Peering through night vision goggles, John Blown of North Shore Rescue (NSR) could make out a pair of headlamps on Yak Peak, a granite dome three hours drive east of Squamish.

Blown’s team had mobilized at 10:40 p.m. on August 5 to assist with a complex climbing rescue on the peak’s Yak Chek (5.9/10a; 450m). Earlier that day, at roughly 6 p.m., two Australian climbers were nearing the top of the route when the leader fell down a runout slab pitch and injured his head. When his partner lowered him back to the belay station, he noticed his friend was dazed and his helmet was dented.

According to Barry Ganon, the Search Manager with Hope Search and Rescue, the climbers only called for help nearly four hours later. Clouds darkened the sky and the setting sun was dipping below the horizon, the mountain soon to be shrouded in darkness. Ganon requested assistance from NSR, who, along with their rescue partner Talon Helicopters, are the only volunteer SAR team in southwestern B.C. with the equipment and certification to perform helicopter rescues at night.

Poor weather and cloud cover forced NSR to approach Yak Peak from the east and north—instead of directly from the west. Waves of cloud and rain rolled steadily through the pass, further obscuring any sight of the climbers in the night. “Flying at night, the margin for error is extremely low,” Blown explained. “Night vision is like staring through two paper towel tubes, you can’t see clouds coming and it’s hard to see the rain.” Although Blown’s team eventually caught brief glimpses of the climbers, they eventually backed off due to the challenging conditions.

The successful rescue

Nathan Friesen, a member of nearby Chilliwack’s Search and Rescue team, received a message to prepare for a ground rescue effort instead. Friesen and his colleagues packed up their gear in the middle of the night and drove an hour east to the base of Yak Peak. In the dark, they shouldered packs and started hiking up the mountain’s scramble route, making visual and verbal contact with the climbers in the early morning hours.

“[Yak Chek] is a pretty common spot for us to get called in for rescues,” Friesen explained. “With its short approach and moderate grade, a lot of people underestimate this route.”

Dave Ellison, an Association of Canadian Mountain Guides-certified rock climbing guide agreed. “Yak has far more loose rock and is more runout than your typical objective in Squamish or the Fraser Valley,” he said. “The rock is much crumblier and less predictable compared to the bomber granite we have at most of our popular climbing destinations locally. The route finding is also far more complex and it’s easier to get off route.”

Lucky for these climbers, the weather forecast improved overnight and NSR put another helicopter in the air that morning. Friesen and the Chilliwack team were prepared for a ground rescue, but, with wet rock and the nature of the injuries, Blown explained that a helicopter rescue was the best option. The NSR helicopter deposited two rescuers to the belay station where they packaged the injured climber and flew him to a waiting ambulance below. The second climber was flown off shortly after. Both were transported by paramedics to a local hospital where they were later released with minor injuries.

Gannon explained that the weather and late-day timing made the rescue was both complex and challenging. He wasn’t sure why there was such a long delay between the accident and the call for help, but explained that, even after the call, the rescue was further delayed by communication challenges with the subjects—despite the fact that there is cell reception on the mountain. (For reasons that still remain unclear, when rescuers attempted to call the Australian phone number associated with the climbers’ Personal Locator Beacon, they couldn’t make contact. It was only after rescuers spoke with one of the climbers’ mother in Australia that contact was made through WhatsApp and rescuers were able to talk to the climbers on the wall.)

 

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Blown pointed out a few things that the climbers did right—carrying rain jackets, headlamps, and having a device to call for help—but he also noted one key way to be better prepared for a committing route like Yak Chek. “They didn’t really have an exit strategy in case something went wrong,” he said. “They couldn’t rappel. … The pitches are 60 meters long and they only brought a single 60-meter rope.” While it may have been possible for the climbers to rappel off anchors built from their own gear, they decided not to attempt it due to the worsening weather and the head injury. Carrying a second rope to aid in a retreat would have vastly simplified a descent.

Everyone Climbing spoke to for this story reiterated that climbers should respect the alpine nature of this area. “Alpine objectives are often more runout, have more loose rock, are dirtier, and more sandbagged than local climbs,” Ellison said. “If you over prepare for alpine objectives or target routes well below your normal grade, you are going to have a much better time.”

The post Climbers Rescued By Helicopter After Spending the Night Stranded and Injured appeared first on Climbing.

Helicopter rescues in Argentine Patagonia are exceedingly rare. The famed Chaltén massif has a dedicated volunteer rescue team but no guaranteed emergency response and no chopper to speed dial. And even if it did, the area’s ripping coastal storms would easily pluck most choppers from the sky. So it was both surprising and notable when, on April 5, a small Robinson 44—originally chartered for tourists in the nearby El Calafate—flew past the town of El Chaltén and into the Torre Valley to aid in a rescue.

The day before, two groups of two female climbers were midway through a traverse called La Vuelta del Fitz, which passes beneath Cerro Chaltén’s (Fitz Roy’s) west face and descends a steep ramp of rock and ice below Filo del Hombre Sentado (Sitting Man Ridge). Near the end of that ramp, the first rope team set a two-screw anchor into 70-degree ice and prepared a rappel. When they both weighted the anchor it ripped from the ice, sending them into a roughly 40-meter fall.

By 8:30 p.m., the second rope team had rappelled to where their partners lay, assessed their open fractures, and opted to leave them in a tent while they hiked several hours to the Niponino camp in hopes of finding a climber with a satellite communications device. Members of the Comisión de Auxilio (CAX), El Chaltén’s volunteer rescue service, were notified of the accident around noon the following day.

Caro North, a professional Swiss climber who lives in El Chaltén for half the year, and who has volunteered with CAX since 2014, calls the ensuing rescue unprecedented. “Usually, it is very hard to get a helicopter to come for a rescue—almost never in Patagonia— because there is no dedicated heli in the area,” North explains. However, this time, the Robinson 44’s little engine was able to carry two members of CAX into the Torre Valley. When the pilot feared his load was too heavy, he dropped one volunteer off in Niponino before carrying the second even closer to the accident site. The pilot made several more trips into the Torre Valley ferrying more volunteers and heavy rescue equipment, including stretchers and ropes. The air support allowed some rescuers to avoid at least 10 hours of tedious glacial and moraine hiking.

“It was a combination of factors that made this rescue work: the tourist helicopter that was in the area, and the incredibly stable weather,” says North “The calm wind was crucial as the helicopter was not very powerful. I think if there had been just a little wind, the pilot would have been unable to fly.”

Watch a video of the 40-person rescue effort, courtesy of Caro North:

On April 5, North was relaxing in El Chaltén, tired after a long Patagonian summer. Her season had included an attempt of the Southeast Ridge of Cerro Torre and the first ascent of Apollo 13 (7b+/5.12c; 600m) in the Turbio IV Valley. She and her boyfriend opted to not climb during the weather window surrounding April 4, content instead to relax in town with friends and enjoy the final days before a flight back to Europe later that week.

Even so, when CAX’s Whatsapp groupchat lit up with word of a serious accident, North and 40 other volunteers sprung into action, leaving their families, plans, and any dreams of relaxation behind.

“CAX activates two teams,” North says. “The contact group, who goes first with a superlight bag of first aid gear and tries to get to the injured as fast as they can, and a second group, who follows them with stretchers and ropes and other rescue gear needed to extract the injured.”

North was part of the first group, leaving town at 2:30 p.m., shortly after the helicopter who flew the two first responders into the Torre Valley. That group slowly picked their way across the Torre Glacier, which is littered with car-sized boulders, crevasses, deep pools of water, and has no clear trail to follow. The days are short in Argentina this time of year, so when the sky went dark at 8:30 p.m. they carried on by headlamp.

North’s group reached the two first responders and the injured around 11 p.m. In darkness, they began carrying the stretcher back down the glacier, carefully trying to not roll an ankle or drop into a crevasse.

Technically, the heli pilot and his Robinson 44 might have been able to fly all the way up to the base of Filo del Hombre Sentado to pick up the injured climbers, but it’s understandable why he didn’t risk it. In December 2014, the pilot Pablo Agriz, in the same type of helicopter, flew toward Hombre Sentado to rescue an unroped climber who had fallen into a crevasse. In an undeniable act of both bravery and misplaced optimism, Agriz misjudged the power of his own engine’s lift and fatally crashed into the mountain’s flanks. The helicopter’s wreckage still sits at the base of the ridge, reminding climbers of the potential consequences of calling for a rescue.

A few hours before sunrise, North and her group had descended to Niponino, where they hoped the heli would be able to pick up the injured climbers.

“Waiting was a bit of a mind game,” she says. “Should we just keep hiking? Or do we wait until daylight in hopes the heli can get them? But carrying them out further than Niponino would have been at least another 20 hours [of hiking], I think.”

North notes how fortunate it was that the stable weather continued to hold, and that it was warm enough for the rescuers to sit out the coldest hours of the night—given that most of them didn’t have bivouac gear.

Thankfully, the heli was able to land on the glacier at first light, picking up the injured as well as several rescuers.

“I’m always impressed by the number of volunteers who gather for these rescues,” North reflects. “So many people in town drop what they’re doing to help. Another impressive thing with this rescue was how far away these girls were. This is one of the furthest places you could have an accident, and how lucky they were that the helicopter could take them out.”

North says she hopes this accident underlines the need for a dedicated rescue helicopter in the Chaltén massif—one that does not rely on the bravery and goodwill of private tourist operations but rather of government support. “Volunteers expose themselves to so much risk during each rescue,” she says. “I decided not to go climbing in the mountains during this window because I was too tired… but I ended up going anyway and hiking through the night to help this rescue.” North and so many other Chaltén locals are eager to help—but ideally, when the next accident happens, the responsibility should not just be on them.

An earlier version of this article inaccurately implied that this rescue was the first occasion rescue volunteers had been airlifted to the scene of an accident in the Chaltén massif. —Ed.

The post Rappel-Anchor Failure in Patagonia Prompts Impressive Rescue Effort appeared first on Climbing.

Climber: Douglas Kern
Location: Staunton State Park, Colorado
Date: August 23, 2014

The Scene

Asha Nanda, 21, had been introduced to climbing at a Christian leadership program in the Adirondacks. During a trip to Colorado, she and several other climbers hiked up to the Tan Corridor, high in a forested gully in Colorado’s newest state park. Douglas Kern, then 25, had just met Nanda the day before; he was one of the more experienced climbers in the group. In the afternoon, Kern led Reef On It! (5.10-), a vertical, seven-bolt sport climb. He left a rope running through quickdraws clipped to the anchors so the rest of the group could enjoy a toprope.

Nanda was the last climber to do the route. Before starting, she borrowed one of Kern’s thin Dyneema slings and girth-hitched it to her harness; she planned to use this sling to clip in at the anchor, thread the rope, and then rappel. Kern’s slings were rigged as alpine draws, with a wrap of tape cinching the sling tight next to one of the carabiners so it wouldn’t shift around.

When Nanda reached the top of the route, 60 feet above the ground, she clipped one of the anchor chains with the sling hitched to her harness. Although she was new to outdoor sport climbing, she had rehearsed anchor cleaning in a gym, and had run through the steps with one of her climbing partners earlier that day. She leaned back and fully weighted the sling connecting her to the anchor to test it, then yelled “off belay” and began untying the figure eight at her harness, preparing to thread the rope through the anchor. “I was very focused on checking and rechecking each step, and this process took approximately two to three minutes,” she says. Suddenly she heard a scream and saw the rope falling in loops below her. Then she realized the scream was her own and she was plummeting through the air.

The Response

Unbeknownst to Nanda, the single sling she’d used to clip the anchor had been compromised, either before she hitched it to her harness or while she was climbing. A loop of the sling must have slipped through the gate of the carabiner that was taped at one end, so now two strands of sling were clipped through the same biner. Although difficult to visualize, this creates a very dangerous situation similar to cross-clipping two loops of a daisy chain—in effect, when Nanda weighted the sling, only the wrap of tape around it secured her to the anchor. The beefy climber’s tape held her weight until she had completely untied and only failed then, leaving the carabiner still clipped to the anchor bolt and the now-useless sling hitched to her harness. The tape fluttered to the ground after the falling climber.

Startled by Nanda’s scream, her belayer, Julie MacCready looked up to see her plunging toward the ground, the rope looping below her. There was nothing she could do to stop her. Kern had just lowered off a nearby climb and was walking down the gully when he heard Nanda yell. Amazingly, he had no doubts about what he would do next.

“I once saw a dude fall in the Adirondacks when we were ice climbing,” he explains. “He fell 20 feet and landed on the ground right next to me. I said to myself right then, ‘If I ever see that again, I’m going to catch the person.’”

Nanda weighs about 125 pounds, and Kern is 6’ 2” and weighs 190 pounds. He had lifted weights throughout high school and college and practiced karate. As he saw her fall, he vividly remembers thinking, “She’s so small, I’ll catch her—it’ll be no problem. I’m going to stop this fall.”

No more than two seconds elapsed between Nanda’s scream and her impact, but Kern remembers that she seemed to be falling “really slowly.” He stood at the base of Reef On It!, planted his feet, and stuck his arms out in front of him, like a man about to catch a medicine ball in the gym. Nanda fell into his arms and slammed onto his chest, then ricocheted onto the ground, where she bounced “a foot or two” off a single narrow strip of dirt amid a sea of boulders and scree.

Flat on her back, Nanda looked up at her friends and said, “What happened?”

Both Kern and Jennifer Lee, another friend in the party, had wilderness first aid training and began to assess Nanda’s condition. MacCready called 911, and another climber ran down the mountain to direct rescuers to the scene. Despite the horrendous fall, Kern and Lee could find no injuries, but when rescuers arrived she was shaking and her blood pressure was falling. Rescuers carried her out of the gully and called for a chopper. She arrived at the hospital two hours after the fall. After seven hours of tests, Nanda was released—every test and scan had come up negative.

Nanda quickly returned to climbing, but says her accident taught her several crucial lessons, including to use her own gear, avoid taped “alpine draws,” and always back up her anchor. Also, she says, “If you’re new to climbing, advance cautiously and with respect to the risks.” She now lives near the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, studying nursing and volunteering for the local fire department.

