I had stood on the summit of the mountain the day before, with climbing friends from Edinburgh. We had opted for a walk because we reckoned that due to the recent heavy snow showers few climbs would be in condition. It had been a long trudge to the summit and we had stayed well back from the double cornices that overhung the winter routes. Fresh snow and spindrift had billowed from the top, falling into the summit snowfield, below which lie most of the gullies, including Alpha.
In Dave, Donald, Colin (all MR emergency medical technicians), John and “Spanner” I had an experienced and strong climbing team. Every alternative had been discussed. It made sense for us all to get to the scene as soon as possible, find the climbers, sort out the casualties, and prepare for an evacuation. With luck, the helicopter might be able to lift off the injured. If that was not possible, it might be able to take in the remainder of the team; otherwise, they would have a difficult hike, followed by a traverse into the bottom of the gullies or, alternatively, a climb to the summit. Without a helicopter this could take three hours in the thick drifting snow; if we walked in from the west it would take about the same time.
As you know, Rescue 137 came in and picked up two of our team, Dave and Duncan, and in what seemed a short period of time radioed to request that we bring a 200-metre rope and belay gear when we were picked up. It appeared as if a long lower would be required. Minutes later, while on our way to the scene in Rescue 137, we were able to contact the others at Loch Droma. Eleven more team members had gathered there; they were asked to wait for the return of Rescue 137 after it had refuelled. It was clear from the chat on the intercom that we were flying on the edge of the helicopter’s capabilities; the flight reminded me of being in a small open boat in rough seas when you know you should be on dry land.
We were winched down on to the sloping ramp that lies below Alpha, Beta and Gamma Gullies. Below lay a rock band that prevents easy access from the floor of Choire Mhor. A few boulders peeped through the snow, providing us with something to hang on to. As we sorted ourselves out, I could see that there were only three climbers with Duncan at the bottom of Alpha Gully. Where were the other two climbers? In the gully? Below us? Or possibly, not even on the scene? Rescue 137 was sitting on the top of Meall nam Peithirean, waiting. But not for long.
At the accident scene things were moving slowly. Two of the three survivors on their snow ledge were busy sorting out the tangled rope. Then Gareth tied on and moved out across the gully. He made it, quite a feat considering the trauma of the accident and a damaged ankle. When he got across he discovered he had forgotten the gear, but Duncan and the others fashioned a belay with his two ice axes.
Duncan Tripp
Once Gareth was with us he was belayed whilst I used his ice axes, one in frozen turf and one in ice, to complete the fixed rope anchor. I then clipped on and crab-crawled across the slope using my own ice axe. Once with the casualty I was able to clip onto a fixed belay on the snow platform which was barely big enough for us to stand. Finally I had the chance to assess the casualty.
“Hello, I’m Duncan. What’s your name?”
“David,” he gasped.
During the assessment there was continuous spindrift pouring down on us like a waterfall from the buttress above and that, combined with the wind, made corns with both David and Rescue 137 difficult. David was sitting to his right side with his knees pulled up to his chest, his respiration’s were fast and shallow and he had difficulty speaking.
As well as being slightly cyanotic, he had an obvious facial injury and was very cold and wet.
At this point Rescue 137 radioed to say they were getting short on fuel; time was critical as heavy snow showers were approaching and light was fading fast. The Boss came up on the radio.
“Duncan, we need to make a decision in the next two minutes.”
He then explained that Rescue 137 would have to depart the scene for refuel at Inverness as fuel was now down to 100 lbs, or six minutes flying time above the bare minimum – what we called running on chicken fuel.
