A Climber Saved
Until last night, it had been three years since the Army's Chinook
helicopter had flown into the medical camp at 14,200
feet for a rescue. Some of the
world's best climbers were recruited to perform a ground rescue of a
61-year-old Armenian climber who had fallen two days ago from Denali
Pass. He had sustained some injuries to his ribs and was unable to
walk. For two days high winds left him stranded at High Camp at
17,200 feet, under the watchful care of an Air National Guard PJ
(parajumper). There was no chance of a helicopter rescue until the
winds subsided, and the patient was growing weaker.
Finally, Chief Mountaineering Ranger Roger Robinson made the
difficult decision to send up a team of expert climbers to bring the
patient down to Dr.
Howard Donner at
Fourteen Medical. (To see the route up Denali, go to
Climb.) And if the weather
cleared, a Chinook helicopter would fly in to rescue the climber
from the mountain and take him to a hospital in Anchorage.
The list of names that took part in the rescue reflects the elite of
American climbing today:
Pete Athans, Mark
Twight, Joe Reichert, Scott Backes, and Steve House. They climbed up
to 17,200 feet in record time, packed the patient into a litter, and
painstakingly lowered him along Denali's West Buttress ridgeline
between 16,000 and 17,000 feet to the fixed ropes at the top of the
Headwall. From there, the rescuers set an anchor, clipped the litter
into a 500-foot rope, and began lowering him down the 800-foot
Headwall, the steepest part of the West Buttress route.
By the time they reached camp, the rescue had taken on a momentum of
its own, as climbers from all over camp joined in the march across
the high plateau to where the National Park Service tents stand as
the boundary. Donner was in his medical tent readying intravenous
fluids, while Ranger Robinson was communicating with the Army
Chinook, hoping the clouds would lift for a brief moment to allow
them clearance to fly into camp and land.
"From 7,000 feet to the summit, the whole mountain is clear, except
for a few clouds here at 14,000," Pete Athans said as he brought the
patient in to camp with Twight, Reichert, Backes, and House. If the
Chinook were to land, there would be only a brief window of
opportunity before the clouds closed back in. The patient was in
stable condition, but he needed to get off the mountain to get
closer medical attention to the possible fractures to his ribs.
We heard the Chinook minutes before we could see it, framed in a
bank of light clouds as snow fell. It's a massive helicopter, and as
it approached it filled the sky with its insect-like shape. We had
built a landing zone made of bright red body bags to provide visual
guidance to the pilot attempting to land in a sea of white. As he
lowered toward the spot that
John Grunsfeld was
indicating with flares, a wall of circling snow 300 feet high welled
up in the rotor wash, obscuring the helicopter from view. Minutes
later, the patient was carried onto the helicopter by a six-person
team, including Donner and Athans.
As the helicopter lifted off, an avalanche of snow created by the
rotors blasted the 30 of us attending the rescue. It was like
nothing any of us had seen before: in the middle of the night a huge
machine broke the silent falling snows by flying in to our remote
camp high above the clouds. One more climber had been saved, safely
plucked from the sides of Denali through an extraordinary human
effort.
Location: Fourteen Medical
Altitude: 14,200 feet
Air Temp: 10°F
Windspeed: 4 mph
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