Aconcagua Story
Page 6
The Accident
I walked back to camp. By the time I was back to the tent the Argentines had reached the second rock band. The South Africans had also shown up in Camp Two. This was good as I didn't like hanging out alone. I watched the Argentine climbers for a while. They were getting close to the final rock band. I abstractly mused about whether they had noticed that the shadows were growing and that they would soon lose the sun.
I walked down below the tent to take a pee. In the wind you have to turn just the right way to keep it from blowing onto you or flying back in an eddy behind you. I looked back up toward the Argentines. There was a lot of spindrift on the mountain. I could not see them where they had been moments before. My heart sank and I got a surge of adrenaline. I looked up and down, no sign of them. I ran up to Dave's tent.
"Dave are you in there?" I yelled.
"Yea," he said. He had been sleeping.
"Do you have any binoculars?" I asked, "I lost the Argentines."
"No."
Just then Oliver came over the rise, "Someone fell," he said.
"Oh no!"
"I though it was gear bags or something."
"It was the four Argentine climbers!" I said. My heart was racing, what to do, is there any way to help them?
"They stopped there," he pointed, "There is blood on the ice."
He handed me his binoculars. Where he was pointing I could see the climbers, three together and a fourth about six feet away. There was a faint red smear above the third one. They had fallen over a thousand feet.
"Oh god, we have to help them." I started running down to the Argentine camp about a hundred yards away and down hill.
"Argentina! Argentina!" I yelled outside the tents. A Spanish climber I later learned was named Pepe came out.
"Argentina?" I asked.
"No, España," he said, "Argentina allá." pointing toward another tent with a woman coming out.
"Argentina, hay un accidente, Andinistas cayo!" I said in my poor Spanish, "Cuatro personas cayo."
Several people started toward me and I started back up the hill. When I arrived I spoke to the South Africans.
"We have to go up and see if any of them are still alive."
I went to my tent and stuffed my sleeping bag and a down parka into my pack.
Oliver handed me some liquid morphine and some other first aid supplies. I also
took his insulated water bottle. I put on my harness and a few ice screws. As an
afterthought I threw a rope and my headlamp in.
I hurried up to the edge of the glacier. Pepe had already started up and Dave was also packing his pack. As I put my crampons on we agreed on some signals.
I said, "I will hold up my hand once for each one who is still alive and if I cross my arms like this they are all dead."
They agreed to start getting hot water and other help. As I started out Pepe was quite a ways in front of me and he was not carrying a pack. He was probing the glacier with his ice tool, looking for hidden crevasses. I thought, "How odd, it is all solid ice, what is he doing that for?"
Tragedy
I was gaining on him. For some reason I cannot understand I wanted to pass him. I wanted to have an opportunity to save someone's life.
After the Avalanche buried David Bridges and Alex Lowe on Shishapangma, Kent Harvey, Andrew McLean and I along with a Tibetan and two Sherpas had gone back up in the afternoon to search. We kept at it till after sunset when Mark Holbrook called us down over the radio. It was such a helpless feeling. The aftermath was a huge pile of hard snow with no clues as to where our two friends were buried. Afterward I felt guilt for not being able to find them. Even though they probably died instantly we all knew that it would have meant a lot to their families to see them again.
Pepe looked kind of silly probing the ice for crevasses and going slow. Eventually he got into a really broken section and had to back track. I went a different way and was soon above him. I studied the way ahead. There was a diagonal ramp of blue ice that let right to the Argentines. I made my way to it. My heart was pounding and my lungs were burning but I kept thinking that someone might be alive and that I had to go fast. Still, at 20,000-ft it seemed like I was going very slowly. I got closer. I had never seen a dead body before. What was it going to be like? Was I going to get sick? Back at the edge of the glacier a large group had formed. They were all watching, waiting for my signal.
About ten yards away I yelled, "Hello," nothing.
Then I got closer. Three of them were piled together with their rope tangled around them. The fourth was to the side. There was blood on the ice around them. The bottom most of the three was missing he top of his head. His short hair did little to cover a gaping hole in his skull with blood clots inside and trailing out onto the ice. His skin had an orange hue and was waxy. The next one I checked was the one who was separated from the others. There was blood all around him and in a long streak above him on the ice. His skin was like the first, I determined that he was dead as well. Then I went to the uppermost climber, German. His injuries were less severe at first glance and his hands were holding the ice above him as though he had arrested the sliding fall. His skin was also waxy and orange. His face was bloody but he was still the good-looking young man I had spoken with the day before. He was dead yet I felt like I was looking at a person, a person who I could speak with and would tell this whole story to later. The last was the most difficult, his pack had flipped over his head and I had to pull it up to see him. It was splattered with blood and the rope held it in place. His hands were stiff and I got no response. As I was kneeling on the ice I looked down to see a large piece of someone's flesh next to my knee.
The whole scene came more into focus. There were snow pickets in the tangled rope and pieces of gear and blood all around. The fall had been incredibly violent. They were probably all dead long before they stopped moving.
I walked a few feet away so that I would not be standing on body parts and crossed my arms in the 'all dead' signal. Then I knelt down. Tears welled up and I sobbed.
Pepe arrived and checked them over as well and then came over and hugged me. It was a profoundly sad moment. They had been just like us, great friends enjoying life doing something they all loved. This was not supposed to happen. Sure, as an abstract concept death is a possibility but it is what keeps you focused. It is what reminds you not to make mistakes, so you don't.
"They're dead," he said quietly, "We must go down, be careful."
They had come to rest on a fairly steep area of ice. He was right it was a dangerous place. We made it a ways down where Dave had stopped when I signaled, we embraced and the tears started again. We turned and continued down toward the people below, Pepe right behind, still probing for crevasses. After passing through some ice penitentes we suddenly heard a half scream half groan from Pepe. I turned to see his head disappearing into a crevasse. I had thought there were no crevasses in this part of the glacier. Now I knew why he had been probing on the way up. In a few big steps I was to him. He had stopped falling by jamming his feet against some icicles inside the hole. It continued below him and I could hear ice crashing below. I grabbed under his arms and hauled him out like a sack. We looked at each other. I think we both had big eyes.
When I got to the edge of the ice the South Africans were there. We hugged and cried for a long time again. When we got down to the others I discovered that several of the people there were from the same party of Argentines including two women, Laura and Sophia. Laura kept asking me what clothing they were wearing. She could not believe that her friends had fallen. She thought that it had to be someone else. We tried to explain that her friends were the only ones on the route that day.
Later the rest of their group returned and I tried once again to explain what happened. One of them, Antonio, was an experienced guide. He had seen death in the mountains before and his reaction was stoic, but I could sense his pain more acutely than all of the others.
The next day Lorrie Skreslet lead a memorial ceremony in the tradition of North American Indians. We made a cross from snow pickets and piled up rocks to form a chorten. Several of us took turns speaking and the for men's Argentine friends placed rocks with notes wrapped around them in the pile. I took my Sherpa coral and turquoise off my necklace and placed the pieces in the rocks.
Later I spoke with Pepe, he thanked me for pulling him out of the crevasse and told me that I should go on and finish the climb. It would be a way to honor the fallen climbers. Others echoed the sentiment. They were trying to help me get past the event. I don't think any of them knew about Dave Bridges and Alex Lowe and for me that this was another layer of grief.
When Jim returned from Camp One that afternoon and we talked it over and decided to go ahead and climb. We would not attempt the Polish Glacier but rather traverse onto the normal, and easier, route.