Whoops: my sixty second helicopter rescue

[peds]

A couple of weeks ago I got myself into a spot of bother. We've already had some chatter over on the Eurothread, but now I've written a slightly more detailed report of what went wrong I thought I'd post it in a thread of its own, instead of spamming it up over there some more.

Sunday 28th January


At the top of the line, the south west couloir of the Becs Rouges

“God dammit...” I mutter quietly to myself. There's no-one else around to hear me, anyway. I've just spent far too long carefully sidestepping downhill, axe in hand but skis on feet, over deep runnels of bulletproof snow and bare rock, carved out and polished by last night's avalanche. Obviously, this was not part of the plan.

As I slowly creep around a shallow corner in the wide couloir, my eyes fall on a sight that makes my heart sink even further: the huge cone of snow that I had seen through my binoculars just yesterday evening, still stacked up neatly at the bottom of my exit couloir at sundown, is no longer there. It is now splayed across the glacier far below me in a fractal of ornate tendrils, each a hundred meters long, and in its place lies a narrow, rock-strewn gully, bordered by towering granite on one side, and a crumbling moraine wall on the other. “God dammit.” I repeat, quieter still.

I glance back at the cliffs above me and the south-facing slopes beyond them, glowing, shimmering in the midday sun. I don't have long. I pull the shaft of my ice axe out of the snow above me, and anchor my rucksack to the hillside with the handle of a ski pole driven into the hole. I unlock my toes and step out of my uphill ski, swap into the first crampon, then stamp out a small ledge under my downhill ski to stand on comfortably so I can do the same for my other foot. After strapping my skis to my pack and stashing one pole, I press on down the broken couloir, picking my way between patches of mirror-finish ice over the maze of spines and runnels. Even with careful, methodical movements, my progress is reassuringly faster than on skis, but too many minutes and too few meters of descent later, a faint rustle and a series of dull thuds draws my eyes downwards: the moraine has started to crumble in the heat of the day and a skull-sized chunk of granite has just peeled away from the dusty ochre wall, bouncing down the centre of my intended line of descent, before sliding to a halt among a cluster of its former neighbours, still nearly two hundred metres below me. For some reason I hear a slight giggle escape from between my curled lips, and I allow myself a short moment to wallow in the absurdity of the situation. But I know that won't help.


As seen from across the valley the day before, the intended line until difficulties started, partway down the second couloir. First part of the line hidden from view behind the ridges.

What I do know, however, having studied this line obsessively through binoculars and photographs over the years, is that there is a hanging snow slope sandwiched between the right-hand moraine wall of this couloir and the cliffs just above it, and that I might be able to use it to rejoin the route a little lower down, below most of the potential rockfall. Once back in the couloir, if I ski quickly enough and pretend to be much thinner than I actually am, it's entirely possible, even probable, that I won't be crushed to death by rockfall and become a pink smear on the bottom of the glacier. The odds aren't great, I admit, but they are the best I've got right now. “I don't have time for this,” I mutter as I start to climb back up the couloir, finding small comfort in my own commentary. “I literally do not have the time for this.”

Eventually, I find a patch of snow that reaches up to the base of the cliffs, and there is now a traverse of thirty meters or so to a stunted rock buttress which marks the closest edge of the hanging snow slope. The soft and accommodating snow on the traverse has been left untouched by the avalanche of last night, and I am soon underneath the buttress, where a short but noticeably-steep climb puts me firmly on top of this small bastion of solid ground. I dig around in the rocks at the bottom of the cliff and find a good sturdy flake to grab onto with my right hand, so I can lean out a little and take stock of my new situation. My heart sinks again: along the entire left-hand edge of the slope below me, the moraine wall is crumbling away, and every twenty seconds or so a piece of it tumbles down to the glacier. The entire length of the remaining couloir is stained pink from constantly-falling debris, and although it is out of my sight, I know that the story will be the same along the base of this hanging slope as well. I can't see a way out. I reach over my head into the top pocket of my backpack, take out my phone, and turn off airplane mode. No signal, but maybe it just needs a moment or two to wake up. I slide it into my thigh pocket.

That instantly-recognisable hiss. The quiet-but-growing sound of constant surf breaking on a rapidly-approaching shore. I turn around and face back towards where I've just come from, grabbing the flake of rock with my left hand instead, just in time to see the first wave of the avalanche carve down the guts of the couloir, not thirty meters away from me, the noise now a steady roar as a churning river of dirty white launches into the air, tearing at the walls, plucking loose rocks from the trembling moraine and swallowing them whole, spitting them out again a hundred, two hundred meters lower. A minute later, the world is silent once more, still, except for the rain-on-a-tin-roof rattle coming from the moraine. I unclip a short sling from my harness and drape it over what I have decided to be one of the very best flakes of granite on Earth, and as I clip my cow's tail on to it, I feel my thigh vibrate. My phone must have found signal.

