Alone in the snow and wind-blown desolation near the summit of North America, Irishman Jerry O'Sullivan shivered for 16 hours in May with only the pain throbbing through his broken leg to keep him company. A world away from his home in Ballinhassig and in life-threatening danger, he wondered if he would live to see once again the lush, green, rolling hills of County Cork. His climbing companions had left him to go for help, but with a storm raging across the 20,320-foot top of Mount McKinley, there was no telling if they had made it to the safety of high camp.
O'Sullivan shifted in and out of a dream-like consciousness as he waited and waited.
"I couldn't believe that was me up there,'' he said Thursday in his first public comments about his Alaska ordeal. "I was wondering if anyone even got down. Then I saw the helicopter in the sky."
That was like witnessing the arrival of an angel. Suddenly above him, clawing for elevation in the blue, windblown skies just below McKinley's summit, was an A-Star B3 helicopter with National Park Service contract pilot Andy Hermansky at the controls. O'Sullivan was in that moment far from safe, but now at least there was hope.
"I was waving up at it," O'Sullivan said, and then the helicopter was gone. "I didn't know if it was coming back. I was hoping."
Either way, though, this was good news. Someone among the other three climbers with which he'd earlier fallen had made it back to the McKinley high camp at 17,200-feet. Other climbers down there at least knew now he was in trouble and could try to help. O'Sullivan struggled to sit up in the snow and wondered what might happen next.
Then the helicopter was back.
"I was looking up at him, wondering what he was going to do," O'Sullivan said. "I didn't know if he was going to land or lower a ranger." The injured climber thought maybe he'd get some instructions on a loudspeaker, "and all of a sudden, I saw this basket in the snow beside me."
Mother of all carnival rides over Mount McKinley
O'Sullivan doesn't remember seeing it coming. He doesn't remember seeing the 125-foot rope connecting the rescue basket to the bottom of the helicopter. He doesn't know if Hermansky swung the basket in to him or drug it up the slope below as the pilot battled to keep the helicopter aloft in a place where the air is so thin only a few helicopter rescues have ever taken place.
But O'Sullivan will never forget seeing the metal wire basket.
"I don't exactly know how I got into it," he said. "There was a strap. I remember looking at something, thinking about hooking in."
He doesn't remember if he did. He does remember he didn't have a thought about the risk of what would happen next. Hermansky was about to yank O'Sullivan in the air and dangle him over the Kahiltna Glacier. The Irishman was about to go on the mother of all carnival rides, a short haul flight in a basket thousands of feet above the glaciers of Mount McKinley, possibly without anyone checking to make sure he was safely strapped in. He didn't care.
"All my worries were done," O'Sullivan said. It was his only thought as he rolled his body into the basket. He doesn't remember much of what followed:
O'Sullivan was informed later, in fact, that his rescuers didn't consider him "pretty lucid." A LifeMed air ambulance picked him up at the 7,200-foot Kahiltna Glacier base camp on McKinley. He doesn't remember the transfer from the basket below Hermansky's helicopter to the air ambulance or the flight. He does remember later asking doctors if he was in Anchorage or Seattle.
Three weeks on from the accident, the 40-year-old mechanical engineer remains here, undergoing rehabilitation. He talked Thursday by telephone from the St. Elias Specialty Hospital, a long-term-care facility to which he was transferred from the Providence Alaska Medical Center. His broken leg is expected to heal, he said, but it remained unclear as to what body parts he might lose as a result of the serious frostbite he suffered while stranded on the mountain. His hands are still swollen from the frostbite and unusable.
"I can't put weight on my heels at the moment either," he added, which makes it difficult to get around.
McKinley guide Dave Staeheli 'saved my life'
O'Sullivan is lucky that his girlfriend has flown in to be with him. He isn't sure when he'll be able to get on a plane to go home or in what shape he will be when he leaves.
"I'm certainly not going to go home with as many (fingers) as I came over here with," O'Sullivan said. He could lose toes, too; even part of one foot. But it could have been far worse.
"I could still be laying up there in the snow," O'Sullivan said. "I'm lucky. I'm looking forward to meeting that helicopter pilot. It was so good to see him."
