The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters
Page 48
The morning was sunny as always and if it wasn’t for the injured man we would have enjoyed that beautiful location. There were several aeroplanes flying around which told us that the rescue was well under way and that the people of Kenya cared.
After I dressed and splinted Gerd’s leg, Silvano tried to carry him on his back, while John Temple, who had arrived during the morning, and I tried to assist him with two ropes. But Gerd could not tolerate the pain when the injured leg was hanging down. At least we managed to take him to a flat space which measured two metres by fifty centimetres and belay him to pitons. Gerd was looking worse than the day before, he was dying slowly. He could not take enough fluid by mouth and I still didn’t have intravenous infusions.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
The next morning (Day 4) Jim Hastings brought up plasma in a chopper, and landed above his normal ceiling using a saucer-shaped depression near the Kami hut. He had stripped his machine of all but essentials. Two climbing pairs set off. Dick Cooper was in one, and I was in the other. We both carried plasma. Dick was fitter and faster. I remember that Firmin’s Chimney, the crux of the climb, was long and unprotected and difficult in icy conditions.
DR OSWALD OELZ
I was sitting on the minute ledge beside Gerd, my legs hanging in space. It had started to snow again. Gerd told me that he expected to die during the night. He thought that it was terrible that it took so long to die and complained that he could not simply go to sleep for ever. During the night he developed fever and asked me to unclip him from the pitons so that he could roll over the edge and fall down the face to a quick death.
(DAY 5) There was fog all around us and it was cold. There was also the noise of several planes and there was a new noise, the throb of a helicopter. Suddenly there was an almighty crash and after that there was no helicopter noise any more. We knew that it had crashed and our despair was now complete. Later we learned that the pilot, Jim Hastings, had died in the crash. Dick Cooper and another climber arrived and at last I got the essential intravenous fluids. Robert Chambers was just behind. After I set up the equipment on the rock face I injected one and a half litres. Gerd was now looking better. However, the injections started to freeze and during that night I held a Gaz stove underneath the injection bottles to enable me to give him more. From time to time I found myself thinking that it would probably be better if Gerd died now since we could not bring him down anyway. I desperately wanted to get away from this terrible place on this terrible mountain with its terrible weather.
(Day 6) The morning was very cold. There were now four climbers – John Temple, Dick Cooper, Robert Chambers and Silvano Borruso – as well as myself to help Gerd and we had enough rope to rig a cableway over the first difficult section we had to traverse. However, we failed once more to move Gerd as the pain grew unbearable when we tried. There was nothing to do but to wait for a stretcher.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
Preparations were being made for a North Face lower. From Nairobi Bob Caukwell traced 600 feet of nylon rope in Mombasa. The Kenya Police drove with it through the night over three hundred miles to Nairobi and then on to Naro Moru. It was loaded in a plane, to be dropped across the ridge. We were then to use it for the direct North Face lower. We watched the plane come, slowly excreting an extraordinarily long line, and it seemed so long it could not miss. But when released it curled and drifted and missed the ridge. So we were forced back on the wire, which would have to be dragged all the way up the long North Ridge route we had followed.
Those who had taken the stretcher to the base of the North Face reported heavy stone falls and were reluctant to bring the stretcher up by that route. The loss of the airdropped rope also meant that we would have difficulty hauling the stretcher up as we had proposed. So we decided it should come up by the Firmin-Hicks route.
Unfortunately this meant further delay, and much effort. We sent out appeals for any climbers anywhere in East Africa to come and help.
Meanwhile Dr Oelz had organised a primitive hospital ward near the summit.
