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Survival by Sacrifice

FOUR YOUNG MOUNTAINEERS WERE TRYING TO CONQUER THE UNCLIMBED PEAK OF HARAMOSH WHEN AN AVALANCHE SWEPT TWO OF THEM OVER A SHEER ICE CLIFF. THE OTHER TWO CLIMBERS WOULD DRIVE THEMSELVES BEYOND THE POINT OF EXHAUSTION AND RISK THEIR LIVES IN A DARING RESCUE ATTEMPT THAT WOULD HAVE TRAGIC AND HEROIC RESULTS.

DATE: 1957 SITUATION: CLIMBING ACCIDENT CONDITION OF CONFINEMENT: STRANDED BY AN AVALANCHE AT 6,400 M (21,000 FT) DURATION OF CONFINEMENT: 2 DAYS MEANS OF ESCAPE: CLIMBING TO SAFETY, RESCUE AND SACRIFICE BY COLLEAGUES NO. OF ESCAPEES: 2 DANGERS: DEHYDRATION, EXHAUSTION, FALLING TO DEATH, HYPOTHERMIA EQUIPMENT: CLIMBING EQUIPMENT

The snow-covered peaks of the Karakoram Range, Pakistan.

The height of ambition

It was no wonder that the young students were bursting with enthusiasm for the climb. Several extraordinary recent mountaineering achievements had fired the imaginations of all men who loved the mountains: Tensing and Hillary had climbed Everest just four years previously and the savage K2 had succumbed the year after. It seemed that no peak was beyond the reach of determined and able men.

But the three lads from Oxford University Mountaineering Club took their enthusiasm one step further. They wanted to be the first men to conquer the virgin spire of Haramosh, a towering 7,400 m (24,270 ft) mountain in the Karakoram range of northern Pakistan.

They would pay dearly for their high ambition. They would also display depths of bravery and self-sacrifice that belied their years.

The team finds a leader

The project was the brainchild of 23-year-old Bernard Jillott, a grammar school boy from Huddersfield. With him were John Emery, a medic who delayed his finals to join the expedition, and Rae Culbert, a 25-year-old forestry graduate from New Zealand.

The students were young, but also wise enough to know that to get a climbing permit they would need an older, more experienced leader. They asked Tony Streather, an army officer who had been on the 1950 Norwegian expedition that made the first ascent of Tirich Mir, the highest peak in the Hindu Kush at 7,690 m (25,223 ft). Initially the expedition’s transport officer, he ended up being part of the four-man team that reached the summit. He had also climbed Kangchenjunga (the world’s third highest mountain) in 1955 and two years later he was in Oxford lecturing on his experiences when the lads from the university mountaineering club collared him.

Streather was recently married and had a very small child, but it wasn’t long since he had left Pakistan and he yearned to return and see his old friends.

‘They got me into a bar, plied me with several whiskies, then asked if I would lead their expedition to Haramosh…. I suppose they caught me at a vulnerable moment and I said, “Yes, fine”.’

The team starts planning

The four didn’t always see eye-to-eye but good climbers are, by necessity, highly driven individuals who dislike compromise. Groups of them are rarely harmonious.

They decamped to the Streathers’ army bungalow in Camberley and set up their expedition headquarters. Preparations went well and by July 1957 the team was in Pakistan.

On 3 August the climbers established their base camp below the towering northern face of the mountain. They then began working their way up a long flanking route to the east.

Although it was still late summer, the weather was turning against them. Heavy snowfall often kept them in their tents for days on end. For several frustrating weeks they made little progress and by early September it was obvious (to Streather at least) that they were not going to conquer Haramosh.

But then the weather broke. The sun shone and the team decided that they could at least climb to a new high point on the mountain. It would make all their efforts worthwhile.

A step too far

On the afternoon of 15 September 1957, the four men crested a ridge at about 6,400 m (21,000 ft) and what they saw nearly tore their hearts out. The view was beautiful: a dazzling bird’s eye vista of the high Karakoram, something that only a tiny percentage of men have ever seen. No one had ever climbed higher on Haramosh. But they could also see that there was a huge, yawning gulf between them and the ultimate summit. Streather knew instantly it was time to turn back.

But Jillott insisted on continuing a little bit further, just to see over the next crest. He was roped to Emery.

Streather waited with Culbert, watching the other pair plough ahead through the crisp snow of the ridge. The north face dropped sheer away for 2,400 m (7,875 ft) on one side of the ridge but the gentle convex slope they were on seemed harmless enough. Then, suddenly, the climbers crumpled and twisted, their arms and legs flailing like marionettes.

For a split second Streather thought that Jillott and Emery were larking about. Then horror seized his heart: the whole side of the mountain was moving, dragging the two men with it. There was an eerie silence as they slid out of sight and then reality came thundering back with a roar as the avalanche cascaded over an ice cliff taking their friends into the abyss.

A spectacular view across the hundreds of mountain peaks in the Karakoram Range, Pakistan.

An avalanche in the Karakoram Range.

