The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters

by MacInnes, Hamish

  The first European to record seeing what later became known as Mount Kenya was a resolute German missionary, Dr Johann Krapf, who looked northwards from a village in the Wa-Kamba district on 3 December 1849 and saw “snow on the equator”. “It appeared to me,” he wrote, “like a gigantic wall, on whose summit I observed two immense towers, or horns, as you might call them. These horns or towers, which are at a short distance from each other, give the mountain a grand and majestic appearance which raised in my mind overwhelming feelings.” Though natives had spoken earlier of the mountain to explorers and missionaries, they were not believed, nor immediately was Dr Krapf. Indeed it was to be fifty years before someone climbed the mountain which gave the state its name.

  The first recorded attempt was made in 1893 by Professor Gregory, whose loyal Zanzibari bearers made better porters than climbers and had an understandable distrust of snow and ice. One agreed to rope up with his master, but when a hold broke under him his nerve broke too and he addressed the professor: “That is all very well for Wajuuxi [lizards] and Wazungu [white men] but Zanzibaris can’t do that!”

  So the first ascent fell to the explorer Sir Halford Mackinder who six years later climbed Batian (17,058 feet/5,199 metres), the higher of the twin summits, accompanied, as was the fashion of those gentlemanly days, by two Courmayeur guides, César Oilier and Joseph Brocherel. The second summit, Nelion (17,022 feet/5,186 metres) was not defeated until Eric Shipton and Percy Wynn Harris climbed it in 1929.

  Today the mountain and its satellites are within the Mount Kenya National Park. The plateau of moorland surrounding the peaks above 11,000 feet (3,351 metres) could be from the pages of Lord of the Rings. Giant heather and groundsel grow like twenty-foot trees, while the lobelia stands as tall as a man, and below, the forest teems with a Noah’s Ark of fauna, from rhino to leopard, who sometimes trespass on to this moorland.

  The twin peaks soar in splendid volcanic isolation over the East African savannah and while the area is a magnet for tourists and climbers, the ascent of Mount Kenya is by no means easy.

  The two young Austrian doctors felt justly proud when they reached the summit of Batian by the hard North Face on 5 September 1970. I first met Dr Oswald Oelz two years later at the Yak and Yeti Hotel in Kathmandu when he was a member of an Austrian Manaslu Expedition. This is the start of Oswald Oelz’s account of their amazing experience. After him various members of the rescue team contribute their own memories of an operation unparalleled on the mountains of Africa.

  DR OSWALD OELZ

  On 5 September at 1.30 pm my friend, twenty-nine-year-old Dr Gerd Judmaier, and I reached the main summit of Mount Kenya, known as Batian. This was our first trip outside the Alps and we were ecstatic to have reached our goal. We left the Kami hut at 5.30 am and found the climbing enjoyable, but difficult in places, due to ice in the chimneys. It was the first ascent from the Kami hut that season.

  We stayed on the summit for a few minutes only since we were entirely in cloud and it had started to snow. To gain the descent point we traversed three pitches of the summit ridge to Shipton’s Notch where I found two old abseil slings around a rock but used a new one to ensure a safe rappel down the face. Shipton’s Notch is a comfortable place on the ridge and has enough space for several people to stand there. We were still roped up, Gerd was standing one metre to my left looking down the face and was holding on to a big rock block with his right hand. While fixing the abseil sling I suddenly to my horror saw the block breaking away and falling down the face together with Gerd. They both vanished. Somehow I managed to get the rapidly disappearing rope into my hands and tried to arrest the fall. My hands and fingers were burned immediately. But suddenly the rope snagged for an instant, interrupting Gerd’s fall as he crashed diagonally down the face after a twelve-metre plunge. This enabled me to take a turn of the rope round my arm to stop him.

  Immediately I heard him crying to give him some slack. I let him down another two or three metres. Writing this after all these years I still don’t know how I managed to hold him.