DR OSWALD OELZ
I was again out of injections and painkillers and Gerd was getting rapidly worse. Covered by our bivouac sac and in the few clear moments between his fever dreams he talked about his past. He said that he had had a good life and that he was sorry to go. He complained about all the girls he had not had and all the wine he had not drunk. The snow storm in the afternoon was particularly strong and we got even more depressed. It was already dark when suddenly, like a deus ex machina, John Temple, who had gone down to meet the others, reappeared and told us that six Austrians were landing that night in Nairobi to help us. He also brought some plasma for intravenous injections. On my knees, partly in the open air, in darkness, with a bivouac sac that the snow storm was threatening to tear apart, I tried to insert a needle in a vein of Gerd’s arm. My hands were open wounds and I couldn’t feel anything but pain. I couldn’t find a vein for the intravenous fluid, they were all collapsed due to the severe dehydration of my patient. After about two hours I finally succeeded in inserting the needle. I made injections throughout the night with the stove beneath the injection bottle.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
We faced a crucial decision whether to go ahead with the direct lower down the North Face. It would have to be done entirely from above, without support from below due to the stone falls which the descent would create. We debated what to do. Dick Cooper was in favour. Others were against. The party in Kami, with whom we discussed it over the radio, were strongly against. I remember sitting trying to make up my mind. The direct descent without support from below did look enormously hazardous. So we agreed on the much longer, slower and more strenuous, but safer route, along the West Ridge and then down the North Ridge, the way we had come.
DR OSWALD OELZ
Gerd had high fever and complained all the time. He asked me to make a fire and heard girls’ voices, speaking German. He also told us to start to work on his evacuation immediately and not to sit around.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
Different parties were now ferrying supplies up parts of the route. I worried that inexperienced climbers were going beyond their safety limits, relying on that extra verve and daring which rescues inspire. It seemed entirely possible that we would have another accident on our hands. Although Silvano Borruso was reluctant to go I sent him down. He had made a tremendous effort in the early stages of the rescue, and spent a night at 17,000 feet (over 5,000 metres) with only a shirt and anorak, having given his pullover to Judmaier.
At midday on Day 7 we finally got the stretcher to Shipton’s Notch and five or six of us began to try to move Judmaier. The first part was uphill. Even with the stretcher suspended from a rope in a Tirolean traverse, it took us hours to do this. The carry along the shelves of the West Ridge that followed was exhausting, and belaying was a continuous problem. But by evening, we had Judmaier at the top of the North Ridge. From here onwards, it was steeply downwards. It was a very cold and bad night for everyone, not least poor Judmaier.
DR OSWALD OELZ
It was again desperately cold and Gerd was having weird fever dreams all night. He called us drunkards and demanded some red wine for himself too. I melted snow every two hours and tried to give it to him but he refused each time to take more than two sips.
On the Saturday (Day 8), Robert didn’t think it possible for them to get Judmaier down the North Ridge.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
I had the idea of a direct lower down the Northey Glacier. We had enough rope, and the entire lower might be completed in less than an hour, providing we could organise lowering the joined ropes. I had climbed the Northey ten years earlier, and knew it had two sections of steep snow and ice separated by about fifty metres of rock fall. But the Kami party who had now done a recce were adamant that the idea was crazy. They reported very heavy stonefall, and in my slightly paranoid state by then, I wondered whether they were exaggerating in order to prevent the plan. A stronger argument was that the
Austrians were coming and preferred the ridge.
DR OSWALD OELZ
That morning (Day 8) Gerd was still alive and we started to lower him down the ridge. We got down several pitches by 11.00 am and then it started snowing again. I was standing with Gerd at the beginning of a sharp horizontal edge which was definitely impossible to traverse with the stretcher. While thinking about the solution to the problem I looked down the face and saw what looked like an Austrian climbing helmet approaching. I shouted down and there they were, our friends to help us. Werner Heim was first to arrive, pulling three ropes behind him. He looked so strong and trustworthy that I immediately felt that we would make it. Gerd had a moment of clarity and said, “If you don’t get me down today you’re wasting your time.”
