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A wilderness search turns grim |
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Written by asap
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Tuesday, 26 December 2006 |
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This was it: one last chance of finding the missing climber -- a German-born engineer working in the United States.
By foot and from the air, our team of 40 searchers had scoured the mountain and surrounding peaks in the South San Juan Mountains in Colorado. Crisscrossing the slopes of 14,059-foot Sunlight Peak, across from North Eolus, I had felt like a mountain goat. I was in my element, coordinating ground rescue teams and air support.
But after two days, there was no sign of him. La Plata County Sheriff Bill Gardner reluctantly shifted from rescue to "recovery" mode.
The sheriff couldn't justify the risk and cost much longer. And we no longer expected to find the climber alive.
That was in the summer of 1992. I was reminded of that experience by reports of the climbers who were recently stranded on Oregon's Mount Hood -- including two who remain missing.
Familiar to me was the heavy heart that Hood River County Sheriff Joe Wampler must have had when he and the climbers' families decided to call off the search for the two missing men after finding their companion, Kelly James of Dallas, dead in a snow cave.
I know that there's always an urge to look -- just one more time.
ONE LAST TRY
In the San Juans, I'd persuaded Gardner to let me go up in the Chinook and have that one more go at it.
Our missing climber was a 30-year-old mountaineering instructor in the German military named Walter Eidelloth. His Swedish fiancee, who he'd been vacationing with, and some of their parents, who showed up later, were worried sick. She'd hiked out alone from their camp site when he failed to return from a solo outing.
I'd taught mountaineering year-round for the Colorado Outward Bound School, knew the San Juans intimately and had climbed in Alaska and the French Alps. I had an idea what Eidelloth might like to try.
Similarly, last week, Sheriff Wampler couldn't resist checking out one last tip about the two missing climbers in Oregon. He piloted a Piper Cub up toward 11,239-foot Mount Hood, hoping to find what a snowshoer thought was a yellow tent.
Instead, he saw only a rock.
A SPECK OF RED
With luck, though, such persistence can sometimes pay off.
Hugging a delicate spot of Colorado's thin air back in '92, an eight-person military crew nimbly guided our bus-sized chopper toward a steep, 1,000-foot couloir that was an inviting ribbon of ice and snow for climbers.
He could have fallen while attempting to scale the gorge, I thought, or slipped traversing just above. Both routes, I knew from experience, were trickier than they looked.
Where else could he be?
My mind raced and my eyes sharpened. I just had this strong feeling. The Chinook began pulling away -- and at that moment, like in a movie, a speck of red appeared several hundred feet from the bottom of the couloir. It hung onto the corner of my eye. The missing climber had worn a red shirt.
I radioed Gardner.
"Way to go!" he whooped. "Thank God!"
I heard his heavy sigh of relief. He'd put me in charge of leading the search, and now he could close the loop with the fiancee and parents. We were sad beyond words -- we'd found a body, not a survivor -- but at least we weren't empty-handed.
A RESCUE'S END
After Sheriff Wampler's return from his fly-by last week, he announced the search for the missing climbers had become a "recovery" operation. His teams will now look for their bodies, as weather permits. The families of the climbers had agreed.
"We wouldn't be doing this today if they hadn't been part of that decision," the sheriff said at a news conference.
After we found Eidelloth, I recalled, I helped Gardner prepare for his own news conference. From my own climbing on North Eolus, I estimated the climber could have tumbled as much as 900 feet down the couloir. I gave the sheriff my best guess about what happened.
I had to return to my school's base camp in Silverton, Colo., to lead a 30-day mountaineering course the next day. I recommended Charlie Fowler, who was among the teams of climbers I had coordinated, as the leader of the recovery of the climber's body. I knew it would take a good climber like Charlie to accomplish the job, and he agreed to take it on.
Today, nearly a decade and a half later, Charlie is a missing climber himself, one of two Americans who disappeared more than a month ago in southwestern China.
BREAKING THE NEWS
After we spotted the missing climber, Gardner flew me to a dirt road on the outskirts of the range, where he'd been keeping the fiancee and the parents updated.
Gardner had me break the news. I did, as gently as I could. His fiancee and the parents took turns hugging me, sobbing and offering thanks. No big deal, I told them. We stood like that for quite a while. I stopped knowing what to say and choked up. They told me I'd given them the ability to find peace.
I had hoped to find him alive, and it hadn't occurred to me until then how much of a relief it would be to them just to know what happened.
Gardner, now the chief of police in Grand Junction, Colo., later sent me a sheriff's pin and warm letter of thanks. He also happily used my version of events with the Colorado newspapers, who wrote up the story based on my conjecture. A German climber, they said with certainty, had fallen 900 feet to his death while climbing a steep snow-and-ice gully.
The link between rescuer and victim was complete: I'd inadvertently written the climber's last chapter.
"That's actually how it works. You have to depend on the people in the field to tell you what's going on," summed up Melody Skinner, an administrative assistant in the San Juan County sheriff's office in Silverton for 25 years. "For that brief moment that brought you together for this tragic incident, you know these people. You go through that intense moment in their lives."
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asap contributor John Heilprin, an experienced climber, is the AP's Washington-based environment reporter. | Only registered users can write comments.
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