“Hi honey,” I answer. My wife sounds panicked, I am already quite late by this point. “Listen, I'm not hurt at all, and I'm perfectly safe, but I think I'm going to need a helicopter.”

[peds]

Mountain Rescue call me back about ten minutes after our first conversation. They want to double check that I am not injured and in a safe place, well out of harm's way.

“I have to ask,” the operator says to me in slow, patient French, after my own abysmal attempts at the language have made clear that it's necessary, “If you are in total security, do you mind waiting for a while? The helicopter has to go to another incident elsewhere in the valley, someone has fallen and might be quite badly injured.”

“No, not at all,” I reply. My anchor is solid, I'm relatively sheltered from anything falling from above, I'm warm and dry and I have another jacket in my pack. Although I have finished my Thermos of tea, the hollow tube of my ice axe is collecting the meltwater dripping steadily off the rocks behind me, and I have a pocket full of sweets. I can stay here indefinitely, I suppose. “I am in total security. I have no problems here, if the helicopter has more serious things to attend.”


My home for the afternoon, stuck somewhere between a rock and a hard place

In retrospect, perhaps my timings were a little on the tight side. The same warm sun that had softened the snow to a skiable consistency in the upper couloir was bound to carry on heating the entire face throughout the day, and I was banking on the lower couloir being a clean and quick ski, allowing me to be well away from the area before the inevitable and incessant avalanches started in the afternoon. No such luck. For the next two and a half hours I watch slide after slide tear down the couloir to my left, with the brief lull between every crashing wave filled by the constant clatter and occasional boom of the moraine wall crumbling away beneath me.

As I sit so close to the carnage, I can't help but dwell on how much closer I could have been. The elapsed time between my crampons taking their final step out of the couloir and that first unstoppable wall of snow sweeping everything out of it's path can't have been more than ten or fifteen minutes. That time could just have easily been spent earlier in the day, sorting out a stuck rope after a rappel or clearing ice from the toe piece of a binding, or stopping to grab some time lapse footage of swirling clouds, or watching another team on the other side of the valley through a pair of binoculars, or any other pointless and banal thing you find yourself doing sometimes in the mountains. It might well have been the right decision to climb out from the couloir and cling desperately to the rocks above it when I did, but that most definitely isn't why I'm still alive today, sitting typing these words over a week after the fact in my dressing gown, with a half-ignored mug of lukewarm coffee by my elbow. It was luck. Nothing but dumb, blind, luck.



As the blue PGHM helicopter comes into view hovering high above me, my phone rings. It's the pilot, he wants me to guide him to my exact location, a tiny speck of blue and red lost somewhere on a colossal mountainside. Rotate sixty degrees to the right, I tell them, lower two hundred meters. It's hard to speak into my phone when I'm waving both arms high above my head. They see me. I don't know if I should hang up yet... it seems rude.

A man on the end of a cable reaches out to me. He takes hold of my arm first, then my rock anchor, then he sets his feet down on the tiny ledge I've stamped out for him in the snow. I pull back the bottom of my jacket and stretch out my belay loop as he clips the winch cable to it, then as we both go to pull the sling off of my rock he waves his other hand in a circle above his head. We are airborne. As the scarred couloir and ragged cliffs that I've called my home for the last few hours lurch away from me, fifty meters, a hundred, two hundred, the astonishingly-handsome man cradling my legs between his glances down at the unnecessarily-skinny, lightweight mountaineering harness cutting deep into my thighs. “Ca va?” he shouts over the noise of the rotor, an unmistakeable expression of rather-you-than-me on his face. Ca va, I nod.


Post-rescue, looking back across at the site. Note the small red box, my rock buttress. Most of the exit couloir hidden behind the obvious ridge.

We are set down on one of the Grands Montets pistes, near the Refuge de Lognan, then we crouch as the helicopter lands next to us. My rescuer goes to lift my rucksack into the helicopter, but I tap him on the shoulder and mime that, perhaps, and I'd hate to appear ungrateful, it would be easier for them to leave me here... I can just ski home to Argentiere. They shrug at each other and nod. I shake every hand available, mouthing my thanks, and clasping my hands together in gratitude to the pilot as he lifts off again into the sky. A moment later, my sixty second rescue is over and the world is silent once again, with not even the pitter-patter of constant rockfall in the background. Under the surprised gaze of a small audience lining the edges of a nearby piste, I quickly swap my crampons for skis, and ski home in the fading early evening light.