  He shouted up to me that he had an open fracture of his right leg. I quickly rappeled to where he lay, noting en route that our rope was severely damaged in several places by the rock fall.

  Gerd was lying on steep loose rock on a ledge, and was bleeding from various head injuries, having lost his helmet in the fall. More serious, however, was the condition of his right leg where the tibia was sticking out of his stocking just above the climbing boot and a ten-centimetre splinter from the distal part of his tibia was lying quite separately beside him. This injury was bleeding severely. He had apparently also damaged the left leg. I applied a strong tourniquet around his right thigh and thereby controlled the bleeding.

  Gerd was entirely realistic about his prospects for the immediate future: he calmly discussed three options for dying:

  Shock and bleeding.

  Freezing to death.

  Fat embolism originating from his open bone.

  Neither of us saw much hope in getting him down in time to obtain the vital medication.

  He thought that his chances of survival were only a few per cent. I thought, but kept it to myself, that he didn’t have any chance whatsoever. But we both resolved to fight, to fight as we’d never fought before.

  I wrapped all our clothes around him and covered him completely with a bivouac sack. I also left our food supply, which was limited to 250 cc of whisky and one can of fruit. He asked me to say goodbye to everybody and said, “You know I had a good life.” I told him not to give up, that I would get help in time, and I left hardly able to control my grief and tears.

  I had to tie what was left of the rope together at several points so that I could now only rappel a maximum of ten metres on the descent. It was snowing heavily and I was full of remorse, knowing for certain that I would not find him alive when I came back.

  It was almost dark when I arrived at the Kami hut. There were eight British and American climbers there and when I told them of the accident they immediately offered to help. The strongest of them, a Zambian British ex-patriate called Bert Burrage, climbed in the dark for two and a half hours to the Top hut at 15,700 feet where there was emergency first aid and a solar-powered radio. He got through to the police at Naro Moru, a village at the base of the mountain, and a rescue operation was then set in motion.

  In 1970 the procedure for dealing with a major rescue on Mount Kenya was hypothetical, for until that year there had been no call for a serious evacuation from the virtual summit of the mountain.

  Robert Chambers and fellow members of the Mountain Club of Kenya had speculated about such an emergency, and when it came to pass, like so many dedicated mountaineers, they did their damnedest to save human life and in so doing risked their own. Robert describes the situation and the events leading up to a spectacular rescue.

  ROBERT CHAMBERS

  In the Mountain Club of Kenya (MCK) in 1970, no one would have called our mountain rescue team strong. The club had perhaps a dozen people who could lead Severe or harder, and a dozen more with enough mountaineering and rock climbing experience to be of some use. We also had a few contacts in Uganda and Tanzania who were outside possibilities for help in a long rescue. Many of our members were expatriates on short-term contracts, which made it difficult to build up a team, or even to agree on and practise standard procedures. Every few months we would grit our teeth and force ourselves to devote the better part of a Sunday to a rather hazardous practice, usually at Leukenia, the most popular and accessible rocks near Nairobi, and actually owned by the club. After these practices, with their terrifying lowers of sporting victims, and their lively discussions about methods and procedures, I always heaved a sigh of relief that nothing worse had happened than the loss of climbing time. Our equipment was a mixture of the basic, two stretchers, and the avant garde, a cacolet (rescue litter), plus two 100-metre drums of wire for direct lowers. Every now and then we had call-outs on Mount Kenya, but usually for pulmonary oedema.
The only really big climbing rescue before 1970 was not a true test of the MCK rescue team, because eight fit Germans happened to be already on the mountain and they did most of the climbing involved. Also the weather was good. We had never had to do a major rescue at altitude on our own. The one mock rescue we attempted on Mount Kenya was a dreadful thing. Many of the “rescuers” were more or less useless from mountain sickness.

