, virtually the top level in rock climbing, in the Shawangunks, New York. Such ratings depend on strenuousness and the size of the holds, regardless of the route’s length. Huey, his face tense with excitement, brings three other climbing experts up the route one by one; they all take falls but eventually join him. A fourth, strength spent, gives up halfway.
Huey rappels to the ground, his purple-striped pants and multi-coloured Spandex top astonishing against the grey-brown rock. He rests his left foot on his knee, takes an Allen wrench from his pack, inserts it into a hole in the bottom of his artificial limb, and efficiently unscrews the foot. The wood and rubber foot is painted with an amusing parody of a Nike sneaker. The fibreglass leg is blue, with pink polka dots.
He tried to climb this line on the cliff a few years ago, before he lost both his lower legs.
“But I was doing it all wrong then,” he comments, screwing on a different foot, its purple paint slightly peeling. “It’s all in the footwork.”
Before the accident, Huey was called the Boy Wonder, or Baby Huey (after a cartoon character who doesn’t know his own strength). He was a competitive gymnast on his high school team and arguably the best rock climber in the east. Today he is called the Bionic Boy and the Mechanical Boy. In March 1982 he had both legs amputated below the knees due to frostbite. Now, on artificial legs, he is climbing better than he was before.
He speaks haltingly of the mountaineering accident, when youthful optimism and misjudgment, things apart from his technical abilities, brought disaster. A volunteer rescuer died in an avalanche; for Huey, months of depression and pain followed.
Fiercely driven before, he became more so after the accident. “After all the efforts people made to sa
ve me, I felt I should make an incredible output to do well,” he said.
Alone, he slipped out of his hospital bed to practise lifting his weight with his fingertips on a window ledge. The first time he tried to climb rock on his artificial legs, he cried because he couldn’t stand up. Months of intense practice brought back spirit and superb ability: “When I knew it was possible to return to where I was before, the thought drove me nuts,” he says now.
“I’d always had this incredible joy climbing. You’re totally narrow-minded, zooming your mind into the rock, into the power of your hands, staying calm. Just calculating and going for it.
“I don’t think I’ll ever think I’m good at climbing. Ever think I’ve mastered the mental part of it.”
He confesses to being turned on by risk. “A lot of climbers don’t admit that. Placing myself into severe situations forces the best out of me.”
Another Gunks (Shawangunks) regular, Russ Clune, said that when Huey was only fifteen he was not only extraordinarily strong but “the most balls-out climber I’d ever seen” when risking a long fall, even a “grounder”, otherwise known as a “crater”.
From Huey’s father: “He is a fierce obsessive. Climbing for him was the greatest therapy in the world. He doesn’t want to be the best handicapped climber in the world, though. He wants to be the best climber. Of the homo sapiens, period.”
On Friday 22 January 1982 Huey Herr, then aged seventeen, and his friend Jeff Batzer, twenty, both from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, drove north to New Hampshire for a weekend of ice climbing on Mount Washington.
Mount Washington (6,288 feet/1,916 metres) is a formidable prospect in winter, its grim list of over a hundred fatalities making it as dangerous as mountains three times its size. The reason for the disproportionate number of accidents is the weather, which is considered as extreme as any on the American continent south of Alaska. Winds average forty-four miles per hour on its summit, where the Mount Washington Observatory frequently gauges wind velocities of over one hundred. In 1934 the observatory clocked a gust of 231 mph, the highest recorded wind speed in the world.
Huey and Jeff awoke at dawn in the Harvard cabin at the base of Mount Washington, where climbers frequently sleep. They were appropriately equipped for a day out. Each put on long underwear, layers of wool clothing, Gore-Tex parkas and outer pants, and mountaineering boots covered by padded Supergaitors.
The summit temperature was 9°F, and high winds and rapid weather changes were expected; it was already “snowing like crazy”, as Jeff put it. Huey and Jeff, carrying a pack with rope, climbing and bivouac gear, were the first of seven climbers to leave the cabin. They told Matt Pierce, the hut caretaker, they intended to make a day trip up Odell Gully, involving about five hundred feet of technical ice climbing, an equal distance of snow hiking, and a descent via the Escape Hatch Gully. The two hiked about three-quarters of a mile to the base of Odell Gully, on the east side of the mountain.
Deciding that the pack and sleeping bag would slow their progress, they elected to carry only technical gear, and left their bivvy gear at the base of Odell Gully, to be reclaimed during the descent.
Huey later recalled moving fast and confidently up the four pitches of ice in Odell. He wanted to solo Odell, and he let the rope trail free behind him, enjoying the concentration required. At the end of each rope length, he would tie himself into ice screw placements to belay Jeff. Neither spoke beyond a few rope commands, nothing unusual for Huey, who is naturally quiet. The two raced up the ice section within an hour and a half, and began to trudge up the dry, loose snow above. The summit was about 1,500 feet further. The boys crouched behind a boulder out of the wind.
“You want to try for the summit?” Hugh asked.
“Think we could make it?”
“Well, we could just go a ways,” Hugh suggested.
“We thought we’d sprint to the summit and spring right back,” Jeff said later. “It was blowing really hard, but visibility wasn’t too bad. It started out fun, really cold and windy, with ice crystallising on our faces.”
The two boys are uncertain at what point they stopped. A Mount Washington rescue report compiled later estimates that they turned back when they reached Ball’s Crag, less than half a mile from the top. Winds there were blowing at 64 mph, and gusting to 94; the temperature was one degree above zero.