While Kern’s actions undoubtedly were heroic, he was lucky too. The impact of Nanda’s fall could have seriously injured him or even killed them both. The great difference in the two climbers’ statures enabled him to absorb the blow. Kern also had prepared himself mentally for this day after witnessing a previous groundfall, and his self-confidence and desire to succeed boosted his ability to stand tall.

Kern, who is now living in New Zealand and working for an arborist, credits God for helping him save Nanda: “I think He wanted that girl alive.” Asked if he would do the same thing if he witnessed another falling climber, Kern says, “For sure! If I got a bruise, big deal. She didn’t die. Of course I’d do it again.”

Survival Tip: Give Accurate Directions

Write down or review the information you want to communicate before calling rescuers, including your location (without relying on route names, if possible), your name and number, and the patient’s status. “Rescues are often delayed by panicky callers that are unable to give a location to rescuers,” Simon explains.

The post A Mis-clipped Anchor Leads to a 60-foot Grounder—And a Life Saving Spot appeared first on Climbing.

Through years of experience, you’ve learned how to safely ascend a multi-pitch route and descend via the walk-off or rappel. But what if your partner gets injured on the climb or descent? Or what if you’re with a newer climber who panics and feels uncomfortable rappelling on his own? Every climber should be able to troubleshoot difficult rappel situations, and one of the best ways is by mastering the buddy rappel.

In the buddy rappel, two climbers attach themselves to a single rappel device for an easy descent. One climber controls the descent, choosing the appropriate speed while stabilizing her injured partner and guiding him around any obstacles. This system allows you to safely assist an incapacitated, anxious, or scared partner. One caveat: Before you decide to descend, assess the situation. Is your partner capable of being part of the buddy rappel without compromising the safety of your descent (e.g., do they have a head injury or are they traumatized, anxious, or combative)? Make the safest decision in the moment, which may be to call for help and wait.

Extend the rappel

Extending the device while rappelling allows you to place the prusik third hand below the device without creating interference. You’ll use one double-length sling to extend for both you and your partner.

1. Girth-hitch the sling to your partner’s belay loop.

2. Tie a small overhand on a bight 8 to 10 inches from your partner’s harness—this is where the atc clips into the system. Your partner’s extension should be slightly shorter than yours, such that you’ll be situated below him while rappelling in order to stabilize, assist, and guide him down as needed.

3. Clip the sling’s free tail to your belay loop with a locking carabiner. Now you and your partner are both extended and ready to rig the rappel. (See figure 1 above.)

Rig your device

Now it’s time to set yourself up for a safe rappel.

1. Rig your rappel device to the rope and clip it—using a locking carabiner—to the overhand on a bight on the extension sling. As stated above, your goal is to be positioned a few inches below your partner so you can navigate him down the rock. (See figure 2 above.)

2. Hitch your third-hand backup to the rope and clip it to your belay loop with a locking carabiner. While you should always use a third hand while rapping in case something goes wrong and you need to be temporarily hands-free, this is especially true with the buddy rappel, in which you might need to assist your partner. (See figure 3 above.)

Double-check your system and begin to rappel

It’s time for a final safety check before you start to rappel.

1. Weight the system and double-check that the extension is tethered to you and your partner correctly, the device is rigged correctly, all locking carabiners are locked, and your third-hand is dressed properly and will engage.

2. Unclip from the anchor and begin your rappel. (See figure 4 above.)

3. Rappel slowly, continuously scanning for hazards. Place and clip directionals on overhanging and traversing terrain if needed and don’t accidentally rappel past your next station: You cannot ascend the line with two people.

Reach the next anchor

This next step is applicable only with a partner who is able to unweight the system on her own (otherwise, see “Dealing with an Unresponsive Partner” found below).

1. At the subsequent anchor, clip yourself and your partner in with your anchor tethers and lock the carabiners. (If you’ve safely reached the ground, you can unclip both of you from the system and continue first aid or get further help.)

2. Take yourselves off rappel. Pull the rope such that it falls away from your injured partner and prepare for the next rappel.

Dealing with an Unresponsive Partner

If your partner is unconscious or seriously injured and unable to transfer his weight onto and off of the anchor, then don’t use a personal tether for him. Once he weights the anchor, you’ll have to lift his body weight each time to unclip and continue downward. Instead, use a simple Münter-mule overhand to control the weight transfer.

Here’s how:

1. As you reach the next anchor, take out your cordelette and undo any knots, essentially creating a small rope. Tie one end through your partner’s tie-in points using a figure-eight follow-through. The cordelette will act as the anchor-tether point for both you and your partner; your partner’s body weight will naturally be your counterbalance.

2. Clip a locking biner to the rappel anchor and then clip the cordelette through that carabiner and lock it. Clip a locking carabiner on your belay loop and hitch the cordelette to this locker using a Münter hitch. Remove any slack from the system such that the cordelette is taut from your partner, up through the anchor, and then back down to you. Now tie off the Münter using the mule overhand knot. (See figure A above.) This load-releasing hitch will help you complete the following steps.

• Related: How to tie a Munter Hitch (Video)

3. Lower yourself and your partner onto the cordelette and go off rappel. Now you’re both clipped to the anchor with the load-releasing hitch, allowing you to easily transfer your partner’s weight when ready.

4. Pull the rope and rig the next rappel as described in the main article. Once you’re ready to begin your next rappel, transfer your and your partner’s weight onto the rappel device by undoing the mule overhand and slowly lowering his weight off the anchor using the Münter.

5. Once both of your weight is fully on the rappel device, release the Münter hitch by letting the rest of the slack feed through the system. Take the cordelette with you to use at the next station.

Buddy Rappel Gear List

1. Double-rope rappel device (e.g., ATC)
2. Third-hand/friction-hitch backup (a 20-inch, 5–6 mm prussik)
3. Four locking carabiners
4. Double-length sling or webbing
5. 2 anchor tethers (e.g., a PAS), one for you and one for your partner
6. Cordelette (20 feet of 6–7mm) for dealing with an incapacitated partner

• Related: Master the art of Self Rescue

Alexa Flower lives and works seasonally in Yosemite as a climbing ranger. She worked for three years as a member of YOSAR, and in the winters trades off between ski patrol and traveling.

The post The Buddy Rappel: Rap Safely With an Injured Partner appeared first on Climbing.

There’s an understood credo in climbing that every climbing team is responsible for their own safety, and knowing how to escape from a bad situation, whether it’s injury, weather, or rockfall, should be in every climber’s bag of tricks. Unfortunately, since learning and practicing these skills takes time away from actual climbing, very few climbers educate themselves about these essential self-rescue skills, and even fewer climbers regularly practice them. In an effort to expand and improve upon my own knowledge of self-rescue, I attended an Advanced Rock Rescue course offered by the REI Outdoor School. The class emphasized two skills—hauling and lowering—as the most important techniques to learn when first delving into self-rescue. While there are numerous ways to haul and lower, we’ve outlined simple and efficient methods that are versatile for a number of situations and easy to learn by beginners and longtime climbers alike.

[Take our Essentials to Self-Rescue Course Here]

Start Here

One of the first things veteran guide and senior instructor Paul Haraf made clear during the class is that there are infinite situations that might require some level of self-rescue, from spraining your ankle and not being able to complete a climb to a belayer being knocked unconscious from a falling rock. Because you can never predict what the exact circumstances might be, the most important factor are to have a thorough knowledge of what the systems are, how they work, and how to quickly and safely set them up. If you’re well-versed in the systems, you can apply and adapt them to whatever situation you might find yourself in. That said, the majority of self-rescue scenarios will involve minor injuries that prevent you and your partner from finishing a route. Because of this, hauling your partner up to you and/or lowering him to the ground or a previous anchor are the most often-used techniques. The skills outlined here involve top-down rescue, meaning you’ll be hauling or lowering a follower (as opposed to a leader when belaying from below), with an auto-blocking belay device set up correctly on a solid anchor. Lastly and perhaps most important: Practice, practice, practice! Haraf suggests setting up a practice station in your house so you can do it whenever you have a few free minutes.

How to Haul Your Partner

The most basic system is a 3:1, also called a Z-pulley, meaning that for every three feet of rope you move through the system, you’ll raise the climber one foot. A 3:1 system also means that you’re reducing the weight of the hauled load by two-thirds, so in a frictionless world it would take 50 pounds of effort to raise a 150-pound climber. Of course, the real world has friction with the rope, the anchor, the rock, etc., so that number isn’t exact, but it’s relatively close.

1. Build a prusik (A) with a closed loop of cord on the weighted strand, and tie an overhand in the bight (B) to shorten if necessary.

2. Clip a non-locker inside the prusik loop, and then clip the brake strand of the rope into the biner (C). Slide the prusik down the rope as far as you can.

3. Using your legs (not just your arms) and your body weight, pull the brake strand (D) up toward the anchor. Once the prusik engages, this will raise the climber.

4. Keep pulling until the prusik is in a position where you can’t pull efficiently any more. At that point, slide the prusik back down the rope and repeat. The auto-blocking belay device will hold the climber while you reset the system.

How to Lower Your Partner

Lowering a climber with an auto-blocking belay device set up on the anchor is a topic fraught with debate. There are many schools of thought on how to do it safely, but in this skill, we’re going to skip that controversy entirely and instead lower with a Munter hitch. This involves putting the follower on a friction hitch with a backup (Haraf says, “Never trust anyone’s life to a single friction hitch!”), removing the belay device from the system, building a Munter, and using it to lower with an auto-block backup that’s clipped directly to your belay loop.

1. From the belay device, take a few feet of the brake strand and tie an overhand on a bight, then clip that to the anchor with a locking biner (A). This will be the backup for your friction hitch.

2. Using a long cordelette or sling, tie a Klemheist on the climber’s weighted strand of the rope (B).

3. With the other end of the cord, tie a Munter-mule-overhand on a locking biner that’s clipped to the anchor (C). Slide the Klemheist down the rope as far as you can.

4. Transfer the weight of the climber from the belay device to the Klemheist by wiggling the biner clipped through the loop of the belay device back and forth (D). Keep wiggling it until a few inches of rope have moved through the device and the Klemheist has engaged, holding the weight of the climber.

5. Remove the belay device (E) completely from the setup, and with that section of rope, tie a Munter onto the locker that was holding the belay device on the anchor.

6. Pull slack through the Munter and tie an auto-block hitch with a closed loop of cord onto the brake strand (coming from the Munter) and clip it to your belay loop. Slide it up toward the Munter and sit back on it so it’s engaged.

7. Untie the backup overhand that’s clipped to the anchor (A). Slowly untie the Munter-mule-overhand on the cord, using the Munter part to transfer the weight of the climber from the cord to the rope. Then remove the cord entirely.

8. The climber’s weight will be completely on the Munter hitch, your brake hand, and the auto-block backup.

9. With one hand on the auto-block and another higher on the brake strand, gently squeeze the auto-block so it disengages. Lower the climber as you normally would, using the auto-block as a backup.

General Rescue Tips

• Clip into the anchor with a clove hitch on the rope, which allows you to change your distance from the anchor and get into a better position to see your follower.
• The anchor should be high, about chest height or above. This will help the rope run easier over any ledges or avoid them completely.
• You want at least a 3mm difference in diameter between cord and rope for maximum friction when applying hitches.
• Organization leads to less chaos, so put your own clip-in point on your side of the anchor and face biner gates up for better access and easier clipping/unclipping.
• Prusiks can only be built with cord; a Klemheist can use cord or slings.
• Every inch counts in these systems, so when sliding hitches and pulling rope, move them as far as possible every time, but keep them within reach. This might also mean tying an overhand in a prusik if it’s too long.

For tons of class options from beginning rock climbing to advanced anchor clinics, check out rei.com/learn for listings in your area. 

This article originally appeared on Climbing.com in 2016.

Also Read

• How to Transition from Gym bouldering to Outdoor Blocs
• Need More Endurance? Use a Hangboard
• Five One-Hour Workouts to Fit Your Frantic Schedule

The post Climbing Multipitch Routes? Better Master the Art of Self-Rescue appeared first on Climbing.

At 3 O’clock in the morning of August 19, 1966, six men crept up the Mer de Glace, the glacier from which the Petit Dru spits upwards. In the dark they could not see the mountain before them. Rain spat down, soaking the climbers to the bone. Ropes, pitons, army rations and sleeping bags bulged out from their heavy rucksacks. They plodded up in the dark: an American, two Germans, an Englishman, two Frenchmen. Some had met for the first time the previous night, in the smoke and gloom of the Hotel de Paris, the cheapest place for an itinerant climber to cop an actual bed in Chamonix. Above the six men was a mountain face that, 15 years earlier, had not once been climbed.

But the six men were not assembled to climb the Petit Dru—they were to save two young Germans who were ensnared on a ledge, unable to retreat, and unable to continue climbing. Verglas coated the entire wall. A helicopter had flown over the mountain on the 17th, and spotted the Germans through the clouds. They were alive. Forty rescuers had been dispatched to the summit of the Dru, but massive overhangs made it nearly impossible for teams to rappel to the stranded men.

The sole American on the glacier, and part of a second rescue team, was a tall, angular man with patched climbing knickers and a scarf nearly as long as he was. His face, one journalist later wrote, “had something of the beauty of the paintings of the Christian saints.” His eyes, an impish, childlike blue, twinkled when he smiled. In a few days he would be one of the most famous people in Europe. In three years he would be found dead in a campground in Jackson, Wyoming. His name was Gary Hemming, and he carried with him a conviction that in turn carried the five other soaked climbers upwards in the gray predawn drizzle. They would save the men who were trapped, thousands of feet above, by climbing up through the storm.

***

In a range rich in iconic summits, the Drus—the Grand and Petit—stand out. While both are spectacular summits, it was the Petit Dru, at 3,730 meters (24 meters shorter than its taller counterpart), that caught the eye of Chamonix alpinists. Its North and West faces are both steep, imposing walls of granite nearly as tall as El Capitan in Yosemite. It wasn’t until after World War I that alpinists even considered the faces possible.

***

In 1935, the first ascent of the North Face fell to Pierre Allain and Raymond Leininger. Allain was, in the words of the climbing chronologist, Ian Parnell, “decades ahead of his time.” He invented equipment still used today: lightweight half-height sleeping bags, inflatable mattresses and the first modern rock shoe. Allain honed his skills on the boulders of Fontainebleau outside of Paris, unlike many cloistered traditionalists of his era. His equipment, training and approach were, for 1935, breathtakingly modern. On the North Face, Allain and Leininger brought one ice axe between them to save weight. They used a single 7mm rope, five pitons, six carabiners and a prototype pair of Allain’s rock shoes. The pair freed the entire climb at 5.9. In 1935, and perhaps still, it was an absolute tour de force.