The rescue attempt

Streather and Culbert moved quickly. If their friends were still alive they would need supplies. They threw down a rucksack containing warm jackets and food. Agonizingly, it overshot the pair below and tumbled into a crevasse. There were more supplies cached at Camp 4, so Streather and Culbert tramped back to the tents.

Already shattered from their efforts, they had no time to rest; at that height every second counted in the race for survival. They collected vacuum flasks, food, warm clothing and rope and started to reclimb the four hour route to the accident site.

Night fell and still they kept climbing. Luckily the moon was up and the sky was cloudless so when they reached the ridge they were able to continue down into the basin.

By the time they got close to their friends the sun was rising. To their joy they heard Emery and Jillott shouting at them. Then they realized the shouts were a warning: they were about to step over the vast ice cliff that Emery and Jillott had been swept over. The fallen men told them to traverse several hundred feet right, to a point where the cliff’s steep gradient eased.

Streather had to cut steps with his ice axe all the way across the giddy traverse. They were nearly across when one of Culbert’s crampons fell from his boot and disappeared into the void.

By the time they reached Emery and Jillott it was late afternoon. Both men were weakened after a night in the open and Emery had suffered the agony of a dislocated hip when he fell although mercifully this had clicked back into its socket. Streather knew they had to start climbing back out of the basin immediately, even though he and Culbert had now been continuously on the move for thirty hours.

They had climbed 60 m (200 ft) when Culbert’s cramponless foot slipped. He fell from the ice wall and pulled everyone back down into the basin. The men tried again. This time the exhausted Jillott fell asleep in his ropes and again they tumbled back to the bottom.

They tried for a third time but Culbert’s exposed leather sole gave him no grip. Despite valiant efforts he slipped from the sheer ice and swung in space like a pendulum. He was roped to Streather who tried but could not hold his weight. Ripping his partner from his holds, Culbert hurtled back down the same cliff over which Emery and Jillott had tumbled two days earlier.

With savage irony the rescuers had become the victims.

Another night in the arms of death

The sun had set and now it was Emery and Jillott’s turn to climb through the night, returning to the ridge to collect supplies. Meanwhile Streather and Culbert shivered in the darkness of the basin below.

At dawn on 17 August, Emery and Jillot had not returned. Culbert was very weak and frostbite had numbed all feeling in his feet. Streather knew that they had to try for a fourth time to get out of the basin; their colleagues might not have made it.

They would normally have been roped together, but Streather had lost his ice axe and couldn’t have held the younger man if he had fallen. There was no point in both men perishing when one slipped, so they climbed by themselves. Now the full consequences of Culbert’s lost crampon became apparent. He was unable to get the purchase he needed to haul himself up the ice wall. As he tried to follow Streather to the ridge he kept sliding back down. Streather could barely put one foot in front of the other himself; he had no choice but to keep climbing on his own. That climb was the most savage test of endurance he would ever face.

‘I thought I was dead and I didn’t know why I was climbing, but I just knew I had to keep moving.’

Streather eventually reached the ridge and found the rucksack they had left. He was frantic with thirst, but the water bottles were frozen solid. Now all he could do was crawl back to camp.

On the way he was surprised to see a set of tracks diverge from the correct route. Back at the camp he found Emery lying, utterly exhausted, with his cramponned feet sticking out of the tent.

‘Streather asked where Jillott was. Emery said: “He’s gone.” “What do you mean – gone?” “He’s dead. Over the edge.”’

The divergent footprints had been Jillott’s. He had strayed over a precipice and fallen several thousand feet down the south side.

Emery had nearly died himself: he had tumbled into a crevasse and only managed to crawl out that morning, reaching camp a few hours before Streather.

The two who were left

Streather and Emery then talked about going back up for Culbert. But in the cold light of day they knew that was out of the question.

Streather could only get to his feet by levering himself up with ski sticks. Emery was even weaker. Physically they wouldn’t be able to accomplish it and the sad truth was that Culbert was almost certainly already dead after another night in the open.

It was time to face facts: Jillott and Culbert were dead. And unless they got a grip, they would soon be too. Streather got the stove going. Emery, the medic, gave them both penicillin jabs to protect their frostbitten hands and feet from infection.

It took them four more days to get down to base camp. Then they had the heartbreaking job of sending telegrams home to the families of Jillott and Culbert.

Home

The two survivors returned to England where Emery had emergency surgery. All his fingers and toes were amputated. The surgeons managed to leave enough of a stump of his thumb and first finger for him to hold a pen. He got a first in his medical finals. Incredibly he returned to climbing, but died in a fall in the Alps in 1963.

Streather escaped without any amputations. But he still had to face the families of the young men who had died. Doubts, regret and sadness would haunt him ever after.

But beside the tragedy there is another truth. Tony Streather pushed himself to the edge for his friends and Rae Culbert, tragically, gave even more. It was only thanks to their bravery that any men came off that mountain alive. Haramosh was finally climbed on 4 August 1958.

Climbers roped together in search of a way out between the crevasses.