Denali’s “Football Field”/Mountain Trip

Death stalking two mountaineers on Denali

With the temperature near the summit of North America’s tallest mountain pushing toward 30 degrees below zero on this evening, hopes were fading for two unidentified climbers last heard from Tuesday high on Mount Denali.

The National Park Service reported that they were with a third unidentified climber near the 20,310-foot summit of at 1 a.m. that morning when they used a Garmin InReach satellite communication device to message that they were hypothermic, unable to descend and in need of help.

No rescue assets were available so high on the mountain, and all rangers could do was try to communicate with the men until they messaged in the early hours of Wednesday that they would attempt to descend toward a gently sloping area called the “Football Field” near 19,600-foot elevation.

Communications were lost shortly thereafter.

“To the best of our knowledge, the InReach device the party had with them stopped transmitting data at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday,” park spokesman Paul Ollig messaged today.

At least one of the men was, however, able to continue descending. A Denali guide found him near Zebra Rocks, a landmark near 18,600 feet later on Tuesday.

The guide helped the retreating climber down to the 17,200 camp where a guided party did what they could to begin treating his frostbite and hypothermia until a park service climbing team arrived from high camp at 14,200 below the base of what is called the Headwall.

Meanwhile, a search had begun for the other two men with the help of the Alaska Air National Guard. The ANG’s, four-engine HC-130 Combat King II was called into service with the clouds swirling around the mountain making it impossible for the park’s high-altitude helicopter to reach the site from its base in Talkeetna.

With the HC-130 circling the summit, ANG pararescuemen on board managed to spot the two other climbers somewhere between 19,000 and 20,000 feet shortly before noon on Tuesday. An experienced guide who was on the upper mountain then made a valiant attempt to rescue the two men.

Impossible rescue

He found the men at the Football Field, but they were weak and unable to descend with him, according to the park service. The guide stayed with them through the day, according to a park service statement, but “when the clouds moved back in late Tuesday night, the guide was forced to return to the 17,200-foot high camp for his own safety and for the safety of his team.”

The fate of the two climbers there has been in limbo ever since.

 The park service’s high-altitude helicopter was, however, able to reach the climber being provided first aid at 17,200 by around 10:15 p.m. Tuesday, the park service reported.  The helicopter icked up the ailing climber, made a quick stop at that 7,200-foot Kahiltna Basecamp to refuel the helicopter, and managed to make it back to Talkeetna, according to the park service account, “as clouds began to build up again on the upper mountain.”

In Talkeetna, the patient – which the park satement described as “critical” – was transferred to a LifeMed helicopter for a flight to hospital.

As of Wednesday morning, however, the park service was still trying to arrange a rescue of the two climbers who remained stranded high on the mountain in extreme cold.

“This is still an ongoing rescue operation, and additional information will be forthcoming as we learn more,” Ollig messaged at about 5 p.m.

Climbers have survived for hours at the football field. Forty-one-year-old Irish climber Jerry O’Sullivan hung on there for 18 hours after breaking his leg in a fall while descending from the summit in 2012. Climbing ranger Daryl Miller, now retired, at the time called it a miracle that O’Sullivan lived although he did pay a huge price.

The hours he spent huddled and shivering at 19,500-foot until Andy Hermansky, a helicopter pilot on contract with the National Park Service, could make another of his many daring, high-altitude rescues cost O’Sullivan all his fingers and thumbs and part of one foot. They had to be amputated after being seriously frostbitten.

The cold is a dangerous enemy, but O’Sullivan is not the only climber who miraculously beat it.

Miracles do happen

Texan Beck Weather, found seemingly lifeless and left for dead near 26,000 feet on Mount Everest in 1996, somehow rallied from a hypothermic coma to save himself. Canadian doctor Stuart Hutchinson and three Sherpas who’d gone searching for Weathers left him after finding the man “partially buried in snow,” Ed Douglas would write in The Guardian years later.’

“Hutchinson saw the stiff right arm frozen above (Weathers’s) head, the jacket opened to the waist, the ice-encrusted face and judged the man in front of him as ‘being as close to death and still breathing’ as any patient he had seen.”

Close by, Japanese climber Yasuko Namba, who’d spent the night with Weathers on the mountain, was already frozen and dead. Hutchinson concluded Weathers would be the same soon. He notified authorities that the Texan pathologist was not going to make it, and the word went out that Weathers had died on the mountain.

Only nobody told the comatose Weathers, who has never been able to explain what happened after he rescuers left.

“I was so far gone in terms of not being connected to where I was,” he told Douglas “There was a nice, warm, comfortable sense of being in my bed. It was really not unpleasant” until he realized where he was and banged a frozen arm against the ground only to hear the impact echo like he’d hit the ground with a block of wood.

“This was not bed,” he told Douglas in recounting that moment.  ” This was not a dream. This was real and I’m starting to think: I’m on the mountain but I don’t have a clue where. If I don’t get up, if I don’t stand, if I don’t start thinking about where I am and how to get out of there, then this is going to be over very quickly.”

He somehow managed to get up and stumble the 300 yards to Everest’s Camp Four and was later helped down to Camp Three from which a helicopter was able to hoist him off the mountain in what was then the second-highest helicopter rescue in history.

“As far as I know I’m the only person to have come out of a hypothermic coma in that setting. That awakening is something I don’t understand,” Weathers told Douglas. “I’ve looked at it from the most spiritual and most physical angles. There are things that changed physically during that day which may have been sufficient. And the core of your body can withstand drops in its temperature far beyond what I would have believed.”

He lost his nose, his right hand, and half of his right arm to frostbite. He was left with a fleshy mitt and a crude thumb on his left side. He underwent more than 10 reconstructive surgeries to restore a face that looked like it had been incinerated.

But he survived and underlined the reality there is always hope.