The first ascent of the neighboring West Face, in 1952, was such an undertaking that Guido Magnone, one of the first ascensionists, wrote an entire book about the endeavor. The signature beauty of the climb lay in the perfect, 90-meter diedre, a dihedral of granite high up the face. On the first attempt, Magnone, Lucien Bréardini and Adrien Dagory, exhausted from the oppressive heat and short on equipment, dead-ended above the dièdre, where blank slabs gave way to a 30-meter overhang. On their second try, the team, this time with Marcel Lainé, traversed in above the dihedral by placing a line of primitive bolts (gulots), from the neighboring North Face, skipping the section of the West Face they’d previously climbed. This time the team committed to an irreversible pendulum traverse across the slabs and launched up the overhang. The route constituted the cutting edge of rock climbing for 1952. In the wet, icy conditions of 1966, however, the same features conspired to form something more sinister: the perfect trap.

***

“There is,” wrote the journalist Jeremy Bernstein, in a 1971 article for The New Yorker about rescues in the French Alps, “in the back of the young climber’s mind an awareness of the efficient rescue service in the valley—the realization that, if the worst comes to the worst, ‘on vous cherche.’”

Heinz Ramisch and Hermann Schriddel had set off up the Petit Dru on August 14, five days before Hemming’s team labored towards them on the Mer de Glace. Ramisch, a 22-year-old student from Karlsruhe, Germany, had never once climbed with the 30-year-old Schriddel, who worked as an auto mechanic. They had only just met, encamped with a cluster of their countrymen in the Montenvers campground.

Accidents typically leave a distinct trail of seemingly inconsequential mistakes. But then, alpinism is rife with instances— both of ascent and disaster—where small things go wrong, apparently unnoticed by the unlucky protagonists. A razor-thin line has always separated the brilliant from the bumbling.

Ramisch and Schriddel made average, but decent, progress up the easy lower two-thirds of the wall. Planning on two or three days on the face, the two pared down their bivouac equipment to the minimum standard at the time: waterproof anoraks and down jackets, as well as a rudimentary two-man bivy sack.

On the second day, Schriddel took a 30-foot leader fall, badly bruising his ribs. Ramisch’s throat, sore from dehydration, hurt so much he couldn’t swallow. Nonetheless, on the 16th, even after bivouacking through a violent thunderstorm, they started up the dihedral, ignoring the growing clouds and the ice now plastering the face. The decision to continue, instead of retreat, would activate the most complicated rescue in the history of mountain climbing. They made impossibly slow progress. Schriddel fell yet again, and Ramisch, who caught him on a hip belay, badly cut his hands. That afternoon, having taken all day to climb the signature 90-meter dihedral, the Germans committed to the pendulum. Here, they confronted two options: Magnone’s bolt ladder, leading to safety and the less difficult North Face, or continuing up the horribly iced-up overhangs to the summit. Before the team had left Montenvers, they had agreed to wave a red parka in case of trouble to their anxious countrymen below.

After another bivouac, this time on the impossibly exposed ledge beneath the roofs, unable to commit to either the icy overhangs or the old bolt ladder, and certainly unable to reverse the pendulum and rappel, the exhausted Germans made themselves as comfortable as they could, took off the red jacket, and furiously signaled for help.

***

Lother Mauch was frustrated. It was Thursday, August 18. The rain drummed down on the café roof in Courmayeur, on the Italian side of the Alps. He had just retreated from the mountains, and now the weather was getting worse. Mauch, a 29-year-old German with handsome, dark features—he occasionally funded alpine-climbing trips with modeling gigs for fashion magazines—had been planning on an ascent of one of Chamonix’s longest routes, the Peuterey Integral. Across from him, reading that day’s Dauphine Libéré, a French paper, sat Gary Hemming, Mauch’s partner and mentor. The pair had made numerous ascents together: “Gary taught me everything during two summer seasons, when I climbed mostly with him,” Mauch remembers.

***

With Hemming, nothing was as it seemed. Hemming was born in 1934 in Pasadena, California, but when he became famous, he loved toying with reporters and friends alike, mischievously lying about his age, his height, his history. In his obituary, Royal Robbins would describe him as “a climber widely believed to have been among the best in the world.” Yet he climbed well only sporadically, often moodily lapsing into a listlessness that caused his abilities to suffer as much as his partners. Tom Frost, who climbed a new route with Hemming, John Harlin and Stewart Fulton on the Aguille de Fou in 1963, tells me that “his limitations were personal, not physical. He just wasn’t that stable a personality.”

For Hemming, as for others of his generation, alpinism was more a crucible than a sport. He told an admiring reporter from Elle after the rescue: “The mountain is an initiation which is renewed every year. You go there, you test yourself, you find yourself again. Afterwards, you are more able to accept yourself.”

Though Hemming had climbed with Robbins and Frost—men who practically invented modern climbing—he lingered only on the fringes of Yosemite in the late 1950s. His ramblings, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, took him from Wyoming to Mexico, to British Columbia, to New York City: an early prototype of the dirtbag. Beginning in the summer of 1959, Hemming gravitated towards the Tetons, where he worked as a guide for Exum Mountaineering.

Mercurial even at his best, Hemming was legendary in his moodiness. He exploded into fits of rage, often against inanimate objects. Partners recall how his moods and tempers would affect his climbing. “He was very temperamental,” remembers Konrad Kirch, a friend of Hemming’s and a climbing partner of John Harlin’s. “And he was very fluctuating in his abilities.” Hemming, stalk thin and around 6-foot-4, would often provoke fights he knew he’d lose. Once, he was badly beaten outside a bar in the Tetons by three cowboys he’d been glowering at through his noticeably long, tangled hair. “Death,” he wrote in his diary, “is chasing me in this country. I have to leave before it catches me.”

In 1960, Harlin, an American Air Force pilot stationed in Germany, wrote to Hemming, whom he’d climbed with back in California in 1954. Hemming, attracted by the allure of the European Alps and sickened by the perceived restraints of American society, soon joined him.

While both men had made little ripples on the fringes of climbing development in California, they made quite the splash in Europe, bringing Yosemite tactics to the large, glaciated mountains of the Western Alps. Apart from a new route on the Fou, Hemming completed the first American ascent of the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses, and the American Direct on the Petit Dru, with Robbins in the summer of 1962. (The Direct, as luck would have it, joined the original West Face route at the 90-meter dihedral where the two Germans now found themselves trapped.) Though Hemming climbed with others, it was with Harlin that he felt most strongly the electrifying power of partnership. And while they would argue, notoriously berating each other as they dangled from some precarious belay, they quickly became the most famous Americans in the Alps.

Guided by Hemming’s fatalistic, medieval sense of chivalry, the two were part and parcel to some of the Alps’ most famous rescues. Rescue duties at the time were divided among three groups seasonally— the École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme, or E.N.S.A. (the guide-training school of France), the guides themselves, and lastly the École de Haute Montagne (the training school of the French Alpine troops). Help from talented “recreational” alpinists such as Hemming and Harlin was a necessary addition, but not always welcome. “Gary never liked the Chamonix guides,” says Lothar Mauch. The rift had begun when Hemming and Harlin offered their assistance during the famous disaster on the Central Pillar of Freney in 1961. The ordeal killed four out of seven climbers, and left the two Americans disenchanted over the lassitude of the French rescuers. This rift deepened when Hemming was booted out of an E.N.S.A. course in 1962 for refusing to shave his unruly beard. Later, he shaved it off all the same.

Hemming’s stubborn romanticism plagued him even more in the lowlands. His love life was plentiful, but abysmal. By 1966, he’d amassed a tangle of relationships that were complicated even considering the decade. He had a son with a Frenchwoman in 1963, and the couple maintained an open relationship. But he had also fallen in love with a young French student to whom he prescribed unrealistic expectations and mythic proportions.

When the two met, the woman was 17 years old. Hemming pestered her with hundreds of letters. He climbed over the hedges of her parents’ house in Paris. Her sister, unamused, promptly phoned the police, and Hemming was arrested. Hemming’s beatnik predilections baffled most of his American contemporaries. Frost muses, “He was portrayed as a romantic in the media. But, he wasn’t willing to step up to the plate to be a father or a husband.” For the French, who have always gathered rebellious spirits to their collective bosoms—from Joan of Arc to Arthur Rimbaud—the man brooding in the café with Lothar Mauch on that rainy day in August could not have been better poised for stardom.

John Harlin’s obsession was a route up the North Face of the Eiger in winter. By winter of 1966 he had made multiple attempts over five years, and finally recruited a team of alpinists whose names read like a who’s who of alpinism in the 1960s: Englishmen Chris Bonington and Don Whillans, the Scottish climber Dougal Haston, and the brilliant American Layton Kor. But the attempt had ended in disaster on March 22, as Harlin ascended a 7mm rope halfway up the face. The tiny perlon cord wore over a sharp edge, and Harlin fell. The journalist Peter Gillman, on assignment for the Daily Telegraph, watched in horror from Kleine Scheiddeg through his telescope. “Suddenly I saw a figure in red cartwheeling downwards. It fell too fast for me to follow it.”

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Five months later, as Hemming read the Dauphine Libéré in Courmayeur at noon on August 18, he was doubtless still reeling from Harlin’s death. “John is one of my dearest friends,” he wrote in his diary. “His death I refuse to accept and so far as I am concerned he is still very much alive … I cannot climb alone next summer.”

The article that interested him involved the two Germans, trapped high up on the Dru, on terrain he was intimately familiar with. The École de Haute Montagne had dispatched some 40 troops to the summit of the Dru, orchestrated from Chamonix by Colonel André Gonnet. The plan was to lower a steel winch down and haul the stranded climbers back up. An Allouette helicopter had buzzed past the Germans, and through the clouds confirmed they were alive, but with the atrocious weather, could do little else.

With the rescuers came the press. “Every newspaper in Western Europe carried details of the rescue on its front pages,” wrote Bernstein in The New Yorker. A helicopter from the O.R.T.F., the official French radio and television network, joined the fray. The Petit Dru had been besieged.

Mauch took a little convincing before he would go with Hemming. “Gary said, ‘If they do it like that, trying to go down from the top of the Dru, they might never get them out.’ He knew very well about the overhangs on the West Face,” he says.

But the tunnel from Courmayeur to Chamonix was expensive, and the two climbers had just paid the hefty fee. Hemming pressed—what better crusade than a daring rescue? He would recount in an ensuing Paris Match article: “This rescue is a great ascent—a real adventure. But what’s important is that it involves the lives of two persons, two companions. If we make it, it will mean a lot more than just another windy summit, don’t you agree?”

Eventually Mauch agreed to return to Chamonix, and to accompany Hemming up the Dru. “It was bad weather,” he reasons, with the logic of any obsessed alpinist. “There was nothing else to [do].” Hemming’s plan, to reach the Germans by climbing up to them and rappelling, seemed simple enough. But rescues in Chamonix were overly complicated affairs, and to rappel a face that huge was still daunting, given the techniques and equipment of 1966. “The rescue organization,” says Mauch, “was very, very bad at the time.”

At 3 o’clock on the afternoon of the 18th, Mauch and Hemming introduced themselves to Colonel Gonnet, who, to his great consternation, realized he was suddenly parlaying with the same upstart American who had been kicked out of E.N.S.A. for refusing to shave.

A man wholly different from Gary Hemming was also paying particular attention to the unfolding saga on the Petit Dru. René Desmaison was one of the best alpinists in France. The 36-year-old had made the fourth ascent of the West Face of the Dru. Unsatisfied, he completed the first winter ascent of the line, and then returned to solo it. In 1958, he and Jean Couzy climbed a new route on the north face of the Grandes Jorasses. He was a member of Lionel Terray’s expedition to Jannu in 1962. Perhaps only Walter Bonatti exceeded Desmaison in ushering in the new era of modern European alpinism.

Unlike Hemming, who flitted between bohemian dalliances and climbing with a calculated nonchalance, Desmaison was an obsessive career alpinist, and one of the foremost guides in Chamonix. And like many professional climbers desperate to fund their endeavors, Desmaison possessed a canny ability to manipulate his adventures and present them—for a cost—to the mainstream media. “He had a reputation in Chamonix,” remembers Mauch, “for working with Paris Match and the radio station.”

In Desmaison’s defense, alpinists with middling bank accounts have always relied on publicity stunts to fund their endeavors. Harlin’s death on the Eiger had received massive coverage; the French magazine Paris Match had taken to keeping a full-time correspondent on hand in Chamonix during the busy summer alpine season in order to snatch up rescue stories as quickly as hapless climbers could ascend into trouble.

Like Hemming, Desmaison realized that climbing up to the Germans was the surest method of rescue. He decided, without informing the world’s oldest organized mountain-guiding association and his employer, Chamonix’s venerated Companie des Guides (who hadn’t yet ventured forth a rescue effort), to strike off up the West Face to save the Germans.

“Amateur or professional,” he wrote in Total Alpinism, “any climber has the right, indeed the duty, to save life.” What he neglected to reveal, in his chapter on the Dru (entitled “The Maverick”), was the exclusive contract he signed with Paris Match before setting off.

François Guillot, another young alpinist, was drinking a beer and watching the rain in the Hotel de Paris when he saw Mauch and Hemming. Hurriedly, they explained their plan. Within hours of the meeting with Gonnet, Hemming had assembled an improvised team of rescuers: Gerhard Baur was a young German in his early 20s who knew Ramisch and Schriddel. Gilles Bodin was a French guide. Mick Burke, who Konrad Kirch remembers as a “small, dirty- looking climber,” was a talented Brit who would later go missing on the South Face of Everest. He was also crucially well versed in knowledge of the West Face, having rappelled the American Direct, Robbins and Hemming’s line, when his partner had broken an arm due to rockfall.

But Guillot was the lynchpin. At 22, he was one of the youngest rescuers, but also one of the strongest. “I was a pure amateur at the time,” he laughs. “I was coming off a six-week trip to the Caucus mountains. So I was in good shape. Gary knew me, and knew I was a decent climber, and asked me to come.”

