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polarwid
May 14, 2002, 12:05 AM
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Please read the following article and see what CLIMBING TOO FAST can do to you.
These guys were "PROS" and they thought they could get away with it, but as you can see, in some others "PROS" opinions, they didn't!
[ This Message was edited by: polarwid on 2002-05-13 19:04 ]
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polarwid
May 14, 2002, 12:05 AM
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Mount St. Elias survivors must stop making excuses
Craig Medred
Outdoors
(Published: May 12, 2002)
Somewhere not far below the summit of Mount St. Elias, the snow is piling high on the frozen bodies of Aaron Martin and Reid Sanders. They have no need to rationalize the mistakes made on that 18,008-foot Southeast Alaska mountain in April.
For John Griber and Greg Von Doersten, it is different. They are the ones left to explain how the quest for a world-record 31/2-mile ski descent went so badly wrong. They are the ones left to outline how a plan to drop 18,000 feet from summit to sea ended almost before it began with two dead and two more rescued.
Both survivors were hard at explanations in the April 29 issue of Sports Illustrated.
" We didn't just say Let's ski this thing,' " Von Doersten told Sports Illustrated reporters. "We specialize in extreme terrain."
And if anyone did get carried away in the so-called 2002 Ultimate Vertical Ski/Snowboard Descent, sponsored in part by The North Face, it wasn't the two survivors, Griber said.
"From the start," Griber told the magazine, "Aaron was out-of-his-brain excited about the endeavor. By the time we left, he had infected us with his enthusiasm."
How convenient.
Von Doersten makes the case that these weren't "four heedless thrill-seekers plucked from a Mountain Dew commercial," as Sports Illustrated puts it, and Griber implies that if that was how it appears they acted, it was only because one of the dead men was so enthusiastic.
"Going (up) too fast was definitely an issue," Griber admitted to Sports Illustrated, "but we were strong and motivated and thought we had a weather window. Taking chances is a game you play with the mountains."
What an interesting turn of phrase.
But there's a problem.
Taking chances is almost always a game you play with yourself, not with mountains.
There is an important distinction.
Yes, the mountains occasionally require people to take chances, either because of poor planning or because weather plays havoc with plans. Sometimes climbers gamble on making a move when food and fuel are running out.
Far more often, though, people gamble with themselves, trying to smash through that barrier known as the impossible in order to push the limit of the possible farther out.
This is exactly what Griber, Von Doersten, Reid and Sanders were up to on St. Elias.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
We should admire people who push the envelope. It is the essence of human evolution. The world is not made a better or more interesting place by those of us who simply show up every day. The world is driven forward by the people who show up to try and do something more or something better today than anyone did yesterday.
No one should fault these men for daring to attempt a ski and snowboard descent of St. Elias. Desire and ambition were not the problem.
The problem came when they let these things known to culminate in fame or money influence their decision making.
As pilot and wilderness veteran Paul Claus of Ultima Thule Outfitters has observed, the men went up St. Elias too fast. Claus dropped the group at 10,500 feet on April 5. Three days later, Reid and Sanders were at the 18,008-foot summit with Griber lagging just behind.
The standard rule of thumb for altitude gain in mountaineering is 1,000 feet per day at elevations above 8,000 feet. Experienced Alaska mountaineer Colby Coombs, in his guide to climbing Mount McKinley, recommends climbers spend a full day at the Kahiltna base camp at 7,200 feet to begin altitude adjustment.
Then he suggests taking about a week to hike the glacier to the 14,200 foot Base Camp, above which the real climbing begins.
To ascend faster is to risk acute mountain sickness, which is what it sounds like Griber may have been suffering on St. Elias. He describes fatigue, vomiting and hallucinations, typical mountain sickness symptoms.
No one will ever know how the failure to properly acclimate affected Martin and Sanders. Were they physiologically 100 percent when they jumped off the top of the mountain, given that another symptom of acute mountain sickness is dizziness? Were they thinking straight when they decided to clip into their skis and descend a steep, icy and runneled mountainside?
You have to wonder, because even before the fatal accident there appears to have been some strange thinking going on.
Von Doersten lost a crampon and frostbit his hands on the first day of the climb. His climbing companions had to hoist him by rope to a camp at 14,500 feet. And there they left him.