O'Sullivan did not want to talk about the events leading up to his rescue, although he does credit Mountain Trip guide Dave Staeheli with saving his life. After a rope team of four climbers guided by Staeheli fell and O'Sullivan broke his leg, it was Staeheli who treated the break, dragged O'Sullivan to a flat enough place below the summit ridge that the injured climber wouldn't fall off, and then went for help with two other clients.
"I was dragged down over the steeper part," O'Sullivan said. "I was kind of wrapped up. I had my rucksack and Dave's rucksack under me."
Staeheli also gave O'Sullivan his parka for extra warmth, and then everyone left.
"I was kind of waiting and waiting," O'Sullivan said. "It seemed I should have been in more pain. I should have been colder." He thinks he was probably in shock, which took some of the edge off the pain from the broken leg and the ice creeping into his flesh. He did not learn until long after his rescue of the disaster that had befallen the 56-year-old Staeheli and the others on their descent after leaving him.
One of the Mountain Trip clients --38-year-old Beat Niederer of St. Gallen, Switzerland -- didn't make it to high camp. He died near 18,000 feet from causes still unknown. Staelheli, a resident of Alaska's Matanuska-Susitna Valley, and 45-year-old client Lawrence Cutler from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, made camp at 17,200-foot, but both suffered severe frostbite. They too had to be air-evacuated off the mountain.
The National Park Service is now in the middle of an investigation of the fall and its aftermath. The investigation isn't expected to be complete until at least July, but Mountain Trip, the guide service of which O'Sullivan, Culter and Neiderer were clients, has published a report on its examination of what happened. The company website says its "Summary of Events of May 11-12" comes from "interviews and conversations with Dave Staeheli, Henry Munter, Jack McGee (another guide on the mountain at the time), Tony Diskin, O'Sullivan and Lawrence Cutler."
Mountain Trip's record of the fatal McKinley trip
The summary adds some new details to what happened, changes other details, and alters the chronology of some events as originally reported by the Park Service. Such is not uncommon. Most breaking news is confused by the fog of crisis. The fog begins to clear only as witnesses are interviewed, and their accounts compiled and compared.
Here is a summary of what Mountain Trip now says happened:
Two guides, Staeheli and assistant Henry Munter from Girdwood, got a morning start from high camp toward the top of McKinley on May 11 with four clients in tow. They left behind in camp a client who was suffering with the altitude, and client Tony Diskin, 33, from Westmeath, Ireland didn't get far on the summit attempt. Having chosen to wear gloves instead of mittens, he had frostbitten hands by the time the team reached Denali Pass at 18,000 feet. Munter then turned back to high camp with Diskin, picked up the other client there, and all descended to the medical camp at 14,200 feet.
Staelheli and the other clients, meanwhile, pushed on to the mountain's 20,320-foot summit. "As they took in the sublime light of late evening just below the Arctic Circle, a 15-20 mph breeze did not permit much time on the summit," the website says. It does not give the exact time of day, but judging from the events that later transpired and the report of a morning departure from high camp, the team had to have been on the route for at least 12 hours -- if not longer -- by then. That is a long time to be climbing. Everyone was certainly tired. Fatigue might have played a part in what happened next.
O'Sullivan's boot-top fracture, according to climbing doctors, is characteristic of what happens when a climber falls while wearing crampons, starts to slide, catches a crampon point in ice or snow, and is then twisted over and around his boot by the force of gravity.
Other climbers note the description of Staeheli taking off his mitts to better grasp his ice ax is confusing. In the middle of a fall, they said, you are usually clinging to the ax as if your life depended on it, praying you can get the point to dig into the snow or ice and stop the fall. It would be unusual to stop doing that to remove mittens. It is possible, however, he might have taken his mittens off at the start of the descent if they were iced up and he wanted to have a better grip on the ax.
Whatever the case, it is clear from the frostbite Staeheli suffered that his mittens were off at some point for some time, and the Mountain Trip report agrees with O'Sullivan's memory that after the fall, Staeheli dragged the injured man to a safer location.
"While this was occurring," Mountain Trip reports, "Lawrence and Beat began hiking across the Football Field (a relatively flat are on the mountain) in the hope of having better luck with the radio and finding some shelter from the wind in the rocks."
Other climbers who were on the mountain at the time said the winds, which had been calm at the start of the day, were by then building.