By 7:00 that evening, Hemming and his team were on a specially scheduled cog- railway train headed up to the glacier. Early the next morning, the men climbed up the Dru Couloir, an inhospitable place in the best of conditions. Now, as sleet spat down, the couloir was a death trap, and the men, laden with heavy rucksacks and soaked already to the bone, resorted to every trick in the book to make upward progress. In the snow and sleet, the slabs and ledges proved impossible. Guillot led a few pitches and then retreated back down, and the men huddled into their down sleeping bags and two-man bivy sacks, little better off than the Germans, who remained crouched on their teeny ledge, rationing nuts and shivering through their fourth night in the same forlorn spot.

Meanwhile, Desmaison and an aspirant guide and photographer named Vincent Mercié, had taken a helicopter to the base of the couloir and were soon also dodging the fusillade of stones and debris. The two Frenchmen hunkered down for the night on a sheltered ledge, unable to cross over to Hemming and his team until morning, when the cold had frozen the couloir enough to allow safe passage. In the morning, Baur tossed Desmaison a rope. The two parties converged. Now they were eight. What went through Hemming’s mind as Desmaison and Mercié popped up on the ledge next to him? Desmaison, according to his own account, chastised the team for moving too slowly, and conjured a plan of action. “Gary knew very well that Desmaison was there for money,” says Mauch.

For Hemming, the helpless, troubled romantic, the Dru rescue glimmered as the spiritual crusade he had always dreamed of. For Desmaison, whose career suddenly hung in the balance, saving the Germans, and the race to beat his colleagues, meant everything. The idealist and the opportunist would now have to work their way together up the mountain as 10 million Europeans listened, read and watched the drama unfurl across the granite of the Dru.

“Desmaison wanted to do the rescue to take pictures, to sell the pictures to Paris Match, and you could speak for hours about that,” Guillot says. “However, he was perfectly in line with his approach, and he was a professional alpinist.”

They came up with a plan of action. Guillot and Hemming would go first, Desmaison and Mercié second, and Mauch, Baur, Bodin and Burke would tackle the less glamorous but equally daunting task of hauling the heavy rescue and bivouac equipment up the verglassed face.

That Hemming and Desmaison, not exactly slouches when it came to alpinism, allowed the young Guillot to lead the entire West Face speaks more to the 22-year-old’s abilities than anything else. Bodin recalled in an interview in 2002, “Without Guillot, we may still have succeeded. But, it would have taken twice as much time.”

Hemming belayed as the young Frenchman furiously hammered his way up the West Face. Word had gotten out about the tall, valiant Californian racing his improvised team up through the clouds. Even if he was only feeding out rope, the press was in love. Less enamored was the Companie des Guides with Desmaison. For the stoic clique, Desmaison’s latest publicity stunt constituted the final straw.

There were now three rescue groups on the Dru. The École de Haute Montagne’s 40 volunteers, soldiers and guides on the summit were still attempting to lower a steel cable down to the Germans. E.N.S.A. had finally sent its four alpinists to climb Pierre Allain’s route on the North Face, and Hemming and Desmaison’s team was about to reach the Germans by way of the original West Face route.

The three rescue entities were drawing closer to the Germans, and, as notably to the swarms of reporters below, to each other.

On Saturday the 20th, as Guillot led the climbers up the West Face, rescue efforts were compounding elsewhere, too. Four E.N.S.A. climbers—all colleagues of Desmaison’s—had begun climbing up the less-technical North Face, with the intent of traversing in on Magnone’s aged gulots.

The eight men on the West Face bivouacked below the dièdre. Now they were a mere 300 feet below the two Germans. In one day, through ferocious storms, Guillot had led what had taken Ramisch and Schriddel two days the week before. Around the corner, the E.N.S.A. party bivouacked at around the same height. Hemming shouted to the Germans through the mist, but could hear nothing.

Everyone settled down in the dark. Their sleeping bags and clothes were soaked completely through. The next morning, the Germans responded to Hemming’s shouts, and the rescuers attacked the dihedral. Simultaneously, the E.N.S.A. team began traversing in from the North Face. Higher up, Gonnet’s men were still trying to lower a steel cable from the summit of the Dru. They had enlisted the help of some volunteers, including a young man named Wolfgang Egle, a friend of the Germans, who was rappelling above the four E.N.S.A. climbers when he somehow became tangled in the ropes on the icy north face and was strangled to death.

Desmaison remembers the incident in Total Alpinism: “Luckily, this tragic occurrence was invisible from the West Face and, naturally, we did not mention it to the two Germans.”

Guillot and Hemming reached the stranded German climbers a little after noon on Sunday, August 21—a full week after Ramisch and Schriddel had started up the face. Apart from the minor injuries sustained while climbing, and the obvious hunger, cold and exhaustion, they were fine.

As Hemming reached Ramisch and Schridde, Yves Pollet-Villard, one of the guides on the E.N.S.A. team, was making the traverse across Magnone’s gulots. Pollet- Villard was a colleague of Desmaison’s. Moreover, the two had climbed on Jannu together, and routinely roped up around Chamonix. Understandably furious at Desmaison’s decision to rescue the Germans himself, without prior consultation, he now asked the renegade West Face team what their intentions were.

Guillot remembers thinking that, hubris aside, Hemming and Desmaison’s plan was the safer of the two. The ropework involved with ferrying the two exhausted Germans up and across to the North Face was doable, but complicated, and dangerous considering the Germans’ deteriorating condition. Burke and Hemming’s knowledge of the American Direct, which shot down from the ledge in a perfect line, was the safest option.

“At that time,” says Guillot, “rappelling down a 900-meter-high face was something enormous. And certainly for Desmaison, and also for Gary, it was a question of pride. They wanted to keep the two Germans with them, and not give them to the other team. And this created a lot of problems for my friend Desmaison after that.”

One of the North Face rescuers fuming at Desmaison and Hemming’s insolence was Gérard Devouassoux. Five years later, in February 1971, Devouassoux would be charged with rescuing Desmaison and his young partner Serge Gousseault from the top of the Grandes Jorasses after the exhausted climbers had become stuck at the top of a new route. By the time the rescue arrived, Gousseault was dead, and Desmaison was barely alive. Desmaison would accuse the rescuers of intentionally dragging their feet to punish him for his role on the Dru rescue while Devouassoux and the other rescuers would claim that Desmaison’s need for the spotlight—he hauled heavy radio equipment up the wall so he could broadcast daily updates—had caused him to climb too slowly.

Today, many Chamoniards still whisper about Devouassoux’s “revenge,” though few are willing to comment on it publicly. On the ledge in 1966, Guillot, uninvolved in the older men’s weighty quarrels, chimed in, asking for the guides to lower a stuff sack full of snacks.

Desmaison continues: “The cloud ceiling was now about 11,800 feet. The air seemed humid. In spite of the altitude it did not seem cold. It was obviously only a matter of time before the storm broke.”

A helicopter whirred past to snap photographs, and the team rigged the Germans with modern nylon harnesses and retreated to their last bivouac below the dihedral. That night, as the men prepared for the worst, another storm of insatiable violence lashed the West Face. The rescuers debated untying from the pitons, humming with electricity.

On the 22nd, Mick Burke led the team, and the rescued Germans, down the mountain, soaked, exhausted and elated. In the dark, they stepped onto the glacier. In the morning, when, observed Bernstein in The New Yorker, “The light was bright enough so that the O.R.T.F. television cameras could obtain excellent pictures,” the team was helicoptered back to Chamonix. In the black-and-white footage, Hemming appears a little tired. His pants are tattered and worn, and a red knit cap is perched at a perfect angle over his head. He laughs easily with the reporters despite his fatigue, throwing his head back at his own sardonic remarks. His French is good, with a slight American twang. When a reporter asks if he ever thought about giving up, he fixes his gaze: “Jamais. Jamais.” “He loved it,” Konrad Kirch remembers.

While they had toiled on the Dru, Desmaison had slyly hidden his contract with Paris Match from the other rescuers, but, back in Chamonix, he told an understandably livid Hemming. “Gary was not the type of guy who would make a big fuss about fighting with Réne,” says Guillot. “But, I’m sure it was a pretty tough discussion between the two of them.”

While the rescue elevated Hemming to mythic proportions, Desmaison’s actions caused the Companie des Guides to fire him instantly. He would spend the rest of his life feuding and feeling as if Hemming had gotten an unfair portion of the credit for the rescue. “Well done, Gary!” he wrote. “Gary Hemming was the hero of the hour, the man who had saved the two Germans, the man everybody wanted to touch, and interview, and see. You would have thought he had done the entire rescue single-handed; nobody showed the slightest interest in the rest of us.”

Guillot, who later became a guide, spent years quietly reading Desmaison’s increasingly exaggerated accounts of the affair. “René hid everything about the job we did,” he says. “In all his books he mentions the rescue, and each time his role grows, as if he’d done everything himself. I spent my life looking at what René was writing in his books and saying, ‘Bastard; he could have spoken a little bit more about my role!’”

While Hemming basked in the limelight and Desmaison tussled with the Companie des Guides, Lothar Mauch engaged in a heroism of a different sort. Two men had been saved; another young man was dead. The parents of Wolfgang Egle, the man who still hung from the North Face of the Dru, had come to Chamonix. Mauch remembers feeling uneasy. Devouassoux, the E.N.S.A. climber who had reached Egle moments after his death, had delegated the task of meeting the parents to Mauch. “He saw the guy dying before his eyes! I didn’t see anything,” says Mauch. “I was on the other side of the mountain. The parents asked me questions I couldn’t answer. It wasn’t right.”

After the hubbub subsided, a different sort of recovery took place, as rescuers somberly cut down Egle’s body and returned it to Chamonix.

In James Salter’s novel Solo Faces, which is loosely based on the life of Hemming, the title character successfully fades back into an anonymous, vagabond existence after his dangerous brush with fame. The real ending was less tidy. Hemming’s face had been seen on every television station in Europe. He wrote his own account of the rescue for Paris Match. He was put up in the Paris flats of intellectuals and journalists. He played a character on a French television mini-series. Women stopped him on the street. He was “le Beatnik,” with, as Salter puts it, “a saintly smile and the vascular system of a marathon runner.”

“Gary was uneasy and unhappy in the United States,” Robbins would write in his obituary. In 1969, as his celebrité ebbed, Hemming returned to the Tetons. He had taken, for some morbid reason, to keeping a revolver in his rucksack. Hemming’s idealism, which had so embodied the 1960s to his European fans, would be lost, seemingly in time with the tumultuous decade itself, which began with such innocence and ended in unfathomable violence. “Anyone,” he reportedly quipped, “can be a hero one day and a motherfucker the next.” On the night of August 6, 1969, he attended a party with his old friend Bill Briggs at the Jenny Lake Campground.

Hemming, who loved getting into fights he’d lose, needled one of the partygoers about the inferiority of American guides to their Gallic counterparts. The two scuffled, with the much-stronger Exum guide pacifying the wildly drunk Hemming. Later, Hemming quarreled with his girlfriend at the time, snatched his rucksack out from her car, and disappeared angrily into the night, firing a shot from his revolver into the air. Briggs, attempting to cling to much- needed sleep before he met his clients in the morning, heard a second shot at some point during the night. “I recall thinking probably Gary had committed suicide, or perhaps shot the girl.” In the morning he found Hemming’s long body, splayed out in the grass.

***

Desmaison’s Accident on the Grandes Jorasses and the death of Serge Gousseault put him even further at odds with the Chamonix establishment. He constantly warred with the guides he swore abandoned him. Whatever his earthly motives, his routes are considered among the greatest in the Alps. A modern alpinist, Jon Griffith, wrote on his web page after repeating Desmaison’s pièce de résistance on the Jorasses: “Among all the hundreds of classics … there will always remain … the ones that combine five star climbing with an epic tale enshrined in our sport. The Desmaison-Gousseault is one of them.” In 2007, Desmaison died at the age of 77.

Mauch, Guillot, Baur and Bodin are still alive. When I spoke with Mauch, he was in Spain, enjoying the sunset after a day of clipping bolts. He and Guillot are still friends, having met in the bar that rainy night in the Hotel de Paris, over 50 years ago. I chatted with Guillot, who was spending time in Marseilles. His shoulders, he complains, are giving him trouble. In his mid-70s, he still climbs 5.11 (5.12, according to Mauch). “Gary had the fame,” he told me. “And that’s O.K.”

Most of the rescuers turned toward inevitable careers in the mountains. Gerhard Baur became a successful mountain filmmaker. Guillot and Bodin spent lifetimes guiding in the Mont Blanc Massif, though the fame and prestige awarded the rescuers eventually faded. “Ask the youngsters, and you will see there are not so many who know!” Bodin joked in a 2002 interview.

It is difficult to directly connect Desmaison and Gousseault’s tragedy on the Grandes Jorasses with the rescue, but in a town where politics and climbing are tied so tightly together, not impossible. Hemming, turned celebrity overnight, unraveled over his three remaining years. His diaries constantly question his fame. “Now I know with certainty the impossible situation of being ‘somebody important,’” he wrote. While the other rescuers simply became dramatis personae, and a mountain rescue became a confounding muddle of egos, the survivors are probably relieved to have remained relatively anonymous: the two men who gained the most from those stormy days on the Dru suffered in accordance with their fame.

Michael Wejchert is a writer and guides for the International Mountain Climbing School in North Conway, New Hampshire.

This feature article was first published in the 50th anniversary edition of Ascent in 2017.

The post 10 Million People Watched The Dru Rescue. The Media Created Heroes And Villains. appeared first on Climbing.

Out Alive is a podcast about real people who survived the unsurvivable. Check out more seasons and episodes here.

This episode contains graphic content that may not be suitable for all listeners. 

River Barry, a climber in the right place at the right time, leads a daring rescue of a BASE jumper stranded high on a cliff. Read here.

Transcript

Host: Most of us view our outdoor adventures as something we do for ourselves. While not necessarily solitary, we climb those peaks, scale those walls, and sleep in the dirt for our own benefit. Some practitioners of more extreme sports like climbing, high-alpine expeditions, and BASE jumping are even accused of selfishness.