Sports Illustrated describes Von Doersten's hands as being so badly frostbitten that they were useless.
Which prompts a question:
If his hands were useless, why did his climbing companions leave him alone in a snow cave for days while they went for the summit?
How was Von Doersten to melt snow to provide the water that sustains life? And what if one of those infamous St. Elias snowstorms had blown in off the North Pacific? How would Von Doersten and his battered hands have kept up with the digging necessary to keep a snow cave from becoming a snow tomb?
The frostbitten hands are the main reason Griber and Von Doersten have given for summoning the rescue that put a helicopter crew from Kulis Air National Guard Base in harm's way to save them.
But paramedics who spent time with Von Doersten on the ground in Yakutat after his rescue said his hands were discolored -- the telltale sign of flesh killed by cold -- and tender, but he was able to hold a pen to write.
So maybe Von Doersten's hands weren't completely useless. Maybe frostbitten hands were simply the most comfortable explanation for why the two men didn't descend to Hayden Col at 10,500 feet, where Claus could safely pick them up with an airplane -- avoiding the need for the helicopter.
Maybe frostbite sounds better than acute mountain sickness. Sports Illustrated describes Griber at 14,500 as "so exhausted he could barely move." Fatigue is another symptom of mountain sickness.
Unfortunately, raising this valid reason for calling in a rescue would open the whole box of questions about the hurried ascent.
I tried to talk to Griber about these things when he arrived back in Anchorage after the rescue. He wanted no part of it. He was, he said, overwhelmed dealing with the trauma of witnessing the death of two friends on the mountain.
"Don't you understand what I'm going through?" he said.
I do. I've known a lot of people who've died in the Alaska mountains, and I've witnessed too many bodies being packed out.
I know friends of Griber in Jackson, Wyo., and here. They all vouch for him as an all-around good guy.
Since then, however, having read Griber's comments on this affair in Sports Illustrated and elsewhere, I have to wonder.
Accepting the fact that you've made bad decisions is not easy. I know; I've been there in both everyday life and in the outdoors. So have others. Often there's a common denominator to how trouble arises:
Somebody had a plan, and by God he was sticking to it.
The list of people who've died in the Alaska wilderness by sticking to plans formulated in comfortable confines is long.
Resolute plans have killed climbers, pilots, white-water paddlers, bluewater paddlers, skiers, snowmobilers and who knows how many others willing to push the envelope of chance too far.
Taking chances is not, as Griber wants to believe, some game you play with the elements.
It is a game you play with yourself, a game it feels really good to win.
And a game that can be deadly to lose.
That's why good decision making becomes so important. That's why Griber and Von Doersten should be figuring out what went wrong and talking about that instead of coming up with excuses for why everything should have worked out fine.
Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. He can be reached at cmedred@adn.com or 907 257-4588.
[ This Message was edited by: polarwid on 2002-05-22 12:31 ]
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jmlangford
May 16, 2002, 3:06 AM
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Very sobering story! It doesn't have to be at 18,000' either! Just read this story to find out how it hit me at about 13,000'. DON'T MESS WITH ALTITUDE! Mountaineering/alpining is the most dangerous form of climbing! Thanks for sharing this with us Doug.
[ This Message was edited by: jmlangford on 2002-05-15 20:07 ]
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bradhill
May 16, 2002, 7:28 PM
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Altitude sickness can strike quite unpredictably and climbers need to know how to recognize it and be willing to take appropriate measures. A good lesson for everybody to learn.
That said, these guys fell. Nobody still alive saw it happen or knows why and how it happened. Being exhausted and cold makes mistakes more likely, but they're unavoidable parts of alpinism. Exactly how much, if at all, AMS contributed to this fall is unknown.
Frankly, I think both pieces have a lot of spray. Mountaineering journalism almost always does. People want to read two kinds of writing in this arena: hubris leading to a fall (Outside) and the harrowing escape from great danger (SI). These outlines for a story go back to the oldest extant literature and into oral tradition beyond that. They touch a fundamental part of the human spirit. But not every reality fits into these molds, though journalists and writers always try.
You don't get paid for column inches or attract much reader interest to simply say that extreme alpinism is inherently dangerous and these guys got unlucky and had an accident. Really, though, that's all the truth about the matter we'll ever know.
