Jeff said, “I was thinking about my family, the dinner table. Sweet thoughts. Then about letting them down. It was so lonely. I thought about the chance they’d never find us. I thought about my mom, the closest person to me at the time. Then there were two things left. One was the thirst. We were so dehydrated. All I wanted was a drink. The other thing: I was really praying, out loud in front of someone for the first time in my life. And wondering what would happen to me when I went.”
As evening approached, Jeff said, their extreme thirst was far worse than the cold. There was a hole in the middle of the frozen stream near them, but he knew he would break through the ice if he tried to walk on it. He made his way to the edge of the ten-foot wide stream and, using nylon runners, tied his ice axe to the end of a log. Pushing the log out, he was able to dip his axe into the water. The snow on the axe blade absorbed the water like a sponge. He ate the snow, and twice took a share up to Hugh before losing the energy it took to walk the three paces from boulder to stream.
Lying nearly still, they made it through the third night. On Tuesday morning the two knew they would not last another night.
Throughout that morning they spoke little. At about 1.30 Jeff saw a helicopter above them. He crawled out to spread his red parka among the trees, hoping it would be spotted from the air. When the helicopter continued on, he rejoined Hugh, desolate. An hour later they heard rustling in the trees.
“That was when I looked up and saw ‘the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen!’” said Huey, referring to a quotation later attributed to Jeff by the National Enquirer. (“They made that up,” according to Jeff.) “Know what?” Hugh said with a laugh. “I can’t even remember what she looked like.”
Melissa “Cam” Bradshaw, an Appalachian Mountain Club employee out snowshoeing on her day off, was north-east of Mount Washington in the area called the Great Gulf when she came upon an odd series of tracks. It was 26 January, the third day of a winter storm in which winds had been blowing over 50 mph and the temperature had dropped to – 20°F. The tracks seemed to stagger, and crossed themselves several times. She began to follow them through the snow. An hour and a quarter later she peered beneath a boulder. Amid snow and cut spruce branches lay two boys, side by side. Their faces were ashen, with sunken eyes and cracked lips. They turned their heads and fixed her with dull gazes.
Cam Bradshaw was unconnected with the search and rescue effort under way on the other side of the mountain. In fact, Matt Pierce, caretaker of the Harvard cabin, had become concerned when the boys had not returned by nightfall on Saturday, and hiked out to the base of Odell to call for them. Visibility was only fifty to seventy yards even with a headlamp, and the wind was blowing 50 mph.
At 7.00 pm Pierce made a radio call to Misha Kirk, on duty at the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) hut in Pinkham Notch, who responded by contacting the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, the United States Forest Service, and the Mountain Rescue Service in North Conway. It was too dark to start a search that night, so the operation was slated to begin at 6.30 the next morning.
Organisation efforts began immediately. Sergeant Carl T. Carlson of the Fish and Game Department called six officers who would be available with snowmobiles. Bill Kane of North Conway expected ten to fifteen volunteers. Two forest rangers, five volunteers from the AMC cabin and five AMC employees joined the roster.
The next morning, Sunday, Misha Kirk found the abandoned bivouac gear at the base of the Odell headwall. Searchers reasoned that the missing climbers could be injured and stalled anywhere along the 1,500-foot Huntington Ravine, from which Odell branches. They set out to search the most probable areas.
Paul Ross, one of mountain rescue’s three team leaders, described his effort that day. He and several others rode five miles up the Auto Road in a snowcat, then set off and walked a mile further, heading for the Alpine Garden, which they intended to descend into Huntington. “But visibility was near zero and winds were so bad we were fighting to walk more than searching,” Ross said.
When nothing more had been found by 4.00 pm, the search was suspended until the next day. The searchers had exhausted many possibilities outside of Odell Gully, but could not search the entire gully because of the severe conditions. With the help of the gear found in the discarded pack, Fish and Game officers identified the missing boys and phoned their parents.
“They could have been anywhere,” Paul Ross commented. “It’s a vast wilderness.”
Only later, when the rescue was several days old, Ross added, did he learn much about the boys he was seeking and their crack climbing reputation.