“Stand by,” I said. One casualty had an ankle injury, but could walk. However David was in a life-threatening condition. The quickest way to get David out of there was with Rescue 137. I looked up at the near vertical rock; it would be close, but I reckoned that with enough winch cable out, the rotor blades would be just clear of the rock face. Our laid down limit is fifteen feet. However that can be reduced to five feet for immediate life-saving only. I think this fell into that category. We would have to use the double strop method with the possibility that we could exacerbate any spinal injury. I relayed the idea to Rescue 137. They said they would try. I explained the predicament to David and through gasps he agreed emphatically. “Let’s get to hell out of here!” I shouted the plan across to Donald and Dave and asked them to remain on their side of the gully, the fewer people on the ledge the better.
Steve Hayward
Things were obviously bad. I took the Sea King back in the air and flew an approach towards the scene. Meantime Dougie got the strops on to the hook and, with Rob, ran through the winching checks.
As the high buttress was going to be close in on our left, it meant we would have to be quite high over the casualty in order to have enough clearance for the rotors. This was good in one way, the downwash was less likely to effect them. However, it meant that winching would take longer, also we would have to be very precise. The aircraft was attempting to dance around in the turbulence again as we came to hover over the party. Although I had plenty of references to maintain an accurate hover, I couldn’t judge blade clearance to our left, so Rob had his eyes very much outside to ensure that close didn’t turn into too close. Dougie now calmly guided me to the position he needed the aircraft in to allow him accurately to deliver the strops to Duncan. It was going well, the strops were almost in Duncan’s outstretched hand – then life got complicated.
The Sea King has a system called Automatic Voice Alerting Device (AVAD), or Gladys as we affectionately call it. In the event of a system malfunction, as well as a warning caption, Gladys, in an insistent female voice, will call “Master caution”, this is to draw your attention to something you might miss if you are busy – such as hovering a few feet from a cliff in turbulence with most of the winch cable deployed. When Gladys called “Master caution”, my immediate thought was, Oh, for goodness sakes. This just wasn’t our day!
Rob called out; “Intermediate trans chip caption.”
This tells you that you have either got metallic debris in one of the gearboxes that transmits the drive to the tail rotor, or that the gearbox is overheating. So something very dramatic was about to happen. Of course, the caption could be spurious, the way you endeavour to check this is by pulling the relevant circuit breaker and resetting it. If the caption comes back on immediately, or later on the sortie, you must assume the caption is genuine and land as soon as possible. This means pick a suitable spot nearby and put the aircraft on the ground. Rob reset the circuit breaker, the caption returned immediately. I remembered that a friend of mine had encountered a similar situation and by the time he landed the aircraft – at night on the nearest oil rig – the gearbox had become so hot it had melted the rubber seals round the filler.
Dougie quickly asked, “What do you want to do, Steve? Are you happy to continue? The strops are almost down.”
“Yes,” I replied. You have no time to ponder the risk/benefit calculation at length, you must take a decision and make it instantly. Duncan had already said the casualty needed to be removed urgently and was prepared for the extra risks of winching straight from the scene.
“We’ll stay and take them. As soon as they’re clear of the ledge, let me know and I’ll start flying away.”
This would allow us to winch in Duncan and the casualty as we flew slowly round the corrie. Although Duncan would be slightly more exposed while we did this, it at least would give us the opportunity to carry out an emergency landing should something fail in the tail drive. If we had st
ayed where we were in the hover, up against the cliff, the usual procedure to give the winchman a clear lift, we would be very poorly placed if things failed. All this happened and was dealt with in ten to fifteen seconds.
Dougie was calling, “Winching in, two on, clear to move forward and right.”
“Roger,” I replied. “Fast as you can with winch in, Dougie.” This was a statement of the blindingly obvious, which Dougie ribbed me about later.
Dave can still recall the intermittent view of the chopper high above alongside the buttress. “How it hung there, buffeted by the wind, with the rotors almost touching the cliff I’ll never know. It must have been on the very edge of safety and these guys had gone beyond such parameters and were risking their lives for me. I shall never forget it.”
For a moment let’s go down the 175 feet of that slender steel cable to Duncan, and to a point in time a few moments earlier.