ROBERT CHAMBERS
I remember feeling that I had little left to give, and was marvelling at John Temple’s resilience when there were shouts in German, and a concentrated ball of energy burst up through the mist and snow and, within seconds, as it seemed, had rigged up ropes for lowering the stretcher. It was Werner Heim. Others came up and in no time Judmaier disappeared on his spectacular descent.
The moment the main responsibility lifted from me, I more or less collapsed for a couple of hours. I have never been so tired.
The arrival at an accident scene of a mountain rescue team from so many thousand miles away is unprecedented. All were first-class climbers with vast rescue experience on the steep cliffs of the Austrian Tirol and Dr Raimund Margreiter was a professional colleague of Gerd and Oswald. The other members of this group were Walter Larcher, Werner Heim, Kurt Pittracher, Horst Bermann and Walter Spitzenstatter.
Their assistance had been requested by Gerd’s father, Professor Judmaier, who had flown out to Nairobi from Innsbruck when he got word of the accident. Upon arrival in Nairobi they first flew round Mount Kenya in a Cessna charter plane to identify Judmaier’s lonely bivouac sac close to the summit of Batian.
They then landed at Nanyuki, the nearest strip to the mountain, and from there they went by Land Rover to the Base Camp. Now with the help of porters they crossed two 4,000-foot (1,220-metre) passes and in forty kilometres reached the Kami Hut. It was exactly one week since the accident and they had still to climb the mountain, 600 metres of Grade IV climbing and one chimney of Grade V.
DR RAIMUND MARGREITER
As Walter Spitzenstatter and I got to the foot of the face we saw our friends already several rope lengths above us. Walter had had a great deal of trouble with the altitude during the ascent and we had spent a filthy cold night some two hundred metres below the Kami hut. It was clear to us that our friends would reach Judmaier long before us and we decided, therefore, to put up a continuous abseil route as far as the Amphitheatre, in order to guarantee the evacuation even during the night. The key to this was a 200-metre rope which they had deposited at the foot of the climb. It took a long time before we had disentangled this, in order to fix it at the bottom. The other end I tied round my waist and set off.
On a rock ledge at the end of the 200 metres we fixed the rope with ten good firm pitons. After we had installed three more abseil lengths of about forty metres, we reached the Amphitheatre. The others had already brought Judmaier as far as the upper end of the Amphitheatre, where I was able to attend to his injuries. He was certainly in a very critical condition. As well as highly efficient painkillers, I administered to him the principal steroids. In order to guard against the so-called “rescue death” which frequently hits a casualty at this point if he succumbs to the induced feeling of well-being, I tried again and again to demonstrate to him the seriousness of the situation and that he would only have to hold out a few more hours. I also gave Oswald a sip of whisky.
We continued down to the lower edge of the Amphitheatre without problem, then an abseil as far as the beginning of the 200-metre rope. Walter and I, being the last to descend, removed all the abseil points which we had only a few hours before so tiringly installed. As we came to the final abseil point at dusk it was like a nightmare: Gerd on the stretcher, surrounded by the rescuers: beneath us the endless ravine, only the first few metres of which could be seen on account of the approaching darkness. We were all aware of the risks involved on this lower and no one was keen to descend the last 200 metres with the casualty.
Werner Heim and I volunteered for this hazardous undertaking. The stretcher was attached simply to the fourteen-millimetre rope which had been untied at the bottom and pulled up; we had merely secured ourselves on to the bottom bar of the stretcher. We knew full well that on this very long descent communications were going to be difficult. Various rocket signals were agreed upon in case of emergency. And so with very mixed feelings we lowered ourselves into the darkness. To start with all went smoothly, but after twenty metres we couldn’t shout up to our friends and the signalling code agreed upon didn’t function either. So we had to carry the casualty to the lip of each ledge we came to. When the belayers above felt the rope go slack they eased the tension. When we then let ourselves down over the edge it meant a four- or five-metre drop each time – very unnerving. With increasing rope lengths these drops became progressively longer. Added to this, the rope dislodged stones, so that periodically a salvo would pour directly over us while we threw ourselves on top of the casualty to shield him with our bodies. The stones ricocheted off our helmets and rucksacks, which protected our backs to a degree. On one occasion the stretcher got itself stuck in a chimney, the back of which was a very steep smooth slab. As we had no footholds we could not free it despite our desperate efforts. We had a smoke and reviewed the problem, before giving it a final wrench which was rewarded with a rapid slide of a good five metres!