Some time later, around my third beer, I learn why I got to enjoy a few hours of sunbathing above my crumbling moraine wall. After inadvertently following someone else's tracks, a group of skiers had found themselves in difficult conditions just a few of kilometers to the south of me, in the Chapeau Couloir. The PGHM helicopter had been rescuing one member of the party, and then, from a couple of hundred meters lower down the couloir, recovering the bodies of two of his friends.

[MakersTeleMark]

This belongs in the gaper thread. Nice spray bro.

[peds]

Thanks bro, it means a lot to me to hear you say that.

[MakersTeleMark]

Thanks bro, it means a lot to me to hear you say that.

Whoa bro, check out my line! You are a piece of flail. Maybe you should repost in the weather forum too.

Does TGR give projectile vomit spray awards? Because, you got that.

[peds]

Sorry, sometimes I have difficulty understanding where the irony ends and the assholery begins outside of the Eurothread. I try to keep up, but it's confusing.

Should this go in Tech Talk as well? Thanks for the advice.

[skinipenem]

This will be entertaining


(Glad you're safe. )

Sent from my SM-G935V using TGR Forums mobile app

[abraham]

On the other hand.


I always enjoy reading your writing, and I'm glad you're ok and get to spend time with the family.

[MakersTeleMark]

If you could post gopro from the heli rescue with the dps, I would appreciate it.

[summit]

Thanks for posting that. You write well.
Questions:
1. So do you get a bill?. They flew out your gear too?
2. Were you equipped to bivy if there was no helo? Do you feel you would have found safer exit conditions in the morning?

[peds]

Thanks for posting that. You write well.
Questions:
1. So do you get a bill?. They flew out your gear too?
2. Were you equipped to bivy if there was no helo? Do you feel you would have found safer exit conditions in the morning?

Thank you.

1. That remains to be seen. Amazingly enough, mountain rescue outside of lift-accessed ski resorts is generally free here in France, as instead of falling under the jurisdiction of the local commune, it is seen as the responsibility of the national government, and is therefore paid for by everyone's taxes. It's one of the many, many reasons why I'm so happy to pay the relatively-high taxes here. Rescue, healthcare, childcare... it's all there. I do, however, have insurance with the Club Alpine Francais, which will cover the costs of the rescue if it is decided that I was close enough to the lifts of the Grands Montets. This seems unlikely, as the generally-accepted distinction is that if you can access the area from the top of a ski lift using only gravity, then it is part of the ski area. There are some notable exceptions of course, such as the Aiguille du Midi and the top bin of the Grands Montets, the cable car at La Grave... places like that. I also had to do around 2000ft of skinning, over the popular route of the Col du Passon, to get to where I was going.
Thankfully, on the phone both the operator and the pilot told me to make sure I had everything prepped and ready to go for when the chopper arrived, with my skis strapped to my pack. I am unbelievably grateful that they did.

2. Not so much equipped, but I did have a big down jacket in my sack, spare gloves, a thermarest-style belay seat in the back of my rucksack, and I could have slept (or at least, sat) with my legs in my rucksack. I've bivvied with less before, I'd probably have coped.
Considering the avalanche that ripped the base out of my exit couloir happened at some point between sundown the day before and sunrise of that day, I'd have been pretty freaked out to venture back into the couloir at all, even after the colder temperatures of the night had arrived, especially as I would either be downclimbing relatively slowly still down the main couloir, or trying to rappel into it from the edge of the moraine. Both options would mean I'd be moving pretty slowly. It is, of course, highly unlikely that another slide similar to the previous evening would happen again when it did, and even less likely that I'd be dicking around with spikes or string at the same time, but the prospect terrifies me. I doubt I'll ever be trying to use the same exit couloir ever again, to be honest.

It's worth mentioning that after the colossal storms we had back in December and early January, the exit couloir looked the healthiest it has even been since the winter of 2012/13. It hasn't been as well-filled at after that, and very few people have tried to ski it since. Local legends Aurelian Ducroz, Leo Slemett, and Fanfan Dan tried to ski it a couple of years ago and had to make a 60m rappel to get down to the glacier, I think. Given the rate at which the Argentiere Glacier is shrinking and, consequently, the moraine wall growing, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if no-one manages to ski it clean ever again.

Edit: here are Ducroz and Co skiing the line in 2015.
http://www.skipass.com/news/116894-c...-sud-des-.html

[peds]

...aaaaand just because it's there, here's a video of me and a friend skiing the upper couloir last year, much much slower than Ducroz and Co.