Duncan Tripp
Unknown to me, when the winch hook was almost within my grasp, the audio warning on Rescue 137 interrupted the concentration of the crew. Dougie accurately delivered the strops first time and I quickly had David rigged for lift. I then unclipped us both from the belay and we were winched clear of the rock buttress. The aircraft immediately started to move forward followed by a right-hand rapid descending turn. At this point Dougie banged the cable to let me know there was a problem.
This was a difficult decision for Steve. The helicopter was in possibly one of the most vulnerable of situations, with the rotors dangerously close to a thousand-foot face, severe turbulence and driven snow – running on chicken fuel and with a possible catastrophic gearbox failure. Duncan was soon to be enlightened.
Duncan Tripp
When I looked up again it suddenly struck me, inconceivably, Dougie had closed the cabin door. Alarmed, I realised that I wasn’t actually looking at the starboard side, it was the port side of Rescue 137! The aircraft continued to fly away and descend. Once at the door, Dougie and I assisted David into the cabin. Dougie shouted that we had a hard latched Intermediate Gearbox caption. We were released from the winch hook and I plugged into the intercom.
David, who thought that the worst was over, was lifted and secured in a seat and told to adopt the crash position, which coincidentally was the most comfortable for him, and all loose kit was stowed. Dougie declared a MAYDAY on the HF, Rob declared one on the air traffic radio and I activated my Personnel Locator Beacon – well, if we were going down the whole world was going to know about it! Once all the immediate procedures were complete the crew faced a dilemma: the drills say with this type of emergency “Land as soon as possible.” This had to be weighed up against the isolated hostile terrain, finding a suitable landing site and the very serious nature of David’s condition. This was all rapidly discussed and the Boss elected to fly to the nearest road head, at the lowest safe height and speed to minimise the loading on the tail rotor.
During all this Hugh and Dafydd were engaged in their epic hike back to safety with Dafydd more seriously injured than had been realised. . . . Hugh re-lives the end game: “We set off down, but immediately Dafydd was in a hole – this time the pain was severe. We stopped and had some food and drink and some more Brufen. It was sunny now and the chopper went over and we assumed that Dave was on his way to safety.”
Dafydd was relieved to get going again. “The weather had improved as we descended. In the back of my mind I hoped the chopper would return, but we ploughed on regardless. For me at least it was a struggle and for Hugh, breaking the trail, a seemingly endless treadmill. As we forced our way through the snow, I said, ‘I bet Richard and Gareth will be shacked up in some cosy pub recuperating with a few pints in front of a roaring fire, the jammy swines.’ I didn’t realise they too were struggling in the terrible conditions.”
Hugh and Dafydd reached their car at 2030 and were informed by the police that the helicopter had landed nearby and that Dave was now in hospital. Also that Gareth and Richard were with Bill Amos’s group, still heading out to Fannich Lodge. Hugh suggested to the police that he would take Dafydd directly to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness.
Rescue 137 had managed to limp ten minutes and eighteen kilometres from the incident to a point just up from the main Achnasheen road and was safely shut down at 1810 hrs. Duncan now got to work to do everything possible for Dave and put him on max. flow oxygen. Steve was onto the ARCC, trying to get another helicopter to evacuate David, but it was a busy day. The estimate for an ambulance was thirty minutes. Meantime Dave was responding to Duncan’s efforts. When the ambulance crew managed to get through the snow to the road below the emergency landing site Dave was supported sitting up on a stretcher, which made it very unstable. He was then moved to the ambulance which took a further twenty minutes due to the very rough ground. He was finally handed over to the Ambulance crew at 1930 hrs.
Bill Amos and the team were still a long way from home.