Fortunately for us the moon rose and improved visibility. There was however still a considerable obstacle to overcome: the eight-metre overhang at the bottom of the face. If we were to continue our abseil descent over this last pitch, we would all be hanging on the rope.
“Wait, and you’ll see how safely an Austrian Army mountain guide can get you down,” Werner assured me.
After twenty frustrating minutes when periodically the rope was slackened too much, he finally succeeded in hammering a special piton in three centimetres. From this peg he then belayed me – and the casualty – down the overhang. The peg held.
In order to tell those 200 metres above of our arrival we fired a rocket. It was 10.00 pm. Here on easier safe ground we were met by native porters and revived with tea. After a short halt Gerd was taken on to the Kami Hut accompanied by Dr Oelz. Slowly our friends emerged one after the other out of the darkness, all except Walter Spitzenstatter.
Apparently after the successful rescue he was shattered and still at the belay 200 metres above. Kurt was with him. As a rescue expert he had performed marvellously. I was horrified at the idea of having to climb up once more in the icy cold to help him through this sinister abyss. But after I had sorted out my gear I started the ascent again and eventually made contact with him by shouting. Walter was in a pitiable state and could scarcely stand. We had to support him as far as the hut, in the course of which we lost the path and unfortunately descended too far.
Robert and the other climbers were also shattered and even at this late stage there could easily have been another accident.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
For us there was now a great effort to keep concentrating and to get off the mountain safely. I had one more bivouac with two people who stayed behind. The next morning I nearly fell off on the last long abseil, which also caused others trouble.
Raimund and Kurt got back down with Walter ahead of Robert’s party and Raimund was pleased to see that their effort was not in vain.
DR RAIMUND MARGREITER
In the hut Walter quickly recovered after receiving some oxygen. The rest of the night I spent caring for Judmaier: his leg appeared really bad. The still attached piece of fractured bone protruded far out of a purulent wound above the edge of the boot.
Oswald helped Raimund.
When we took Gerd’s dressings off we were immediately assailed by the terrible smell of gangrene. The bone which was still protruding from the flesh was black. At first we were watched by several of the rescuers who quickly turned pale, then disappeared. Raimund and I were almost certain that Gerd would lose his leg.
DR RAIMUND MARGREITER
While I attended to his leg, Gerd celebrated his “rebirth” with somewhat too much whisky. The excessive reaction to this alcohol intake in his greatly enfeebled physical state was wrongly interpreted by the porters as mental derangement and a report of this was radioed to the valley. His condition next morning however permitted further evacuation.
Ruth, Oswald’s girlfriend, had meanwhile arrived from Mombasa. She had first heard of the accident when she read the headline “Is he still alive?” in a newspaper. Oswald promised her that they would spend their next holiday at a beach – “which we never did”.
DR RAIMUND MARGREITER
Gerd was now placed on the mountain stretcher and carried in relays by four blacks. We made speedy headway. Towards midday it began to rain and the unfortunate Gerd swam, so to speak, in the bathtub of the stretcher. The wasted, bearded face with the gold-rimmed spectacles reminded me of photographs I had seen of David Livingstone: so must his natives have carried him through the bush in his time.
On Day 8 of the evacuation (13 September) Ruth and Oswald took the long drag down to the beginning of the road. “However,” Oswald said, “it was now very easy peaceful walking since I knew that my friend would survive and I felt the fantastic high that always comes after a big effort.”