As Ross’s team mate, Mike Hartrich, observed, “We didn’t know anything about them at first except their ages. They were obviously young – it reeked of inexperience. We thought they’d be in Odell or near it. If we had realised how strong they were, we’d have known they were capable of covering the distance they did. It turned out Herr was a very strong climber, and he’d gone up the gully in about an hour.”
He did not guess the two might have pushed on to the summit. “No one goes to the summit in winter after a technical climb,” Hartrich commented. “It’s a long walk, cold, the terrain is nondescript, and there’s not much to see up there in a whiteout. Of the thousand technical ascents from the Huntington side the mountain gets in a winter, probably no more than two parties go to the summit.”
But even if the searchers had known the two had gone towards the summit, they would not have expected them to descend into the Great Gulf.
The following morning, Doug Madara and Steve Larson of the North Conway rescue team climbed up the right side of Odell Gully until they could see the top ridge. “We could see there was nobody lying there, so we came back down,” Madara said. “We figured we’d done our job.” He sustained minor frostbite: “I think almost everybody did.”
Albert Dow and Michael Hartrich, high on the left side of the gully, found an abandoned karabiner and footprints leading up and out of the gully. They decided to continue up and right across the area known as the Alpine Garden, and descend on the Lion’s Head Trail below it.
“We were following footprints, and could see where they’d made belays,” Hartrich said. “You get a lot of traffic there, but we couldn’t tell – could have been the boys. It was easier to walk across than try to come down through the rock and snow slopes on the side of Odell. You’d have to rappel, in that kind of wind.” They lost the prints, however, in the blowing snow. The two started down the summer trail on Lion’s Head, carefully avoiding potential avalanche slopes. Crossing the winter trail at an elevation of about 4,000 feet, they approached treeline.
“We were on a snow slope,” Hartrich continued. “I glissaded down and was walking in the woods when all of a sudden I was swimming.”
A two-to-three-foot slab of loose snow had avalanched off the 30°-35° slope. The sliding snow was approximately 70 feet wide and 100 feet long; it moved about 350 feet down the slope, trapping both men.
“I was carried probably a hundred feet – I was pretty much buried,” said Hartrich. “The last thing I remember was snow piling around my head. I made a fist and beat at the snow, to try and clear an area around my head. If I just sat there it would have hardened up and I wouldn’t have been able to move.”
He had last seen Albert Dow a few feet above him to the right. Both men had been dragged through a forest of birch trees and firs; Hartrich remembered feeling several break as he hit them. He was able to reach an arm into his anorak pouch and retrieve the radio to call for help. “I couldn’t move anything else,” he said.
Bill Kane, eight other mountain rescue members and two rangers had started up towards the base of the Winter Trail in a Thiokol snowcat to meet Hartrich and Dow. As the minutes passed and the two men did not appear, the group became concerned and Kane tried to make radio contact; thus when Hartrich’s voice on the radio shouted for help, the nine Mountain Rescue members fanned out to search immediately while the two rangers took the snowcat and
raced to the first-aid cache in Tuckerman Ravine for shovels and avalanche probes.
Four others who had been hiking down from the Harvard cabin to Pinkham Notch set off to the avalanche site on foot.
Misha Kirk, who was on snowshoes, had contacted Hartrich and Dow by radio on his way to meeting them at the base of Lion’s Head. He assumed the two were on the Summer Trail, approaching the Winter Trail. The search began there.
A few minutes later, Joe Gill skied across the Winter Trail and heard Hartrich shouting below. Descending, he felt movement in the snow mass and knew the whole area to be prone to slide again.
Joe Gill began to dig Hartrich out from the centre of the avalanche deposition toe at 2.25. He was joined five minutes later by Kirk and the nine from mountain rescue, then the rangers with supplies. The group started the search for Dow with a rapid probing technique known as a coarse probe, down from the top of the gully, checking the deposition debris and any snags, and then they began a fine probe.
They found Dow at 3.15, six feet from where Hartrich had stopped, and attempted to revive him for half an hour. Injuries to his neck and chest showed he had hit a tree.