This refrain is all too common after an athlete’s untimely death in the mountains. But for the majority of us, we balance our tolerance for risk by acquiring the necessary skills to keep ourselves safe. We practice our knots, self arresting, and first aid in order to protect ourselves and our partners, but without much thought for the greater good.

But the skills we’re quietly mastering with each expedition can turn into superpowers. When a crisis arises, we might just find that the resume we’ve been building makes us exactly the right person to help a stranger in need.

Trailer

River: My name is River Barry. I’m a mental health therapist. I have a passion for the outdoors. I used to work in wilderness therapy, so a lot of crisis response and emotional first aid happening there.

Justin: My name is Justin Beitler. I’m based in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m a bass jumper and a pilot.

River: I would say that I love climbing more than anything else. I do. I started logging climbs in 2019, but I don’t just climb. I like to rotate sports. So in the warmer seasons, I’m mountain biking and route climbing, and then in the colder seasons, I’m ice climbing and splitboarding.

Justin: I was in Moab for Thanksgiving. A bunch of friends and I had gone there to go BASE jumping.

And if you don’t know what BASE jumping is, it’s jumping with a parachute. But instead of jumping out of an airplane, you jump off of a fixed object. So a BASE is actually an acronym that stands for Building Antenna Span (being a bridge) and Earth (being a cliff).

Host: Moab, Utah is an outdoor enthusiast’s mecca.

Although the town itself is only 5 square miles, cooler months bring an onslaught of adventurers due to its proximity to endless miles of desert hiking, mountain biking, canyoneering, rock climbing, whitewater rafting, dramatic red rock scenery, cheap camping, and two national parks. The week of last Thanksgiving, Justin was in town during the annual local BASE jumping festival: Turkey Boogie 2022.

And River was visiting Moab after having spent some time climbing in nearby Indian Creek, one of the most iconic desert climbing destinations for signature crack climbing on sandstone towers.

River: I had just left Indian Creek that morning. We were driving out, one of my really good friends came down. She doesn’t really climb too much; we decided we’re gonna go to King Creek and hop on some bikes and get some riding in.

So we had just rolled up, and we were in the parking lot. We were gearing up, got my knee pads on. I had already moved my chain,

Justin: and one of my friends called and they’re like, “Hey, do you want to come on this jump with me?” And I’m saying, “No, I’m really tired.” And they go, “We really want you there. It’ll be a lot of fun if you came.” And I had to roll my eyes and just like, “Fine, I’ll go do this jump.”

Host: The Kane Creek trailhead where River was planning to start her bike ride is also adjacent to a very popular BASE jumping area. From the parking lot. Bikers and hikers can watch people huck themselves off the cliffs above and parachute down to the ground. At the same time River was gearing up, a group of BASE jumpers had assembled at the top of the cliff, including Justin and another one of his friends who was visiting from Australia.

Justin: We get up to the top of this jump and everyone starts putting their gear on and going through the normal rituals. If you’ve never been on a BASE jump before, it’s just an interesting dynamic of all the things that take place before you go on this jump. Everyone, I think, wonders how do you figure out who’s gonna go first?

What is it like? It’s really tense. You’re all about to jump off of this cliff, which is a little bit of a crazy thing to do. It’s really scary. Generally, everyone’s just kind of terrified and walking around. pretending like they’re not terrified, but everyone knows everyone else is terrified.

River: I was doing tire pressure; everything was ready to go. Literally we’re about to pedal away, type of deal.

Justin: I kind of lined up, did the jump. Everything felt good. Right after you open your parachute, your mood changes from being terrified to just being super ecstatically happy, like you survived some big traumatic event or something.

I’m celebrating on the way down. Right about that time, I looked up at the cliff to see my other friend jumping, and you knew right away that it wasn’t gonna be good. When you’re jumping with a parachute off cliffs, there’s only a few things that can really go wrong. One of them is your parachute opening facing the wrong direction.

You need to try to respond quickly and turn the parachute and turn it away from the cliff and fly away from the cliff. The problem is we really don’t have much time to do that. The only distance that you have from the cliff is how hard you ran off of it or pushed off of it, and you might have a couple seconds to try to reach up, get the controls of your parachute.

His parachute opened backwards and it spun his body just a little bit. When he reached up, his controls weren’t in the spot where he was expecting them to be, and so he hit the cliff and he hit the cliff pretty hard. And so now you’re in a position where your parachute’s still trying to fly forward into the cliff and it can’t do that.

So it just rags down the cliff all the way toward the ground, and then his parachute caught on a sort of an outcropping of rock.

River: This person is hanging up in the air just delicately. It looks fragile, the situation. And I remember so vividly. Instantly praying, like I don’t really believe in organized religion, but I’m a very spiritual person and I just say, Great Divine, please help this person.

In no way did I think that I was going to be part of it, really at that point in time because I just didn’t understand how I could be part of it.

Host: The Australian BASE jumper was dangling about 80 feet up the cliff wall held only by his parachute, which had snagged on a ledge.

Justin: It’s time to get into gear and start helping. So I put all my gear down and I just started running up to the cliff. I don’t even really know what I thought I was gonna do, but I just felt like I needed to get up there. I needed to start gathering information and figuring things out. I see my friend up there, he’s not moving, not moving at all, and the first thought that I had was, he may be a goner.

It was really kind of a scary moment that you didn’t hear anything, you didn’t see anything. My brain just kind of went into this mode of gathering resources. I have a friend that has a rope. I have another friend that’s got some harnesses. The one thing that we don’t have that we really need is some trad gear, some rock climbing gear.

Host: Justin thought that in theory someone could climb up the rock to his friend, but without trad gear or pieces of hardware that a climber places in the rock, they had no way to protect against a fall.

Justin: Right about that time, one of my other buddies arrived on the scene and I told him, “Okay, I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta go stay here with our friend. If he wakes up, keep him calm, tell him not to move, he can’t move around too much, or he might fall.” And that was really the thing I was worried the most about this. I didn’t know what was holding him up. If he moved around, maybe that parachute’s gonna slip, and he might fall.

River: And then all of a sudden a stranger just runs up to me; he’s standing by my van and he just starts asking, not just me, but everybody in the parking lot. “Does anybody have rock climbing gear?”

Justin: And that’s when this girl just piped up from across the parking lot, “Okay, I’ve got gear. What do you need?” And that was River.

River: I had a double rack. I’d just come from Indian Creek plus I had my van of all my things and I had a couple harnesses and what used to be a 70 meter but now is a 69 meter rope and grabbed all my gear, put it in a creek pack and he just took the pack and ran away.

It was crazy. Now I think about it and I’m like, “I just gave a stranger thousands and thousands of dollars worth of my gear. That’s crazy.” And he was just, “Meet me up there and at this time.” I’m like, “This dude must be some crusher trad climber, and he’s gonna go save this dude. I’m gonna go to belay him and help out.”

I had this instinct to just run with him, but then I was like, “Wait a second. I’m in biking gear. I need to take a minute to breathe and put on climbing gear and pack some food, some water, a puffy, first aid stuff.” Just take a minute to make sure I was taking care of me also, so I could help out in the best way possible.

I had not even gotten Justin’s name yet, but the stranger that I had briefly met in the parking lot was there, and I was just like, “Okay, cool. We’re gearing up.” I get everything out of my pack. “I just wanna let you know this is what my climbing resume looks like. I just want you to know I’m a safe belayer. What’s your resume look like?”

Justin: I told her, I said, “Look, I’m just planning on aiding this thing, meaning that I’m just gonna put slings and anything that I can and basically build myself a ladder to climb the gear and not the rock.”

River: And I’m looking at his plan and I’m like, “Oh, that doesn’t make any sense.”

host: River began to realize that unlike her, Justin didn’t have much experience placing his own gear or climbing desert cracks. The route up to the injured BASE jumper looked dirty and filled with loose rock. Clearly no one had ever climbed it, but it was a perfect crack, just like the one she’d just been climbing in Indian Creek, and it led directly to the injured BASE jumper.

River: And then I just all of a sudden hop into this go mode. This incredible state of being where you just don’t think, all you do is just do what you need to get done. It’s so beautiful that the human body has the ability to do this, and it still shocks me to this day.

Justin: And she was all of a sudden this ball of confidence that she just started barking orders of, “All right, Justin, you’ve got this harness on. I need that one. Take it off. We’re switching harnesses.” There’s another guy there. She says, “Okay, you need to go over there, start getting my rope flaked out.” So I get ready to climb and I need those shoes, and she’s just, “Boom, here we go.” This is the person that we need to lead this charge to go get my friend.

River: I walk up to the crack and I’m not trying to be below it too much as I tie into the rope because I don’t want the BASE jumper to fall on me, and I tie in and walk up to the crack, ready to climb. Before I climbed I was just like, “Wait a second.” And I look at Justin. I’m like, “What’s your name? What’s this guy’s name up there?” And I just pray for the three of us.

Justin: Please just watch over us. Watch over my friend. And I was just really impressed by that. I’m not particularly a religious or spiritual person. I was really impressed that we’re in this position where there’s a lot of pressure to move quickly. It’s really tense, and it’s really scary, and she was totally in control. I’m gonna do things on my terms. I’m gonna do them when I’m ready to do them.

River: I wasn’t thinking about anything other than just going, we had a brief plan of if the BASE jumper was falling from the air that Justin would yell, “rock,” and I would tuck into the rock.

Justin: You just had to block it outta your mind. It would’ve been pretty catastrophic. Some 150 pound guy or 180 pound guy falls 80 feet on top of you. It’s probably not gonna end well, and that was about all we said because if you start talking about the reality of the situation, which is you’re probably going to get really hurt or maybe even killed if this guy falls, it’s a little bit overwhelming.

River: I just planned on not looking at all whatsoever and the thought came and I made the plan for myself, but then I pushed it away and just did what I needed to get done. As I start going up, it just becomes so clear that this crack had never been touched before by humans.

It was just so covered in sand. There are rocks pulling off that I’m not expecting to come off. It’s just chausey. I’m pushing giant rocks into the cracks so that they don’t fall on Justin, who doesn’t have a helmet on because I only had the one and it was pretty delicate. As I go up, about halfway up I was pretty stoked to hear breathing. It was like, “Oh, he is alive.” We didn’t actually really fully know, or at least I remember questioning it and I remember just yelling to him as I was going up. “You’re a badass.” I would just yell something similar to that. “You got this, I’m coming for you.”

Justin: She just got into the zone and was on it. It was like any other day of climbing, and I’ll never forget every time he would wake up, then she starts caring for him and you could hear her look up at him and just say, “Hey man, just, you’re gonna be alright.”

River: Once I was going up and almost to him,

Justin: my friend starts coming in and out of consciousness, and it’s clear that something’s on with him because he just starts screaming in pain.

I guess we figured out at that time he has probably broken his leg. And you would wake up and scream and talk about his leg and then he would pass out again.

River: When he started begging me to help him out, stress flooded me, and I started to really feel I was starting to rush.

Justin: You could see her body start getting a little bit tense. You could hear her breathing start coming up. She’s starting to get, rushed.

Host: We will be right back.

Now let’s get back to the episode.

River: I had to really tune him out, completely stop listening to what he was saying. And in response, I just started a mantra out loud. And this was around the time I was trying to figure out the last anchor. And I was like, “Take your time, place safe gear, take your time, place safe gear.”

And I just had to completely stop listening to him.

Justin: And right about then is when I think Search and Rescue started to show up.

River: I think a huge part of this experience was the helicopter had come in a little too early. It was really time sensitive because we didn’t know if it was gonna keep holding. The more pain that the BASE jumper became in, the more shifting he was doing and trying to get the weight off of his leg, and we were really worried it was gonna just knock him off.

So I don’t ever want it to sound like “Wow. The helicopter really messed up.” But in the moment, I can’t communicate with my belayer. There’s sand blasting me in the face. I’m just getting blasted. I can’t make upward progression at all because my belayer has me tight on my last piece and I can’t move at all.

And then we’ve got the delicacy of this parachute just hanging out on this corner of this lip and a windstorm is coming in from the helicopter.

Justin: So it was, it was pretty tenuous but I’m trying to keep belaying River and telling people like, “Please wave the helicopter to go away.” And finally the helicopter crew saw us and waved off.

But that certainly brought the energy level of everybody up pretty high. I just kept having this image in my mind that he was gonna fall, and so shortly after that, River arrived at my friend, built an anchor, and she just started asking me like, “Okay, what do I do?” So we start just giving her directions. “You take this thing. Clip it into this part of his harness. That’s a load-bearing piece.” Just trying to explain to her as efficiently as possible which pieces she could clip, what things to do.

River: Then I was able to clip him in as soon as possible to like a couple pieces and equalized him,

Justin: And it was just, I can’t even describe the feeling that I had as soon. As you heard the clip of that carabiner connected to his harness and I knew he’s gonna be safe. Because even if he falls, he’s got something that’s gonna catch him. It was a really, really powerful moment.

River: I knew I needed to get higher still because to transfer the weight to me appropriately, I would need to be a bit higher than him so that when he swung down, it was the smallest drop possible.

I felt really confident in this anchor and was able to equalize it nicely and get myself on it. I don’t really have any formal rescue training, but I had spent some time with a self rescue book in the past, and I remember reading about really wanting the victim between your legs when you’re lowering them.

Pulling from some of that background knowledge, I was like, “Okay, I know that I need him between my legs below me.” So I get him, I get a locker and a double link sling connected to my belay loop. And then with Justin talking to me from the ground, he was able to guide me to know what to clip on the BASE jumper’s harness, and was able to secure him to my belay loop that way.

Host: Now River and the BASE jumper were both anchored into the wall with climbing gear and attached to one another by their harnesses. Now they had to disconnect him from the stuck parachute and lower him down to the ground.

River: And then it came to be a moment of truth in some ways. The BASE jumper had a knife on him, which was super helpful because he was conscious to hand me the knife, which was really great. It was the time to start cutting ropes. And the parachute is this spaghetti mess all over his body.

Justin: I just said, look, all of these lines need to be cut. What ensued was a scene out of a cartoon where you just have a character who just erupts into this ball of arms and dust flying everywhere, and there were just little bits of line just shooting out from the wall like they had been shot out of a cannon.

River: And then it came to those last three strands that were like taut and holding all of his weight.