  Even less confidence was inspired by our “dry” rescues in the clubhouse. These were exercises in logistical fantasy, like military TEWTs (Tactical Exercises Without Troops). We would imagine an accident and then follow through our guesses of what might happen, hour by hour and day by day. No amount of beer made these anything but sobering occasions. Once we picked a really difficult place. We took one of the most inaccessible places on the mountain – Shipton’s Notch on the West Ridge, just below the summit of Batian. This we reckoned would be harder than anywhere on the normal route. By the end of the evening, having allowed for mountain sickness and other contingencies, we could see no way the rescue could be completed. Hardly anyone could even reach the place. Despite the support of the Kenya Police and the Mountain National Parks, there was no way we could think to get someone off Shipton’s Notch dead, let alone alive.

  I used to daydream about mountain rescue. It added an edge to life to know you might be called out any moment for some dramatic excitement, and it was an exhilarating fantasy world to enter, with plenty of scope for seeing oneself in a heroic role. As long as it did not really happen. We had procedures and did practices, but we didn’t have experience.

  Jenny and I were lying in bed at home in Nairobi after a rather good Saturday evening and just dropping off into the deep and blissful, when the phone rang. There are moments for telephone calls, and this was not one of them. So I had to make the drowsy joke, “It’s a rescue!” The phone crackled and a voice said, “This is Naro Moru Police Station . . .”

  As convenor of the MCK Mountain Rescue Sub-Committee, I was automatically in charge of the climbing part of the rescue. Jenny and I telephoned around but could raise no other member of the climbing team, so we left the task to the Kenya Police Headquarters. I spoke to Bill Woodley, the Warden of the Mountain National Parks and a highly skilled pilot, and arranged to meet him at the Naro Moru airstrip at dawn. We then went to the Mountain Club, collected medicines and jammed the cacolet with difficulty into our Volkswagen Beetle. It left little room. I curled up as best I could to try to sleep while Jenny, pregnant with our first child, drove through the night, the 120-odd miles to Naro Moru.

  The first question was whether the climber was still alive. After a night alone with a broken leg at that altitude, he might well not be. So we flew up to see, and also to recce a rescue route. We took off in the little two-seater just after dawn. It was one of those Kenya mornings so clear it almost hurts. We climbed slowly up over the forest, and then the moorland, and then finally breasted a col and ridge to the North Face and the summit. And there we could see a red blob on a ledge just below Shipton’s Notch. And the blob waved. We flew right past and could see him well, lying there waving vigorously. I think that having seen Gerd Judmaier, as a person, alive on that ledge, was crucial for me in the days that followed.

  As we flew round, I had a good look at his position. There were two possible rescue lines. One was along the summit ridge and down the North Ridge by the Firmin-Hicks route. The carry along the ridge looked to me out of the question, given our few climbers and the possibility of altitude sickness. And it was difficult to imagine our ever being able to complete the rescue down the long North Ridge which followed. Also any rescue along that line would take so long that Judmaier would be dead long before we got him off. So I looked at the alternative, so appealing from the air – a direct lower down the North Face, in two stages. It would need either our two drums of wire or perhaps two hundred metres of rope, but it looked feasible. If we could get the rope or wire, and the light cacolet to the Notch, plus three or four climbers, we would stand a chance of getting him down and off quickly. Or so it seemed to me, looking at it from the plane.

  We landed back in Naro Moru. A few climbers were beginning to arrive. Judmaier’s companion, Oswald Oelz, was also a doctor, and we got the message that the top priority was plasma to restore Judmaier’s body fluids.

  Meantime, high on Mount Kenya in the Kami Hut, Dr Oswald Oelz hoped to join the group who were going to try to get up to Gerd at dawn.

  DR OSWALD OELZ

  The others started to organise for the climb up to Gerd and prepared me plenty of hot sweet tea which was the only thing I could swallow. They were all suffering in varying degrees from mountain sickness and I didn’t have high hopes for our ascent plan for the following morning.

  Bert Burrage returned late in the night from the Top hut, having done a most remarkable job in alerting the police and the Mountain Club of Kenya. He also brought down vital painkillers and penicillin.