I'll wait and read about it in Accidents in N.A. Mountaineering 2002 when nobody's trying to sell the story or tell anything but the facts.
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kaptk
May 16, 2002, 8:06 PM
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This kind of incident leads me to ask a question. If these four guys where doing this on their own without all the sponsorships and media, would they have turned back at the first sign of trouble and give it a go on another day? From the way that the one guy's enthusiasm was portrayed the answer may be no. I am not trying to place any culpability on the sponsors for what happened by posing this question. I was not able to make a summit one day because one of the kids that I was in charge of was not going to be able to make it. I was disappointed that I didn't summit that day, but I also knew that the mountain wasn't going anywhere and that I would have a chance to make the summit on another day. I understand that sometimes one must take chances, but I can't understand people who refuse to acknowledge when stuff is going wrong and therefore do not take the appropriate actions to deal with the problem. I have a desire to climb some tall mountains in my life and I know that I will never screw with the altitude thing. Altitude will always win and you will always lose.
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bobtheboulderer
May 22, 2002, 5:51 PM
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I have never climbed or bouldered above 10,000 feet, but I did get a pretty bad headache in BOULDER when I first climbed there the afternoon after I got off the plane in Denver. A little water and a rest day helped me out...never went that high though, sounds like a pretty bad deal, I will keep it in mind next time I hit the higher altitude areas.
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hornj
May 30, 2002, 6:22 AM
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This is a story about a rescue in the Mt. Whitney area a friend of mine participated in but as there were some army regulation that were bent I won’t mention any names. It was about 4 years ago so some of the details are foggy.
A lone woman was climbing Mt Whitney when she slipped and fell coming to rest on an arete. She sustained injuries severe enough to immobilize her but with her cell phone she was able to call the local sheriff’s department for help but for some reason could not give her exact location. A search and rescue operation was launched and by late evening had not located her. A weather system was pushing over the Sierra’s bringing cold weather. The woman called in with her condition. By dusk she was getting slightly hypothermic. Before the last light had failed she made a frantic phone call stating that a mountain lion was stalking her. In the early hours of the morning the sheriff called for a hoist equipped helicopter out of Sacramento. My friend was the flight medic. The crew checked the weather which was marginal but at first light decided to launch and fly to Lamoore Naval Air Station which is near Fresno, in hopes the weather would clear. At Lamore the weather was still marginal so they landed to check the weather report plus to make a phone call to the sheriff department for the status of the SAR. The Sheriff reported the woman had survived the night but was frantically calling that the mountain lion was moving in and she was having to throw rocks to keep it away. The flight crew asked how the weather was on the other side of the mountains to which Sheriff reported that there was clearing overhead. Considering the circumstances they decided to make the flight over the mountains. Because of the high altitude of where the hoist operation was to take place they opted not to take on fuel. Out of Fresno they climbed above the clouds at about 5000 feet. The Mountains were obscured in the clouds as they flew east pushing them progressively higher. Somewhere past the halfway point on their fuel they passed through 12,000 feet. It was at this point they became aware of the effects of hypoxia but were unable to descend or return to Lamoore NAS being they had passed the halfway point on fuel. The helicopter had small bottles of oxygen but it was for patient care. One of the pilots started feeling flushed and very light headed so my friend begin rigging a system to get oxygen to the pilot. It was here he discovered that he could not figure out how to place the simple wrench on the valve to open the oxygen tank. As the pilot yelled over the intercom for him to hurry he fought with this task that normally took him but a few seconds to complete. When he finally was able to figure it out he was forced to grab a few quick breaths before he could move forward and give the mask to the pilot. As there was only one mask they had to pass the oxygen around to all four of the flight crew until they broke over the crest at 15,000 feet and dived down into the Owens valley. Below 10,000 feet they were recovered quickly and from the air they located the woman and hoisted her off the mountain. Apparently the mountain lion was scared away by the helicopter as none of the crew spotted it. Though a lot of lessons were learned on this mission the one that is pertinent to this topic is how my friend didn’t realize he was hypoxic until he tried to do a simple task.
I hope this is of use to someone.
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kaptk
Jun 5, 2002, 6:39 AM
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Thanks for sharing your friend's experience hornj.
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