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On Saturday, May 10, three climbers were killed in a rappelling accident in Washington Pass’s Liberty Bell Group. A fourth member of the team, 38-year-old Anton Tselykh,
narrowly survived the incident and is currently hospitalized.
Undersheriff Dave Yarnell, of the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office, said the deceased climbers were Vishnu Irigireddy, 48, Tim Nguyen, 63, and Oleksander Martynenko, 36.
The group was attempting to climb Early Winter Couloir (AI3 M4+), an alpine mixed route that ascends a prominent couloir between the North and South Early Winters Spires. They were roughly halfway up the 1,100-foot line at around 5:30 p.m. on Saturday evening, when they noticed a storm coming in and decided to retreat.
Much surrounding the accident is still unclear, but at some point during their descent the team’s anchor point failed, and all four climbers fell at the same time. “We calculated about a 200-foot near-vertical fall,” Yarnell said. “Then they landed on a rocky, partially snow-covered chute, and tumbled another 200 feet or so down this chute, tangled in their ropes.”
Once the group came to a halt, after a total fall of roughly 400 feet, Tselykh managed to hike out to the trailhead, and then drove roughly 60 miles west on Highway 20 to Newhalem, Washington, where he used a payphone to call emergency services. This decision seems to indicate that the climber did not know the area well, because it would have been far faster to drive east, to the community of Mazama, which is just 15 or so miles from the trailhead. “He took the long route,” Yarnell said. “He spent at least an hour or more driving over the Cascade mountain range.”
A Snohomish County helicopter rescue team later extracted the three bodies from the mountain. A coroner’s report found that the deceased men suffered from severe head trauma and multiple leg fractures. The surviving climber initially refused medical attention, but was later taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he is being treated for internal bleeding and a traumatic brain injury. His current condition is uncertain, said Yarnell.
The undersheriff said that the authorities are still investigating exactly what went wrong on Early Winter Couloir, but confirmed the team was equipped with climbing harnesses, ropes, removable protection, and all other technical equipment expected for a party on that route. He also confirmed that all four men were attached to the same rope when they fell, and that their rope was found attached to a single piton, “which was very weathered and old-looking.”
It’s unclear if all four men were rappelling off of a single piton or if their anchor was backed up with additional protection which has yet to be recovered.
What went wrong? What can we learn?
We likely won’t get any surefire answers until the survivor’s medical condition is stable. With the limited information on-hand, it’s hard to make accurate judgements about the quality of the party’s anchor or the method by which they chose to descend the route. That said, any rappel anchor reliant on a single point—particularly a pre-existing piton of dubious integrity—is lacking in redundancy.
An earlier version of this article claimed that the group did not carry an emergency satellite communication device, but we know now that the group had two. One had a dead battery; the other was functional but was not used. Why didn’t Tselykh call for help on his inReach? Yarnell speculated that “the survivor was so disoriented that he wasn’t sound of mind.” When Tselykh reached his vehicle he began driving westbound to Newhalem, but soon collided with a guardrail then veered off onto the shoulder of the road. Yarnell said Tselykh passed out on the side of the road for an unknown amount of time, likely due to his injuries, before continuing his drive. Roughly a dozen hours had passed before he finally reached a pay phone to call for help.