  Carrying heavy loads, Dick from Los Angeles and I started climbing very early in the morning. On the more difficult pitches we left fixed rope. By 10.00 am it started to snow heavily and the climbing became increasingly difficult. I had excruciating pain in my fingers and hands which had been burned by the rope the day before. After reaching about 4900 metres Dick got very sick and exhausted from the altitude and could go no further, so we had to retreat and I lowered him with the aid of a karabiner brake, a method of running the rope through several interlinked karabiners.

  I was utterly frustrated as I knew that Gerd was either dead or would be shortly and I couldn’t help him. We reached the Kami hut at night, soaked with water and snow, freezing and exhausted. Four climbers from the Mountain Club of Kenya had arrived from Nairobi during the day. They seemed to be a little sick from the rapid ascent but had brought a lot of equipment. Unfortunately there were no intravenous fluids yet, which I considered the most important medication if Gerd was still alive.

  ROBERT CHAMBERS

  Much of the first three days was devoted to getting plastic containers of gear up the hill. That Sunday (Day 2) was hell, an awful long slogging walk up to Kami hut at 4400 metres (14,564 feet). We arrived to find that Oelz and an American, Richard Sykes, had tried to reach Judmaier that day and been driven back a few hundred feet from him by heavy snow. Oelz’s hands were in a mess from holding Judmaier’s fall and his clothes were soaked but he was very, very toughly determined to have another go.

  I think it was the next morning (I am recollecting fifteen years later) that we held a crisis debate on whether to continue the rescue. Most of us were feeling dreadful, with varying degrees of mountain sickness and exhaustion, without even setting foot on the climb. In one view, to continue was irresponsible, Judmaier was probably dead already. We had learnt from Oelz how serious the fracture was. How could he survive two nights and a subsequent rescue with a badly broken leg? If we established contact with him, we would feel morally obliged to continue a rescue, although others were likely to die. Anyway we did not have the capacity to rescue him. The other view was that he might still be alive, and that a direct lower down the North Face could get him off the rocks really very fast. I was ultimately responsible for the decision.

  To call off the rescue was simply not something I could bring myself to do. In fact, it did not all rest on my decision, there were some people in the party who were going to have a go anyway!

  So Oelz and an MCK member, Silvano Borruso, set off on the Monday morning (Day 3) to try again to reach Judmaier. They took a radio. John Temple and Pradeep followed with the cacolet. The weather was cloudy and no pilot could see the Notch to tell whether Judmaier was still alive. I spent the day trying to acclimatise and gather strength at Kami. No message came back in the evening; there was no radio contact. And it seemed to us that Judmaier was probably dead. Morale was very low.

  DR OSWALD OELZ

  Silvano, the strongest climber in the group, was coming back up with me. When we reached the start of the climb we met more people
who had just arrived to help. We made rapid progress, impeded only by the heavy loads.

  Although Silvano was increasingly suffering from the altitude as we climbed, he followed steadily. At 5.30 pm more than forty-eight hours after I left Gerd, I climbed around the last ridge that separated me from his ledge, twenty metres below Shipton’s Notch. I saw the shape of a motionless body covered by the red bivouac sac. Desperately I cried, “Gerd, Gerd,” certain he would not answer. But miraculously he moved the bivouac sac from his face and said in a soft voice: “Oh God, Bulle [my nickname] I didn’t think you were still alive.” He looked desperately pale and thin. I was over-whelmed and cried into my walkie-talkie to all the people on the mountain and the whole world that he was still alive and that we could save his life if we worked fast. However the damned walkie-talkie didn’t seem to work for I didn’t get any response.

  Gerd was suffering terrible pain and I gave him first an injection of morphine. We also gave him some fluid for his desperate thirst. He could not tolerate very much and started to vomit. In the last forty-eight hours he had had a little sip of whisky and the canned fruit which he had to open with stones, since he had lost his knife. We all three were relieved to be together, but spent a miserable cold night on the slanting rock shelf.