Justin: And she kind of looked down at me like, “You’re sure I should be cutting these lines?” Okay, one last check. “Go ahead and cut the line.”

River: And I remember really not wanting to clip them. Everything in my body says don’t do this, but I have to do it right this second. There’s no other choice. And I cut him and

Justin: he dropped down not that far, just a few inches, and suddenly he’s weighted onto her, got all the gear held, and the parachute slipped right off the rock. I remember looking up and getting this feeling, and all of a sudden I would think to myself, “Gosh, I think it’s starting to rain, but I don’t see any clouds around here. Oh, it’s not rain. I’m getting covered in a lot of blood right now.”

River: We were able to sit in that spot to get ready for the lower. He’s in a lot of pain at this point, so we’re just trying to move as quickly but as efficiently as possible. His legs are pretty beat up, and he’s got some injuries to his face.

I remember the urgency of the situation was really starting to hit. I got eye level with him and he was like, “You need to help me get the weight off of this leg.” I’m trying to keep his body upright because he’s on a weight-bearing loop that’s on his right part of his chest, so it’s got him sideways. I’m trying my best to keep him as upright as possible, but also trying to be mindful of his leg hitting the wall. At one point he screamed and I realized his leg had touched the wall in a way, or got caught on the wall. And I was like, “Oh my gosh; this poor dude.” And so I’m trying to control it as much as possible.

And there’s some videos of me talking to him and I’m like, “We’re almost done. We’re almost done. We’re going to have a beer after this and we’re going to laugh about it. We’re gonna be friends after this.” So I think it’s funny; I knew that this person was gonna be someone I was gonna be so connected with. Once we got to the ground, I was relieved.

Wow. We did it.

Justin: There was a medic there. There were a bunch of our friends that were military, medically trained guys. Everyone, they had already been spending all this time formulating their own plan of when he gets down, they had assigned tasks, who was gonna do what. They were really well prepared.

River: I just remember my whole body is already vibrating at that point and Justin kinda wraps his arms around me in this big old hug.

Justin: Just told her, “Hey, it’s over. You did it. You got him down. He’s safe.”

River: At that moment, I was just like, “Wow. That’s crazy to hear.”

Justin: I think she knew at that point she had done her job. She had done a great job. I just remembered just being so thankful that she was there and that she was willing to do all of this for us.

River: It didn’t really fully hit me until more hugs came and more thank yous came at the scene. I had to wait around to see A) if I could help anymore, but B) to get my gear back from the climb. And so while I was hanging around and the medical team’s preparing him for the helicopter to get medevacked, all of his friends just came up giving hugs and thank yous, that’s when I was just like, “Oh my gosh. I think this is a big deal.”

Justin: They airlifted him out to the hospital in Grand Junction. It turns out he had had a pretty nasty break to his right femur, so they had to put him into surgery and it was about a day of doing surgeries and recoveries and everything before he came out and we could see him again.

River: I hung out with all of his friends quite a bit, which was amazing. What a beautiful way to process such a challenging thing is to be there with people that were there and people that really understood this very intense experience. I did a lot of journaling because it feels so important to get it right.

Every little detail feels so important. I just think it’s crazy that it feels like everything was so perfectly aligned. It felt like I was supposed to be there. And that he was supposed to live, and so many little things line up for that. When I was at the van, I could have been gone pedaling away five minutes after that. If it had happened five minutes later, I wouldn’t have been in that parking lot. There’s little other things; I had just learned how to aid climb I think two weeks before the rescue, which gave me the skills needed to progress in an efficient manner up to him.

Just so many little things that just blow my mind. Wow, this is pretty incredible for all of these things to be in alignment for a really awful situation to go the best possible way.

Host: In a regular episode of Out Alive, this would be the natural end to the story, but while doing some research about BASE jumping in general, I happened to come across a BASE jumper who said they had recently went with River on her first BASE jump. I immediately reached back out to River to find out more.

River: I recently returned back to the route. To do that I really didn’t want a big group of people or anything. I really just wanted Justin, who was my belayer from the rescue. In prepping for going back to the route. Justin was like, “Hey, do you wanna try BASE jumping?”

Well, I’m usually the person to say yes to things, especially new opportunities. I was like, “Yeah, if the conditions are right.” I think it might have been 10 minutes between the text messages, and he’s like, “It’s booked.” And I was like, “Oh wow. That’s actually a different feeling than just talking about it.”

It was actually quite terrifying to think about at the time.

Matt: I run a company called Tandem Base, Moab. I’ve got just over 1500 BASE jumps, 11,000 skydives in 17 years. And it’s taken me around the world, made all kinds of friends, seen all kinds of places, and I wouldn’t trade any of it.

Host: This is Matt, the BASE jumper I just happened to connect with. While this seemed like a huge coincidence, I quickly learned that the BASE jumping community is pretty tight. Not only does Matt own his own company taking people on tandem BASE jumps, but he also works search and rescue. He was called to the scene the day Justin’s friend crashed.

Matt: So Justin contacted me saying, “Do you have any availability for tandems?” I said I do and I had a feeling it was gonna be River. I’m pretty active in the Moab BASE jumping scene. I heard what was happening. I was in the parking lot watching her climb. I had not met her, heard how it all played out, and thought it was pretty darn awesome. I allowed everyone to take 48 hours and let emotions relax and settle. Then I was like, “Hey, I need to reach out to this person.” This person did BASE jumpers a tremendous solid and I’m just really impressed. So through the magic of social media, I reached out that way, but truly I didn’t actually give her a hug and introduce myself until about a week ago when she ended up doing a BASE jump with us.

River: So I did a tandem BASE jump. So what that means is that I’ve got a full body harness on that BASE jumpers used, and he’s got one on and he clips me to him.

Matt: There I was one Saturday morning, about a month after the rescue, standing there with her about to take her on a BASE jump, which to me it takes tremendous courage and really cool character.

River: I instantly started thinking about all of the possibilities. It’s interesting, when we were at the top, I felt the most triggered by seeing the harnesses, and starting to put the harness on. Instantly, I was back in that place when we pulled out the harnesses and felt my body flood with adrenaline and just had to take a minute. It was time for us to start going towards the edge and I was pretty much just like, “Alright, River. You’re not allowed to think. No thinking at all whatsoever. Only doing.” So in the video, you hear me say, “No thinking, only doing, no thinking, only doing.”

I’m really big on mantras. I definitely never thought that I would BASE jump. I was standing completely on the edge of this cliff. It’s around a 400-foot cliff. It looks similar to the cliff that my new friend had crashed on. And so I’m looking down this 400-foot cliff and just like, “Okay, this is a really intense feeling, but try not to think at all.”

And then we did the countdown and we jumped. All of a sudden it’s like when you’re at a roller coaster and it starts going down, you lose your whole guts. Your guts just drop outta your body type of feeling. It’s that feeling only you feel like you’re dying because you’re just plummeting in air and then the chute pops open, and it is the best feeling in the whole entire world when that chute just pops open.

Host: Working on this story, I couldn’t help find the entire idea of BASE jumping a little ludicrous, but I really wanted to understand. So with 17 years of experience under his belt, I decided to ask Matt, “Do you think that somebody who hasn’t experienced BASE jumping can understand it?”

Matt: Ooh, fully, probably not. I don’t know that you can understand anything that you really haven’t experienced and all you’re doing is judging the book by its cover. I’d say the average person, probably not. No. I think it’s one of those things that you need to sink your teeth into, and maybe it’s in your spirit. I think there’s something, to me it makes total sense when for the average person or the majority of the population, to look at BASE jumping in and say, absolutely not. It’s against every survival instinct we have. Right? I think a lot of people label us adrenaline junkies, and I understand that. For me, I’m in the outdoors, I get to experience places that 99.9% of the population is just never going to go.

The moments before a BASE jump, anything else that’s happening in your life, in your head, in your job, in your relationship, it goes away. Everything needs to be calming. You need to be operating with a super clear mind and you need to focus on the task at hand. If you’re doing it well, and you’re operating within your experience and comfort zone, you find total peace, complete calmness.

It’s just clarity. Nothing else in the universe matters except for you, where you are standing, and what you’re about to do. That’s not to say there’s not always risk involved. I’ve lost friends BASE jumping. Yes, I’ve lost friends in car accidents. I’ve lost a friend to suicide. I’ve lost a friend to cancer. I guess what I know is that we get a finite amount of time here. And what matters to most BASE jumpers is packing that with experience. I think most of us are people that want to think less about the bank account and more about that memory bucket. “Hey, how much did I get out of life?” And that doesn’t mean being overwhelmingly reckless or crazy or mindless. It just means to fill your life with incredible experiences. And that’s certainly what BASE jumping is.

Host: In January, River returned to the scene of the accident and made the first free ascent of the crack, meaning she climbed it under the power of her own body without pulling on gear to aid her ascent. She added a permanent anchor so that others could climb the route and gave it a grade of 5.10+. River named the route “Lifeline.”

River: I don’t have rescue experience. I don’t think I’m the most sendy climber. I’m a competent climber. I’ve done a lot of wonderful things that have equipped me for this and have the skills for this rescue. I wouldn’t say that I was the perfect person for it. I didn’t think I was gonna be part of that.

I wasn’t running up like, “Oh, what can I do to help?” I felt very removed from this situation until Justin came to me. So I’m not saying, “Be like me. I’m exceptional. I’m just saying in general, if you can try to help, help. You don’t have to be a superstar. Joe Schmos can still be helpful, you know.”

This episode of Out Alive was produced and written by me, Louisa Albanese with writing and editing by Zoe Gates. Scoring and Sound Design was by Jason Patton. Additional production by Emma Veidt. Thank you to River Berry, Justin Beitler and Matt Lajeunesse for sharing your stories with us. Thanks to listening to Out Alive, and if you have a backcountry survival story that you’re interested in sharing, you can email me at outalive@outsideinc.com.

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The post How This Climber Rescued an Injured BASE Jumper from Cliff appeared first on Climbing.

A woman was rescued on January 8 from an Arizona spire after her knee became lodged in a crack 200 feet off the ground.

The woman, 25, had set out with a group of four friends around 12:30 p.m. that day near the base of Queen Victoria Spire in Sedona. Their objective: The Regular Route (5.7), a popular beginner trad line. The four friends aimed to give the woman (who does not wish to be named at this time) a fun time on her first-ever outdoor climb. 

That first pitch seemed to go well. They were a little behind schedule, but everyone made it to the belay without incident. The second pitch, however, involves a 15-foot, four-inch crack and a difficult move over an exposed ledge. The woman, who followed second behind the leader, struggled to pull the move. The next hold was just out of reach, so she attempted to use an alpine knee.

The alpine knee is the more elegant alternative to the beached-whale move: instead of hurling yourself belly-first onto a ledge, you tuck a knee on top of a high foothold and push. But when the woman weighted her knee, it slipped—right into the crack. Around 5:15 p.m., the phone rang at the Coconino County Sheriff’s Department. The dispatcher relayed the message: someone was stuck in a crack on Queen Vic Spire, and needed a rescue STAT. 

“The other members of the climbing party had tried to get her out. They tried pouring water in the crack, but that just wasn’t enough to lubricate the knee. By the time we got the call, she’d probably been stuck there maybe 30 minutes,” says Aaron Dick, search and rescue coordinator with the Sheriff’s Department and the incident commander that day. “The days are short right now, so we knew we didn’t have a lot of daylight to work with.”

Aside from pure discomfort, the rescuers were also worried about the patient for other reasons. If the constriction had been tight, she could have experienced a serious loss of circulation or compartment syndrome, a condition where pressure builds in the body’s tissues to the point of nerve or muscle damage. They needed to act quickly.  

The rescuers considered ascending from the bottom of the spire, but that would have taken time. Given that temperatures in Sedona regularly drop down to the low 30s in January and the stranded party didn’t have overnight gear, hypothermia was also a serious concern. The safest option, the rescuers decided, was to try and pluck the patient off the spire from the air.  

To free the knee, rescuers had two options. Plan A was the standard cure for stuck appendages—good old-fashioned dish soap, nabbed from its place beside the sink in the search and rescue building. The rescuers had really hoped that Plan A would work, because Plan B involved four additional rescuers and a rock chisel. 

Dick’s team geared up, handed off the dish soap to Russ Dodge (the medic and trooper charged with dropping out of the helicopter), and started setting up incident command at the base of the spire.

The climbers waited until 8:00 p.m. for the search and rescue team’s arrival—nearly three hours after they had placed the call. Three of the party waited near the top, and the other two on the ledge. The sun had long set, and all were shivering.

When the Arizona DPS helicopter neared the tower, Dodge zipped down to the ledge via hoist cable. After a brief assessment of the patient, he got to work. First, he threaded a piece of webbing between the stuck leg and the rock and used a sawing motion to scooch her pant leg out of the way. With nothing but bare skin touching rock, he was able to get the soap around the knee. Still, even after an hour of trying, it refused to budge. Around 9:00 p.m., he called for backup. The chopper returned, and four more rescuers were deposited at the top of the spire, rock hammer and chisel at the ready.

But shortly after the second team arrived—and after four hours of being stuck in the crack—the leg popped free.

The patient, the rescuers, and the other four climbers, who were by then exhibiting signs of mild hypothermia, were airlifted off the spire. At the base, Sedona Fire District paramedics evaluated the patient and the other members of her climbing party. None of them exhibited signs of serious injury and all refused further treatment. Aside from being perhaps a little sore and soapy, the knee was fine.

“I’ve checked in with her, and she’s had no issues with her knee since,” Dick adds.

Contrary to mutterings on the internet, the patient will not be charged for her rescue.

“There’s no bill for search and rescue in Arizona,” Dick explains. “The primary reason is that we don’t want people to delay calling in because they’re afraid of getting a bill, and potentially delaying the situation until it becomes more serious for that person and more dangerous for the rescuers.”

He adds that the incident was no one’s fault.

“From our perspective, these climbers did everything right. It wasn’t an issue of negligence or bad decision-making—it was an accident,” he says. “They attempted to resolve it themselves, and when they realized they couldn’t, that’s when they called.” Calling early allowed the teams to mobilize—and execute a successful rescue fast.

As for the other takeaways? Most climbers don’t need another reason to stay away from off-widths. But for many of us, a stronger motivation to keep a little more soap around certainly couldn’t hurt.