They were reported to have begun picking up shortly before the Mountain Trip made the final push to the summit. The Mountain Trip report puts them at "now 20 mph, gusting to perhaps 30 mph" after the fall, and adds that Staeheli's hands were by this point "severely frostbitten, despite his having recovered his mittens." His injured hands, according to Mountain Trip, led to a decision to abandon the team's climbing rope, which was still up the mountain near the point where the fall ended. Without the rope, other guides said, Staelheli was gambling on his ability to keep the clients with him. Some guides refer to the rope as a form of "crowd control." The two ambulatory clients, according to Mountain Trip, were already off, separated, at this point.
Staeheli, the report says, "gave his summit parka to Jerry, wrapped him in a sort of bivouac sack called a guide's tarp, placed him on both Jerry's backpacks, and departed to catch Lawrence and Beat." The climbing party had earlier been reported to be carrying an actual bivy sack, which is really just an uninsulated sleeping bag. It is easy to secure around an injured climber. You just zip them in. It is harder and more time consuming to wrap someone in a tarp.
Swiss climber never made it to McKinley's Denali Pass
The time required to do that allowed Niederer and Cutler to distance themselves from their guide, but according to the Mountain Trip report, "Dave caught up to the two others on the far side of Archdeacon's ridge." There he "outlined a plan to find shelter for Beat and Lawrence in the rocks of Denali Pass while he descended the Autobahn to get help, and the three continued down."
They never made Denali Pass. Niederer was slow and couldn't keep up, even though Staeheli and Cutler stopped to wait. They last regrouped with Niederer at 18,800 feet. Staeheli and Cutler then descended to Zebra Rocks at 18,600 "where Dave and Lawrence waited for 10 minutes or so for Beat." When he did not show, Staeheli -- who'd given his parka to the injured O'Sullivan and was rapidly going hypothermic -- concluded he had no choice but to make a run for high camp. He headed down, according to the report, "thinking that Lawrence was with him," but the two were quickly separated when Cutler picked his own route down toward Denali Pass.
Staeheli was the first back to high camp at 3:30 a.m., a good 16 to 17 hours after the team had departed for the summit. (There had originally been reports Cutler reached camp first.) Staeheli expected to find Denali National Park mountaineering rangers in camp, but they were still down at the 14,200-foot medical camp. Another guide was in camp, but "had endured his own 14-hour summit day, and there were no other resources in camp willing to ascend to assist the three climbers up high," according to the Mountain Trip report.
Cutler, meanwhile, was still up on the mountain continuing his descent on his own. About three hours after Staeheli's arrival in high camp -- with the Park Service having been notified of problems and a search-and-rescue operation gearing up -- Cutler was spotted below the Autobahn above camp and a pair of guides went out to help him in.
"The following day, the NPS picked up Jerry in a spectacular effort and the highest helicopter rescue in North America, and flew a ranger up to Beat, who tragically had not made it through the night on the Upper Harper Glacier on the back side of Denali Pass," according to the Mountain Trip account. "This episode is a grim reminder of how thin a line we walk on the upper reaches of Denali (McKinley). I'm not entirely certain what lessons can be learned as there seemed to be no good options open to the team."
'Classic cascade of problems' turning problems into disaster
Other climbers who have studied the incident say the Mountain Trip report is a description of the classic cascade of problems that can turn a relatively small accident into a disaster. Some park officials and guides are now talking about requiring guides to pack a bivy sack and some sort of sleeping bag to the summit in case a client gets hurt, but there are pros and cons with that idea. Carrying any extra weight high on the mountain slows people down, and any extra weight carried by the guide is going to tire him or her at time when all energy is needed.
Guides note the ill-fated Mountain Trip summit team would have been in a much better position to deal with the events after the initial accident if Munter had still been with the group, but with one client frostbitten and another in camp with altitude problems there is no choice but for the assistant guide to turn back with the ailing climbers.
It is not unusual for a lone guide to continue on to the summit with three clients, but it does increase the risks.
Not long after Staeheli was pulled of his feet by a falling client, setting up the chain of events the led to the death of Niederer, the same thing happened to a guide from Alpine Ascents International at Denali Pass. Guide Suzanne Allen from Seattle died in that fall along with 45-year-old client Peter Bullard from Shanghai, China. Allen was only 34.
As the Mountain Trip accident summary concludes, "Big mountains, such as Denali, are unforgiving at times, and while spending time on them makes some of us feel more alive, this event should give us all pause to reconsider our priorities when considering venturing onto their slopes."
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com