[skinipenem]

Nice vid! That looks great!

Sent from my SM-G935V using TGR Forums mobile app

[subtle plague]

Nice write up.
That's why I usually stick to a lot less mountaineering lines. I hate timing. And I'm prone to making mistakes. I am generally scared of "no mistakes lines"

[peds]

Nice vid! That looks great!

It's such a cool line, and the whole face, which doesn't even come into condition every year, is scattered with similar lines, both established and never skied before if you enjoy a little bit of ropework. But the only way out when the lower exit couloir isn't in condition is to put the skins back on for another few hundred metres of ascent, back to the upper Argentiere Glacier, which is why I tried to grab this opportunity when I did. Silly move.

I hate timing.

The secret to both good comedy and good mountaineering. That, and lots of jokes about nuts and cracks and things like that.

[subtle plague]

Yeah I climb a lot (sports and Boulder... only a few alpine sport Multis far in between, but no trade or real alpine) so two finger pockets, wet cracks and so on seem to be mildy amusing.

If I try to ski anything interesting. It's usually north facing, I come from below and I turn around if I don't see good snow.
This rarely results in hair-raising or worth telling about descents though.

But hey I ended up downclimbing/sidestepping some 8m ice fall /snow/ rock face with a 2m huck to flat as an exit (in a narrow gully system) because I followed some tracks in Italy two days ago.
Which quite ironically was the result of the total opposite of Chamonix thinking.
" hey there are only gapers and some mellow locals here so those tracks should be easy"

I forgot that gapers get into trouble just as often as Chamonix veterans. Only for different reasons. They had climbed back out and I was too lazy.

[Buster Highmen]

Love the slough by slough commentary, gently trivializing the madness.

[peds]

I forgot that gapers get into trouble just as often as Chamonix veterans. Only for different reasons. They had climbed back out and I was too lazy.

Haha, sounds fun. I'm reminded of a similar moment when I was working in Val d'Isere for a season, a decade ago. I was skiing a couloir above La Daille, no idea where it went, but there's a load of tracks in it so it must be fine. Suddenly there's only one track to follow, then none, and a bootpack going all the way back up the couloir. Ten metre cliff below me. Whoops! Skis off, on pack, back up we go. It's a good thing I'm older and wiser now!
I think there might be a photo lurking somewhere, I'll see if I can dig it out later.

Someone else made the same mistake a few years after me, I remember reading about it at the time. Another seasonnaire, same couloir, they got knocked off their feet by sluff from above I think. Carried over the cliff, knocked around, fell into a coma. I don't recall if they died or not.

Love the slough by slough commentary, gently trivializing the madness.

You should see the director's cut, the sightseeing helicopter makes multiple appearances.

[skaredshtles]

Your writing is very good - I enjoyed your account. Glad it all worked out.

For the record: you're mad.

[AKbruin]

I don't get the animosity above. I love a good rescue story with a happy ending. Cheers!

[Shredhead]

I hope your well insured.
It won’t replace you, but it will make life easier on the wife and daughter.
It always makes me sad to see young mothers struggling.

[peds]

For the record: you're mad.

We are all mad, in a way.

I don't get the animosity above. I love a good rescue story with a happy ending. Cheers!

The internet is like real life, the more people you get together in one place, the higher the chance that at least one of them is asshole. It's no big deal, I've been on TGR long enough to know the kind of person who hangs out here.

I hope your well insured.
It won’t replace you, but it will make life easier on the wife and daughter.
It always makes me sad to see young mothers struggling.

Jesus, that's a bit of a downer. You are right, I guess now that I have actual dependants I'm kind of at an age where I need to think about this sort of thing. Wow. The last time I checked I was still 21 years old and living paycheck to paycheck, but suddenly that's a decade ago.

[skaredshtles]

<snip>
Jesus, that's a bit of a downer. You are right, I guess now that I have actual dependants I'm kind of at an age where I need to think about this sort of thing. Wow. The last time I checked I was still 21 years old and living paycheck to paycheck, but suddenly that's a decade ago.

Tell me about it. Although for me it was over two decades ago.

[Meadow Skipper]

Hey, I thought it was a good read, very well written. I'll hold off on the value judgements about the legitimacy of your adventure.

Glad it turned out okay for you.

[hafjell]

I'm here to learn. This thread, Peds' honesty, is helping that. Thanks.

So, how bad was the harness on the airlift out? Still happy with that choice or are you thinking of going to something a bit larger or more comfortable?
I've hinted at this in the other thread, but is there any part of your kit you'd change based on this experience?
And, 20 year, level term life insurance is cheap in the States.