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The post Heli Trooper Frees Stuck Climber with Dish Soap appeared first on Climbing.

For Damian Benegas, climbing in the Himalayas is represented by two cookie jars. One is an “Unlucky Cookie Jar” and one is a “Lucky Cookie Jar.”

“After each climb, we take a lucky cookie, and put it in the unlucky cookie jar,” Benegas explained. “As time progresses, the lucky jar is empty, and the unlucky jar is full.” As Damian sees it, you can be a safe, experienced, skilled climber, but in the big mountains, sometimes even having perfect systems, perfect judgement, perfect technique, isn’t enough.

Damian and his twin brother Willie have climbed and guided across the globe, from Yosemite to Patagonia, with dozens of Himalayan expeditions under their belts. So he knows the range as well as any. Out of all their expeditions, however, none holds the same special significance as The Crystal Snake (5.9 M4 WI5). This 1,500-meter column of near-continuous ice climbs the north buttress of the 7,861-meter (25,760 feet) Nuptse, a prominent summit in the Everest Massif southwest of Everest itself.

Nuptse had enchanted Damian’s brother Willie when he first glimpsed what would become the The Crystal Snake in 1999, on his first Everest trip. He described it in an essay in the 2004 American Alpine Journal as “the most impressive and beautiful line that my eyes had ever seen. A couloir of perfect ice, faultless and clear as crystal” running from bottom to top.

When Willie returned from Everest that year, Damian remembered what it was like meeting him at the airport. “I was so psyched for him. I was so proud, and he just said, ‘Yeah yeah, Everest was okay…but I saw the most perfect line in my life on Nuptse!’ and he went on and on. He wouldn’t stop talking about it,” Damian said, laughing. Willie was so determined to climb it that he had already named the route.

Willie went back to guide Everest in 2000, 2001 and 2002, scoping out The Crystal Snake each time. In 2003, with sponsorship from The North Face, the brothers finally got their shot.

Despite the fact that it’s one of the closest major summits to Everest, in those days Nuptse lived far from the spotlight afforded it’s taller cousin. When Willie and Damian arrived to attempt their new line, there had been only four ascents of Nuptse since the first in 1961. Everest, meanwhile, had already seen over 1,000.

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After acclimatizing and waiting for a window for most of April, the brothers began up the route on May 6, 2003.

“We climbed 400 meters of hard ice,” said Damian, “and set up a crappy, crappy bivy. The worst bivy of my life.” Willie and Damian were on separate sides of a rock, and carved a tunnel between the rock to pass each other supplies.

They woke to a minor tragedy. Their stove had broken in the night. With no way to melt water or cook, they were in trouble. “We thought we can just drop everything and go up super fast,” said Damian, “but we knew if we did this, we wouldn’t be coming down. We still had 1,000 meters to go.” Not wanting to tempt the cookie-jar gods, the Benegas brothers bailed. They fixed gear in some of the cruxes and left their camera, sleeping bags, and other supplies on the wall, partially “to blackmail ourselves so we’d have to come back,” said Damian.

Two days later, after scrounging extra ice screws and a new stove, they returned for round 2.

“The bivies were just horrendous,” said Damian. “So much spindrift, constantly.”

They powered through a cruxy slab section high up on the wall, and then gingerly simuled their way up a treacherous 55-degree snow slope, primed to avalanche. Arriving at the first rock band on the ridge, they scored the first solid bivy of the climb, and continued the next day under horrendous winds and heavy spindrift on shoddy rock, where Willie had trouble “placing even psychological protection.” Damian, meanwhile, was battling the notorious Khumbu Cough, coughing so badly he broke a rib. Out of the 42 pitches on the wall, he ended up leading only two.

To help Willie conserve his strength for leading, Damian gave him the best bivies. “One was awful, barely wide enough to sleep on,” said Damian. The heavy snowfall during the night built up between Damian and the wall. He woke at 2:00 a.m. to find himself hanging in midair, nudged off the ledge by a growing snow mound.

On the sixth day they finally reached the summit, battling more brutal winds and heavy spindrift. The descent was just as treacherous. They rappelled a British route from 1979, having to search for halfway-decent anchors constantly (Ueli Steck died on a steep section of this route in 2017).

“It was so thin. We couldn’t get ice screws. We couldn’t get rock pro. Most of it we just had to downclimb,” Damian said. They reached the glacier safely, however, and then Camp 2 on Everest the next morning.

***

Battling rock and ice isn’t the real difficulty in the mountains for Damian. “The climb was a climb,” he said. “It was hard, but the hardest thing was the next day. We got news that a Sherpa was coming down from South Col.” The man hadn’t drank anything for three days, so by the time he got to Camp 2 he was in bad shape.

The brothers put him in a stretcher, and spent the next 24 hours trying to save his life. “We did the most horrendous Tyrolean traverse with this man in a stretcher,” said Damian. They managed to make it to the edge of the Khumbu Icefall. At one point they had to lower the Sherpa 40 or 50 feet into a crevasse and then haul him back up just to navigate it. “I remember this guy from the BBC was there filming, and we asked him ‘Please can you come help us,’ and he said, ‘No, I can’t, I’m filming, I’m from the BBC.’” The cameraman eventually gave them a liter of water, but that was it. The Sherpa died in the middle of the icefall overnight, Damian giving him CPR all the while.

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Just two days later, an M17 helicopter crashed en-route to Everest Base Camp, and eight other people died. The Benegas Brothers tried to save lives there, too. The BBC cameraman was back, filming as they were trying to lift a helicopter to free a Sherpa pinned beneath it. He would not help then, either.

“I almost hit him,” said Damian. It was situations like these that kept him up nights. He was supposed to climb Lhotse after returning from Nuptse, but abandoned his attempt in light of the accident.

“When you’re a climber, you learn the importance of partnership,” he later said when asked him what climbing had taught him. “You give what you receive. You help when you can. Always.”

On what it’s like climbing with his brother, Damian said, “We both tend not to place pro that often, so we’re both on each other, trying to get each other to be safer, and we both get defensive. But at the same time, I know that when the shit hits the fan, we’re safe. I know how Willie can push it, how I can push it. We’ve known each other for 50 years,” he said, laughing. “I’ve climbed with good climbers, but it’s not the same. I don’t know how they’re going to react when shit hits the fan. Will they help themselves, help me, help others? With Willie, I know.”

Damian’s son, Rafael, was born just last week, two days before I spoke with him. He plans to dial his climbing back now that he has a son—something he’s done already as he’s gotten older anyways.

“But I still want to get out there, always,” he said. “I get the same feeling of gratitude doing second ascents or first ascents that aren’t as crazy, are unnamed, are more obscure, nowadays. Maybe it’s only 6,000 feet instead of 24,000. For me it’s just important to get out there. Of course I’ll dial it back in the objective danger,” he said. “But I’ll always get out there.”

Owen Clarke, 23, is a climber and writer based in Alabama. He enjoys Southern sandstone and fresh fish tacos. He is afraid of heights. Follow him on Instagram at @opops13.

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The post The Route Was Epic, But The Rescue Attempt, Chopper Crash, And An Unhelpful BBC Cameraman Were Horrendous appeared first on Climbing.

Climbers: Lars Johnson, Josh Mucci, Brad Young
Location: Pinnacles National Park, California
Date: December 5, 2011

The Scene

Three men had met because of a common interest in new routes in the obscure back corners of Pinnacles National Park, southeast of San Francisco. Before the day ended, each would help save another in extraordinary ways.

Lars Johnson, then 62, was a painter and illustrator who had done many new routes on the park’s rhyolite breccia, a well-featured but sometimes loose stone made from volcanic mudflows. Two decades earlier, Johnson had fallen 70 feet from an attempt at a new route, breaking his leg in two places. His drill bit still projected from the rock. Now he wanted to show this line and others to two younger climbers: Brad Young, then 49, author of the Pinnacles climbing guidebook, and Josh Mucci, then 30, a California climber passionate about adventurous new routes.

In late morning they reached a steep, narrow gully leading to a belay ledge below the line where Johnson had fallen. They started scrambling up the gully. Near the top, a boulder choked the path. Mucci led the way up a slot on the right side, balancing with his left hand against the boulder.

The teardrop-shaped block, about three feet in diameter, suddenly shifted and tumbled into the six-foot-wide gully, threatening to crush Mucci’s left arm and chest. Instantly, Johnson reached up with his right arm and pushed Mucci hard to the right and out of the way. Young dove to the left. Johnson had nowhere to go. The boulder rolled directly onto him.

The Response

Mucci and Young wrapped their rope around the boulder and tied it off to a tree, hoping to prevent further rolling. Throwing their weight against the rock, estimated to weigh two tons, they were able to move it an inch or two, freeing Johnson’s twisted left leg. But his right leg was trapped up to the hip.

Young, who knew the area best, ran for help. He reached the normally desolate West Side parking area after a half-mile bushwack and a mile of trail to find, quite luckily, park rangers and a trail crew. They radioed for more help and a helicopter, and ranger Mark LaShell and two trail crew left for the accident scene almost immediately, with Young leading the way.

Back at the boulder, Mucci dug at the stony ground for about 45 minutes, despite a badly injured wrist. Finally, Johnson was able to squirm out with Mucci’s help. Johnson had a compound fracture in his right leg and many other injuries. “I got him seated, splinted his broken leg using the rope and a leash from a hammer, and elevated his leg,” Mucci says. More than two hours after the accident, a helicopter dropped a nurse and paramedic on a nearby ridge, while other rescuers cleared a path down which they could lower Johnson in a litter. In fading sunlight, the chopper came in “right off the deck,” Mucci says, and then short-hauled Johnson to the parking area for a transfer to an air ambulance.

As the professionals took over, both Young and Mucci ended up making their way to the parking lot alone, very conscious of how close the margin had been.

“Had it just been me there with him, Lars would have been dead,” Mucci said. “Had Brad stayed and I went down for help, Lars would have been dead. If the ranger team hadn’t been there, he’d be dead. It all had to come together. And it came down to 15 minutes.”

Even though time was critical, Mucci and Young took crucial steps that professional rescuers recommend: They secured the scene to prevent further injuries and prepare the way for a rescue; they made a plan and effectively used the tools they had; and they assigned the right people to each job—Mucci, who had wilderness EMT training, tended to Johnson, and Young, the guidebook author, went for help and led rescuers to the victim.

Johnson mostly recovered from his injuries and returned to painting (studiolarsjohnson.com) and exploring California’s mountains. Josh Mucci says he experienced PTSD that affected him for several years. “In gullies, with loose rock, I’d just burst into tears,” he explains. Mucci now lives in San Diego, and Brad Young lives in the northern Sierra foothills. Both still develop new routes. But not on that obscure backcountry wall in Pinnacles. All three men have sworn they’re never going back.

Survival Tip: Take Care of Yourself

“Making certain that you and your partner are safe and secure is always rescue step number one,” Simon says. This includes a good anchor and adequate protection against rockfall, foul weather, or falling temperatures. “You are no good to your partner if you get hurt or incapacitated.”

The post From the Archive: When a Climber is Pinned by Two-ton Boulder, Friends Launch Remarkable Rescue appeared first on Climbing.

Utah-based climber River Barry, 30, was standing in a parking lot in Moab’s Kane Creek Canyon. She was prepping her gear for a day of mountain biking when a base jumper crashed into the cliff in front of her. At the time, she never imagined that she’d be the only one able to save him. 

It was Saturday, November 26, and the annual local base jumping festival Turkey Boogie 2022 was in full swing. One jumper, an Australian man whose name has not yet been disclosed, was just a few hundred feet above the ground when he pulled his parachute. As planned, a scarlet bloom of fabric erupted skyward, slowing his freefall. It probably took him half a second to understand what had gone wrong—and half a second more to realize that instead of sailing away from the cliff face, he was flying straight toward it.

“Basically, when you [base] jump out from the wall, your chute is supposed to open straight out, and you fly away. But it can open in a different direction,” explains Justin Beitler, a Las Vegas-based fellow base-jumper who was on the scene the day of the accident. In this case, the victim’s chute opened about 160° “off-heading,” or about 160° in the opposite direction of where it was supposed to. Maybe it was because of his body position, maybe because of some asymmetry in his pack. But by the time he realized what was happening, it didn’t matter: the world was reeling around him, and there was nothing he could do.

“His body was spinning, and he didn’t have time to reach up and turn his chute,” says Beitler. Instead of lifting the victim away from the wall, the parachute sucked him into it, slamming his body against the rock and sending him rag-dolling along the cliff face.

At the time, Barry was with two friends, bent over her bike, pumping up her tires. She didn’t see the victim fall, but her friend did. Barry could see the horror register on her friend’s face as he turned to her.

“A base jumper just crashed,” he said. Barry glanced to the wall where the scarlet chute was now dangling, caught precariously on the end of a sloping ledge, pinned by nothing more than friction and body weight. The victim hung 80 feet off the ground. She felt her breath catch in her throat.

“We were all just watching in terror,” she recalls. “That’s when this dude came running up to us.”

The dude (who turned out to be Beitler) was a friend of the victim and had seen the whole thing happen. He’d bolted down from the wall into the parking lot, leaving two other jumpers to man the unconscious victim. Beitler started shouting as soon as he was within earshot, asking if anyone had trad gear. Barry raised her hand.

“I have a double rack, two harnesses, and a rope in my van,” she said. Beitler ran over to her.

“Give me what you’ve got.” 

Barry handed him a pack full of cams and packed a separate bag with food, water, and first aid. By the time she started scrambling up the loose approach, Beitler was already nearing the base of the wall.

“My heart was pounding through my chest, but I was in go-mode,” Barry says. “It’s like you don’t think, you just do.”

[Interested in learning trad? Check out this course]

After a few minutes, she arrived at the base, started pulling on her harness, and asked Beitler for a mission briefing. For a few moments, he tried to explain his strategy, which involved climbing a crack ten feet to the left of the suspended base jumper and then traversing over. Barry blinked.

“That’s not going to work,” she said. The traverse was nonexistent. The only way to get to the victim would be to climb the line just beneath him—a wide crack that looked to be about 5.10. Barry, who’s been rock climbing for years and has extensive trad experience, explained all this. That’s when Beitler confessed that he’d only ever led two trad routes before. 

Barry took a breath.