The four who had been hiking up to the site arrived, to see Dow being taken down in a sled. Albert Dow was pronounced dead on arrival at the North Conway hospital two hours later.
The search resumed on Tuesday with a plan to break the area into grid patterns. An Army National Guard helicopter with a crew of four joined the search, lifting off from Pinkham Notch at 10.00 am. The boys were still believed to be holed up somewhere in the Huntington Ravine or Lion’s Head area.
In trying to enter the ravine the helicopter met extreme turbulence, which forced it to fly 1000–1500 feet above the area being scanned. After an hour it landed to refuel before continuing for another two hours.
It was that day that Cam Bradshaw came across Jeff’s muddled footprints and followed them to their source. She gave Jeff and Huey water, raisins, a vest and a wool shirt, and reassured them that she would return with help. Cam rushed off towards the AMC lodge, passing two hikers whom she sent to the boys by instructing them to follow her footprints. The hikers reached Hugh and Jeff and covered them with sleeping bags. At 3.20 Cam Bradshaw telephoned the AMC to report that the boys were alive.
Within ten minutes the helicopter was launched, and their families and Littleton Hospital in New Hampshire had been notified. Ground crews set off on foot along the Great Gulf Trail.
As the helicopter approached the site one of the two hikers caring for the boys ignited a red flare. The pilot, Captain John Weeden, hovered a hundred yards from the flare where the trees were only about twenty-five feet tall to lower Misha Kirk and another crewman on a forest penetrator hoist, a disk seat protected by metal flanges.
Kirk, a medic, evaluated the boys’ condition and their location. Both were hypothermic and frostbitten; Hugh was incoherent, a stretcher patient. The rescue would be hindered by bad weather, rough terrain, fading light and the eighty-foot trees around them. Kirk remained with hot packs to attend the boys while the helicopter returned to Pinkham Notch to refuel for a lengthy hoist extrication.
Rescuers carried Jeff on a Stokes litter to the evacuation site, an awkward process due to the steep terrain and the three feet of fresh snow on the ground. He was hoisted aboard on the forest penetrator at 5.15.
Several ground crews had now arrived to help, but it was decided to hoist Hugh from where he lay rather than carry him to the evacuation site. This plan would be far more difficult to enact, but speed was now vital. It was dark, and all operations were by the light of headlamps and the helicopter searchlight.
Captain Weeden maintained the helicopter’s position 110 feet above the site. Walter Lessard controlled the operation from the rear of the craft, lowering the hoist cable to the litter below. As the litter rose, it revolved so that the litter head was below the helicopter runners. Hampered by his gloves, Lessard took them off to straighten the litter, despite the sub-zero temperatures and the paralysing wind caused by the propeller blades.
“It seemed like he was struggling with it for five or ten minutes,” Jeff observed. “Then it slid in.” It was 5.45. Kirk and the ret of the party below began to hike out towards Pinkham Notch.
The boys arrived at Littleton Hospital at 7.00 pm, three full days after they were reported missing. Jeff’s core temperature was 94°, Huey’s, 93°. No one could tell what their temperatures were before they received aid from the hikers.
The mistakes the boys made are easy to identify. Their decision to try for the summit of Mount Washington got them lost when the weather worsened. They had changed their intended route, so that rescuers looked for them in the wrong places. Had they not ditched their bivvy gear, they could have shared it in relative warmth. Although unfamiliar with the area, they carried no map or compass. A trail guide would have told them that the Madison hut was above treeline and closed for the winter.
A sharp backlash of public and media opinion followed the accident. Martha Herr, Hugh’s mother, summed up the reaction: “ ‘These dumb flatlanders come up and do this and one of our own died for it.’ It got so we would wonder, can we buy the paper today or will it just depress us?” she said.
The New Hampshire people who were most critical of the incident tended not to be a part of the local mountain rescue service, Albert Dow’s team mates.
“Certainly I don’t resent them,” Paul Ross of Mountain Rescue said. “We’ve all made mistakes. When I was very young, about sixteen or seventeen, I’d go blundering up mountains. Once I had to walk fourteen miles to get home. I never got bloody lost again!”