Bill Amos
We were oblivious of this crisis with Rescue 137 and our immediate concern was to get off the mountain. Conditions were deteriorating. Whilst we waited for the return of Rescue 137 we started to hunt around for gear placements which could be used to secure our present position, or as an anchor for an abseil to the corrie floor, provided that we could find a reasonable way down. We were soon joined by Dave and Donald, together with Gareth and Hugh. It was quickly agreed that waiting for a helicopter below a potential avalanche was not an option and that we needed to get out from our present position pronto! Colin and John had found a possible descent route and were digging out snow from behind a boulder that appeared to be frozen in position; it was the only belay available.
Gareth said that, despite his ankle injury, he would be OK for an abseil. A team member was paired up with him and Hugh so that, if there was a further avalanche, the avalanche transceiver worn by the team member would help the others to find both. It occurred to us all that the whole party could be buried, but these thoughts remained unspoken. It was an “interesting” descent over mixed conditions of ice, some rock, a few good bits of névé and a lot of soft snow which flowed down the gully, only to be blown back up, obscuring the route. We arrived on the corrie floor in darkness. There was still no sign of Rescue 137; they seemed to be taking a long time to refuel. We were on our own and in these conditions and with the amount of first aid equipment, ropes and gear that we were carrying, the five kilometre walk out to the track at Loch Fannich would be a trial. We knew our ordeal was not yet over, it was a long way home. Drifting snow crowded the beams of our headlamps.
Richard
I struggled through sometimes chest-deep snow, weighed down by the remainder of the ropes and gear I was carrying because of Gareth’s damaged ankle. I was kept going by the humour of the rescue team and the image of Dafydd and Hugh sitting in a pub replaying the day’s events over several sharpeners.
Bill Amos
Stopping only to help each other when we plunged in up to the waist and sometimes up to the armpits. By 9.00 pm we were getting pretty exhausted and it was a welcome relief to pull the ten-man bothy bag over ourselves and sit down on our laden sacks for a brew and something to eat. A bothy bag is like a lightweight tent without poles or a ground sheet. It’s anchored by sitting on the bottom wall. It can be a lifesaver.
We had a look at Gareth’s ankle and bound a SAM splint round his boot and up his leg for support. Whilst still in the comfort of the bothy bag, we picked up transmissions from the team Land Rover, which had nine team members on board. They had figured out that we would head out by Fannich Lodge. We eventually established contact and asked them to request a second four-wheel drive vehicle from the police. Spirits lifted, we headed off towards the track that runs westwards from Fannich Lodge and within an hour saw the welcoming sight of head torches moving up to meet us. We exchanged our sacks for their lighter loads and were soon down at the track where we were greeted by Robert, a police sergeant from Dingwall and Ruaraidh Matheson, the keeper from Fannich Lodge, e
ach with a four-wheel drive vehicle.
Fannich Lodge lies about twelve kilometres from the nearest public road at Lochluichart, where we learned that Rescue 137 had made an emergency landing. The final five kilometres to the lodge is a rough track, cut into the hillside above Loch Fannich. On many previous searches, we had asked Ruaraidh to help, even if only to turn on a few outside lights and on the occasional visits team members had been treated as welcome guests. As we crowded out the kitchen on that wild winter’s night, Ruaraidh, his wife and two children rose to the occasion, handing out home-made soup, bread, tea and a small dram to wash it down. With thirteen people in the Land Rover and the rest in the Police vehicle, we bade farewell to the Matheson family and headed down the track. Ruaraidh had been surprised that anybody had managed to make it up to the lodge that night and here we were, driving down, after even more snow had fallen.
The six of us who had left from Dundonnell arrived back at Dave’s bunkhouse at 4.00 am. As we went into the lounge, we agreed that after the departure of Rescue 137, it had been an old-fashioned rescue, where the calibre of the people you are with is what really matters. We had all been very much reliant on each other. We decided that it might as well end in the old-fashioned way. I sneaked into the bedroom where my climbing friends lay sleeping, pinched a bottle of whisky and just as quietly left. On the way through to the lounge I picked up six glasses, opened the bottle and threw the top in the bin.
The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters Page 56