“I realized there was no one else there who was going to do this but me,” Barry says. She looked up at the wall. The rock was spattered with blood. The victim was limp, unconscious. She wasn’t even sure if he was alive—but she did know that the longer she took to get moving, the higher the odds that a wind would kick up and upset his precarious balance. 

The route looked loose and sandy, but she knew she’d be able to get up it. Barry’s Wilderness First Responder (WFR) training kicked in, and she started delegating, asking one bystander to flake the rope, ensuring the rest of the scene was safe, and putting Beitler on belay. Together, they made a plan.

“We both knew there was a good chance that [the suspended victim] could fall,” Beitler says. If Beitler started screaming “Rock,” that’s how Barry would know that the victim was coming down.

“River just looked at the situation and said she’d lean into the wall and hope for the best if that happened. And then she just headed up there anyway—for some dude and a group of people she didn’t even know,” Beitler says. “I was really impressed.”

Barry finished racking up and took a deep breath.

“I brought everything I had,” she says. “The crack was fists to fours, and then it was all chossy and awful, and then it got so wide I didn’t have any gear for it.” Still, she kept going, fighting through off-width sections and a narrow squeeze chimney toward a thinner crack at the top.

Meanwhile, blood continued to drip down the wall, spattering the sandstone and Beitler alike. For the first half of the climb, Barry wasn’t even sure if the victim was alive. It wasn’t until she was about 40 feet off the deck that she saw he was breathing. But it was too soon for any sense of relief.

“Handholds were popping off left and right. It was so sandy, and the gear was scary—it was hard to tell what was real rock and what was a flake,” Barry says.

On top of that, the victim soon began to wake up, rocking against his tenuous lines, slow at first but then more violently.  When Barry was close to eye level with him, he spotted her and began to moan.

“Please get the weight off my leg,” he begged. “Please help me.” He started to move, thrashing to alleviate his discomfort. Barry could see the parachute begin to slip. She could hear the desperation and agony in his voice. It was unnerving.

“He’s begging me over and over. He’s in so much pain,” she recalls. “I have to speak out loud to myself to block him out. ‘Take your time. Place safe gear. Take your time. Place safe gear.’ And the whole time I’m climbing, I’m saying this to myself and I’m screaming over to him, ‘You’re a fucking badass. You got this. We’re going to get you out of here.’”

Barry reached the victim, built a three-piece anchor, and leaned over to him, holding her breath as she grabbed hold of his chest harness. She clipped him into her anchor, and she felt the first wave of relief. But she wasn’t done yet. 

Barry climbed a few more feet, built a higher anchor, clipped into him again, and slipped the emergency knife free from the victim’s harness. One by one, with her heart in her throat, she began cutting the lines.

When she snipped the last one, she could feel his weight transfer seamlessly from the chute to her harness. Slowly and carefully, she executed the lower.

“I don’t think I realized what a big deal this all was until I touched the ground and everyone was saying, ‘Thank you,’” Barry says. “Justin just came over and hugged me and held me and said, ‘Thank you for saving my friend.’ That’s when it really hit me.”

By then, Grant County Search and Rescue had arrived and were able to package the victim into a litter and get him airlifted to the hospital. (This was one of at least three base jumping accidents in the Moab area that weekend.) Without Barry’s quick action, GCSAR would have had to rappel 300 feet from the top of the cliff to reach the victim, an operation that could have taken hours—hours that the victim may not have had to spare. (He’s currently in the hospital, and beginning to recover. Beitler and Barry both communicate with him regularly; the three have all since become friends.)

“I just want to say that I’m super impressed by River,” Beitler says. “She was super calm the whole time. You would have thought she was leading any other climb on any other day, and she was talking to him and calming him down the whole time. She just killed it.” 

As for Barry? She’s still getting a lot of attention after the rescue—including questions about what she hopes to name the 80-foot route she put up in the process. (She hopes to return to free the line sometime soon.) In the meantime, Barry plans to continue honing her own self-rescue skills. But mostly, she says, her biggest takeaways are more philosophical.

“That day made me realize, one, the fragility of human life and, two, the human capacity to just do,” she says. “The human mind and body and soul have such a capacity to show up for someone in need,” she says. “I’m grateful to have been able to be there and be able to do my part.”

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The post Utah Climber Rescues Base Jumper Who Crashed into Cliff appeared first on Climbing.

There aren’t too many things that embarrass me these days. But here’s a hard admission: I got scared as hell trying to solo the second Flatiron. I made it about halfway before I cowered into a ball and then resigned myself to start butt-scotting down. It’s amazing that I didn’t tear my tights. Or start crying. This is the same year that I sent The Crew (5.14c). I’ve been climbing for nearly 15 years, and I think I’m afraid of heights.

Let me back up.

***

The story really starts with my friend, whose mistakes I should have learned from. 

Zach is a talented D.J. living in downtown Denver. He has bright blue eyes and a mane of curly mocha-colored hair. He’s well-spoken and easy going and, consequently, he has many friends, which was perhaps to his detriment. Again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Zach had been climbing for a few years. Mostly in the gym, but a few times outside. He was solid on plastic 5.11s when he attempted to solo the Second Flatiron in Boulder, Colorado. 

“I failed the first time,” he told me. “I kind of got it into my head like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be easy. Like I can climb this. I lift heavy things’”—Zach was “super into fitness” at the time—“‘I could easily climb a rock, no problem.” Despite his confidence, he got about halfway up before conceding to his fears and descending the gutter (a class four gulley that runs on the right side of the popular soloing route). 

By the summer of 2021, Zach had more climbing experience. A lot more. He soloed the second flatiron four or five times, his nerves long gone. He recognized, in retrospect, that he’d grown overconfident. Summer passed. Fall passed, too. Zach had hunkered down in the gym too soon, and he was just itching to get back out. This is where his too-many-uber-helpful-and-supportive friends come in.

“Flatirons, snowy or dry?” he posted on Instagram as a poll. He texted friends in Boulder, too. He let democracy take the wheel, and the people spoke: The Flatirons were dry. Spotless. He was “good to go.” Zach convinced his then boyfriend, John, who was a more experienced climber, to join him in the winter romp.

Of course, you may be thinking, well, didn’t they notice once they arrived that the Flatirons were actually covered in snow and ice? Because it was November for crying out loud! Well, yes, they did notice. John tried to convince Zach it wasn’t safe. Zach was convinced otherwise. Can you guess who won out? They proceeded.

Zach had hiked up in Vibram’s FiveFingers, already a questionable choice in snow. He wore shorts and a Tee. He had a backpack with a windbreaker and, for climbing, a pair of La Sportiva Katana Laces. It was nice, he says, maybe 55 degrees and sunny. They started up the hike around 1 p.m. and began climbing about 20 minutes later. 

Despite having to crawl over a few snow patches, they made it pretty far before trouble arose. They had passed the Diving Board—where people make a small leap from one rock to the next and which sits around the two-thirds mark. Zach thought the gnarliest sections of the ascent were behind them. But he was nervous, too.

“You know when you’re running through something, and you’re like ‘Woah, that was close, like, what if I had fallen,’ and then you get that in your head and you start panicking?” Zach says that’s where he was. If he had been running, he had almost sprained his ankle a few times. But this was no run, and the consequences of a fall would be so much worse than a sprained ankle. So at a junction, Zach veered right for the gutter where John went left. It should have been fine. If the route isn’t icy or snowy, you can take either direction and still summit. But again, it was November.

From the gutter, Zach stood on a ledge below a steep blind lip. He pulled up and his heart sank: “It was just like a sheet of ice and snow for, like, the next eight feet,” he says. “I tried to clear it off, but the whole thing was just caked.” To the right, there was a pile of snow. It didn’t look solid, and, says Zach, was possibly filling up a crevice. He wanted to reverse the move, but found that he couldn’t—it was blind and there was a stream of ice and water below.  

Zach froze. He tried to think rationally, to not panic. 

“Yo, what’s going on?” John yelled from above. 

There was no getting around it. “I’m stuck, I think,” he shouted back. “Can you see anything up there?” John didn’t see anything. Luckily, Zach was in a good stance, with two good footholds, a pinch for his left hand and good crimp for his right. He can stay like this forever, right? His time was already ticking. 

Let’s just breathe, Zach tells himself. Maybe we’re just panicking. We’re fine. We’ve done this climb a million times. 20 minutes pass and he still can’t figure it out. He needs to do something.

“Is there anyone we can call to help us?” he finally shouts up.

John called Boulder’s Sheriff’s department who connected him with Boulder’s free, volunteer-based Rocky Mountain Rescue group. Help would come. It was then around 2:30 p.m.

An hour passes. Then another. Zach is shaking violently. His shoes, which had gotten water in them after trudging through snow at the base of the climb, have frozen solid to his feet. It’s windy and the sun is long off of the climb. “I was kinda lying to myself,” says Zach. He told himself he was fine. He surely thought about the decision to go up in the first place. 

“In the history of John and I climbing things, he’s been a lot more precautious,” says Zach. “Even in the gym …  [with] a rope and everything, he’ll prefer to do an easier climb to work on technique, whereas I like to try a harder climb that’s more physically demanding. I was used to him saying, ‘Oh, that seems too hard,’ so when he said that about this climb, I was like, ‘We’ve done it before. We can totally climb this.’” 

Three rescuers arrived around 4:45. Suddenly, a woman rappelled down to Zach. She put a harness on him and attached him to the rope. Zach had begun to experience hypothermia, so she told him they had to keep moving. They hauled him up the wall, and then gave him crampons for the hike down. It was 6:30 or 7:00 by the time Zach made it back to the lot. .

Zach remarked how nice they were. One of the rescuers even talked him into taking a selfie, which he said was a welcome ice breaker from the “Oh my god I’m going to die” tension that had been building. “There was no scolding or like, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” he says. 

I spoke with Drew Hildner, public information officer for the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, which is contracted by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. The group routinely provides rescues to climbers in the Flatirons, Eldorado Canyon and Boulder Canyon. Hildner has been volunteering for rescues for the past 20 years.

“Our rescue group is getting busier every year, as are all the other rescue groups in Colorado,” says Hildner. “There [are] a couple [of causes], I think it’s multifactorial,” he adds. More people climbing in general is certainly one. It used to be that all the people who soloed the Flatirons knew each other. It was a niche group. Now, a dozen or so soloists can be spied on most fair weather weekends. People go soloing for their lunch breaks. There are competitive car-to-car FKTs. 

“Regularly, the people that we are picking off just realize they were emotionally totally unprepared for it, or psychologically unprepared for it,” says Hildner. “And from a skill standpoint, there’s some component to that as well, because you can climb 5.10 in the gym all day long and be hanging on huge jugs the whole time. But on the Flatirons, you sometimes might just be pinching a pebble or just gently placing your foot on a little dish. So that can also throw people off as well.”

Friction slab climbing is not the same as plastic jug climbing, or even overhung crimping. Seems pretty intuitive, and yet…. 

Freeway, the route mostly commonly taken up the Second Flatiron—and the route both myself and Zach took—is only rated 5.2. It’s almost 1,000 feet of climbing. While most climbers have the skill to solo the Second, fewer climbers understand and appreciate the exposure and the risk. Is there any way to prepare for that, I asked Hildner. Not really, he says. Highball bouldering. Sketchy trad leads maybe. 

“Part of getting in the right headspace for free soloing is acknowledging that, when you put your first foot up on the rock, that if you fall, you will die,” says Hildner. “That needs to be a very specific acknowledgement that you make in your head, and then that should be the last time you think about it.”

Recognize the risk, make peace with it. Don’t let the panic set in if something unexpected happens. Zach brought up his experience projecting in the gym. That mind-race feeling when you’re pumped, right before you fall or make a mistake. But when you say “Take!” you calm down. You can see what you did wrong and how to self-correct. He said, while you can’t ‘Take’ when you’re soloing, you can focus on breathing and letting yourself relax. 

Of course, soloing in the first place should strongly be questioned. Hildner says many people that don’t belong on the Flatirons end up soloing because of the “expert halo” effect. In other words, when your friend that you want to impress convinces you that it’s fine. “It’s that pressure of not wanting to embarrass yourself… by saying you’re afraid, Zach says.

Hildner remarked that the rescue group sees a lot of fatalities in places like Edlorado Canyon, where the walls are steeper. On the Flatirons, he says, gravity is just as inescapable, “but it really beats you up on the way down.” Not everyone who falls punches their ticket, but most get severely injured. Significant fractures, head trauma, punctured lungs, pelvic breaks, etc. 

“Unique to the Second Flatiron is that the jump off of the Diving Board. We will have people that injure their knees or their ankles or their elbows at that spot.” And then, of course, you have to keep soloing. 

Hildner strongly recommended climbing the Flatirons on a rope first. Know where the line goes so you don’t find yourself off it and potentially on highly technical terrain. “And don’t fall victim to  groupthink,” he adds.

Zach recommends not going in November. He also said bring a friend. “I think I would have been pretty nervous to have to call the volunteers myself and do everything alone. I think the panic would have set in. … If I did fall, I would want someone to know immediately.” He also wished he’d packed more gear. A proper jacket, maybe.

***

My boyfriend and I also went in November, although on a much less icy weekend. “You got this,” he told me. He should have been right, the conditions were cold but OK, and I certainly had the technical skill. But I don’t think either one of us expected how risk averse I actually am. We hadn’t made it 10 feet up the wall when I bailed to the gutter. I didn’t want to make a single move that I couldn’t reverse, so I stubbornly climbed the gutter until it ended. And then, right when I could have pulled the lip—the very lip that Zach pulled and then got stuck on—I started the long scoot down.

It doesn’t matter how good you are, soloing can still be downright scary. And, as we all know, it’s dangerous. I’m not here to tell anyone not to do it, but, I do hope to normalize the fact that not everyone should. Conditions, skillset, experience, and mindset should all be taken into account.

The Rocky Mountain Rescue group is funded by community donations. They’ve answered over 200 calls for lost or injured people this year alone—about 30 of which were for climbers on the Flatirons. Donate or find out how to get involved here. From Zach:  Even if you don’t think you’ll ever need a rescue, you might know someone who does.

Also Read:

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• Do Climbers Have Expiration Dates? A Lifer Contemplates His Old Age
• Watch Seb Bouin do Hard FAs on French Alpine Limestone

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