Michael Hartrich put it another way: “The boys did things most people wouldn’t have done. But they didn’t do anything I haven’t done. I just didn’t do them all at once!”
Hartrich disclaimed credit for his own part in the rescue. “People say, you’re so brave to be out in those conditions. But for an experienced climber they weren’t extraordinary. The terrain was not very difficult technically. I don’t think anybody felt they were sticking their necks out.
“It was chance that Albert hit a tree. If he’d ended up like I was, one of us might have dug the other out. We’d have brushed ourselves off and laughed about it.”
Sixteen days after his rescue, Huey was transferred to the Presbyterian Medical Center of the University Hospital in Philadelphia. Circulation to his feet continued to be poor, and the tissue was infected.
Nine days after Hugh’s transfer, Jeff entered Lancaster General Hospital. Infection was evident and circulation poor in his right hand and left foot.
On Tuesday 2 March Jeff’s doctor was compelled to amputate the young man’s right thumb and four fingers down to the first joint. Three days later he amputated Jeff’s left foot. Jeff also lost the toes on his right foot.
Eight days after Jeff’s amputations, about six weeks after the rescue, Hugh’s doctor amputated both of the young man’s legs six inches below the knee.
As we have seen, Hugh not only returned to climbing, he became better at it than he was before. Half a year after his amputations, he was climbing 5.11, and two years later he was climbing 5.12 more often and more confidently than ever. He is maybe the only amputee in the world to refer to his artificial limbs as an advantage: he is lighter now, so that his strength-to-weight ratio has improved. He has five pairs of feet, four of them for climbing different kinds of rock. One pair features pointed toes for crack climbing. Hugh’s technical ice climbing too has improved; he uses rigid crampons shortened to about six inches for improved leverage.
He has difficulty walking on rough terrain, and when a trail is snow-covered, he crawls. Climbing steep ice is usually much easier than approaching it. Damaging the tissue on his legs one day can mean he must stay off his feet for three; the same applies to Jeff.
Hugh speaks of college, and perhaps of training to become a prosthetist, building artificial limbs. But for now, he confesses, “I’d rather get my slide shows and
pants business going, and climb.” He makes his living piecemeal: painting houses, sewing climbing gear for Wild Things Alpine Equipment in North Conway and sewing Lycra climbing pants of his own design in wild colours. He gives frequent slide shows to general audiences and handicapped people.
Jeff returned to his job as an apprentice tool-and-die maker, and his other sports pastime, competitive cycling. One year after his accident Jeff competed in a cycling race up Mount Washington. But more important to him now is his religious faith. He speaks to local church groups about what happened to him physically and spiritually during and as a result of his accident, and plans to go to bible college to train for the evangelical ministry.
Snow on the Equator
Oswald Oelz, Robert Chambers,
Raimund Margreiter
This tale of a rescue on Mount Kenya is one of the most amazing in the annals of mountaineering. The rescuers had not only to combat the technical difficulties of the climb, but some had also to deal with the debilitating effect of altitude sickness. One rescuer was killed. The man they were trying to reach they expected to be already dead from his injuries. Several of the main characters in this high African adventure still feel, after seventeen years, that it was the most demanding and profound period of their lives.
Robert Chambers of the Mountain Club of Kenya was in charge of the rescue bid and he can still recall every detail of those days in 1970. Two friends of mine took part in the operation. Dr Oswald Oelz was one of the two Austrian climbers involved in the accident, it was his colleague who fell. John Temple was one of the rescuers who made a great contribution, especially in the early stages of the rescue. My recollections of John Temple are associated with balmy days in the Cuillins of Skye, warm rock and lumps of uncompromising commercial glucose as hard as gabbro, which caused temporary discomfort to my stomach and permanent damage to my teeth. John had an inexhaustible source of glucose, and Ian Clough, who was the third member of this happy rock-climbing trio, swore that the lumps would make excellent artificial chockstones from which to attach running belays. This was back in 1958 and the alloy chock had still to be invented. We enjoyed many routes together during that summer before John Temple left for Nairobi where he did some impressive climbs on Mount Kenya, some of them first ascents.
The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 46