“The weather was just horrendous,” said Huey. “I said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ I turned back the way I thought we’d come.” Having no map or compass, they tried to use the wind direction to get their bearings. “I guess it changed,” he said.
In the wind and snow, the two crossed the auto road at least once without knowing it. This cuts a switchback up the mountain’s north side.
For a while, they thought they had found a gully they remembered from the approach. Huey started run-stepping down it, elated. Jeff could barely keep up, and kept shouting to Hugh to slow down, in case he were nearing steep ice in the Escape Hatch.
The two were above treeline, and could see nothing of the terrain around them. They had descended the wrong side of the mountain, starting down the north-east ridge into the area known appropriately as the Great Gulf, and were moving down a water drainage run towards the trees.
“I realised for sure we were screwed when the gully just went and went, but going back up would have been death. It was the trees that saved us,” Hugh said.
At first they trudged through a foot of snow, Jeff said, but well into the woods they struggled with snow up to their waists. Small fir trees, their branches interlocking, further slowed the boys’ progress. Daylight faded.
Knowing they were lost, the boys dumped their hardware, rope and crampons, and slogged along the west branch of the Peabody River. Hugh broke through the ice, wetting his feet.
They continued to hike until perhaps 1.00 am, then found a granite boulder they could use for shelter, and cut spruce branches to lie upon and under. Hugh, exhausted, his clothes soaked and frozen, would cut a few twigs, then sit and stare. Jeff had more strength, and collected most of the branches. Hugh stripped his wet clothes off from the waist down, and put on a pair of Jeff’s wool cycling tights and socks, then his own wool pants. That night, they kept fairly warm by hugging each other, and rubbed each other’s feet for hours. The next morning, however, the boys could barely get their frozen leather boots back on their feet.
Hugh fell in the stream again the next day, breaking through to his chest this time. The water, two feet beneath the ice, surged over his knees. Gripped by the thought of being pulled under the ice, he shouted for help. Jeff grabbed a tree with one hand, extended his axe towards Hugh and slowly pulled him out.
At about 8.30 am they came to the junction of Madison Gulf Trail and the Osgood Cut-Off; signs pointed towards snow-covered trails to Pinkham Notch, Mount Washington Auto Road, Madison hut and Great Gulf Trail. Thinking they were saved, “We just stood there and cried,” Hugh said. Unfamiliar with the area, the two set off towards the Madison hut, only two and a half miles away. What they did not know was that the Madison hut is both above the treeline and closed in winter.
“That’s what really killed us,” Huey concluded. “If we’d taken the right trail [towards Pinkham Notch, four and a half miles] we’d have walked right out of there.”
They wasted waning hours and energy flailing up the steep, snow-covered trail, then turned back towards the intersection. Huey fell as they neared the signs, then again a hundred yards further, beside a boulder. This time he did not rise.
The boys crawled under the rock, pulling spruce branches about them again for warmth. When Jeff tried to take off his boots he found that the toes of his two pairs of socks had frozen to his boots. He inserted his ice axe into the boots, and sawed the toes of his socks off. Jeff wrapped his stockinged feet in his parka; Hugh put his mittens on his feet. During the night, temperatures dropped to – 17°F, with winds continuing at about 50 mph.
At dawn on Monday, when Jeff tried to pull his
first boot on, he found the tongue frozen stiff. He pried both boot tongues open with his ice axe, but then his swollen feet rammed against the frozen clumps of socks inside. He was able to pry the socks out of his right boot with his ice axe, and he and Hugh pulled together as hard as they could to haul the boot on to Jeff’s foot.
“I worked on the other boot for two hours,” Jeff said, “but I couldn’t get the frozen sock out.” (Two years later he reached into his old boot and found the wad of wool still there.) He kept elbowing Hugh, saying, “C’mon, get your boots on.” But Hugh would lean forward, pause, then drop back. “His boots were horrible,” Jeff said. “Covered with ice. He was delirious, hardly saying anything.”
“I wasn’t delirious,” Hugh countered. “I was thinking about dying. I didn’t have much to say.”
That morning, Hugh said, “We’d have these contradictory surges: OK, we have to get out of this – then, we’re gonna die.” He gave up on his boots and tried to walk with his mittens on his feet. “But I could only walk ten paces before I’d fall over.”
Jeff mustered his last reserves, and made a desperate effort to hike alone to Pinkham Notch for help. He wore only one boot; he put an overmitt on the other foot. Several times he lost the trail, buried as it was. The blowing snow stuck to the trees and concealed the painted blazes. He found himself crossing his own tracks, reeling back and forth across the same area in search of a blaze. He finally fought his way back to where Hugh lay.
“Hugh, I failed,” he said.
“That’s OK,” Hugh said simply.
The two felt their last chance was gone. “I totally relaxed then and let the cold engulf me,” Hugh said. “I was completely numb. No pain. No hope. I’d fully accepted it.”
Neither could stand now. They lapsed into long reveries as they lay still under the boulder. “I was mostly thinking about people, parents, how they’re going to react,” said Hugh. “It was terrible. So sad. Dying young – I felt cheated. I thought about my friends at the Gunks. I thought about all the routes I wasn’t going to do there.” Huey was hugging his friend for warmth, their legs overlapping. “Want to hear something I’ve never told anyone before? When I was lying there, I had to go to the bathroom and I couldn’t move. I thought, I’m going to die anyway, and I just went. On our legs.”
The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 45