Rescued Malaysian climber caught being sling loaded to Denali base camp/Wayne Pence photo

Rescue efforts save one, but cold kills another

Update: This story has been updated to include the names of the rescued climbers as reported on the Facebook page of Alpine Club Malaysia and considerable new information from new organizations in Malaysia. The park service has refused to offically identify the rescued men but has not said why.

Somewhere on Alaska’s Mount Denali, there is a climbing guide who deserves to be celebrated as a hero for helping to provide the assistance that allowed one of two stranded Malaysian climbers to survive for more than 48 hours in temperatures down to 30 degrees below zero near 20,000 feet on North America’s tallest peak.

Unfortunately, the Malaysian man’s climbing partner died during the ordeal, according to a statement from the National Park Service. The Facebook of the Alpine Club Malaysia identified the dead man as  Zulkifli Yusuf, who “was confirmed dead at 6 a.m. on Wednesday while taking shelter in a ‘snow cave’ in an area known as the “Football Field” at an altitude of 19,700 feet above sea level. The cause of death is suspected of high altitude cerebral edema and hypothermia and will be confirmed by post-mortem.”

Park Service spokesman Paul Ollig said that he did not know the name of the guide who on Tuesday climbed from the 17,200-foot high camp on the mountain to 19,600 feet to provide “food and equipment” to Yusuf and a second climber Club Malaysia identified as  Zainudin Lot.

Yusuf and Lot had been with a third companion near the summit early Tuesday morning when the trio used a Garmin InReach satellite communication device to call for a rescue. Weather and altitude prevented that, and two of the then-unidentified climbers decided to try to bivouac at a relatively flat area called the “Football Field” high on the mountain.

The third, who has also never been identified by the park service, managed to descend to Zebra Rocks, a landmark at 18,600 feet, where a climbing guide found him and helped him back to high camp. Other guides and climbers camped at 17,200 feet tended to him until mountaineering rangers reached the scene, and at 10 p.m. Tuesday, a pilot flies a high-altitude rescue helicopter for the park service, found a break in the clouds swirling around the mountain that allowed him to pluck the injured man off the mountain, according to the park service.

Club Malaysia identified the third climber as “Illaham Ishak (who) was rescued a few days ago and is currently being treated in a hospital in Anchorage Alaska and has frostbite on his hands and feet.” The park service has refused to identify either of the rescued climbers, but has not said why.

Long-awaited climb

“Muhammad Illaham Ishak, 47,” was the leader of the expedition, according to the website of the Malaysian newspaper REFLEKS, and was on a “mission to climb the 7 (highest) Peaks of the 7 Continents of the World… under the management of the Alpine Tour Club, KJA. Muhammad Illaham’s climb to Denali mountain this time will be accompanied by two other climbers, Ir. Zulkifly Yusof, 37 and Zainudin Lot, 47 who are also KJ advisors.”

The newspaper said Illaham, the president of KJA,  had previously reached five of the summits, including that of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak.  The “Denali mountain expedition,” it added, was to be “recognized by the Malaysia Book of Records as a ‘Self Guided’ climb, which means the climb is done without any help from Malim Gunung or other professional climbers from outside.”

llaham’s plan for this climb, according to the Malaysian Post, had been “delayed for more than four years due to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as lack of funds.”

The resumption of his quest to reach the so-called “Seven Summits” by adding Denali to his list appears to have been heavily covered in Malaysia. The New Strait Times, Malaysia’s oldest newspaper, today reported that Illaham telephoned Datuk Muhammad Bakhtiar Wan Chik, a member of parliament, for an Anchorage hospital to report that the trio had reached Denali’s summit before discovering “Zulkifli suddenly could not move, probably due to frostbite.”

Bakhtiar Wan Chik told the newspaper that Illaham said that he then “went down to get help even though he had frostbite on his hands and legs. He found forest rangers and told them what had happened, but the rangers could not climb up due to the bad weather. He told me the rangers arranged for him to be sent to a hospital in Anchorage for treatment, which is quite a distance from Mount Denali.”

The version of the story a KJA spokesman provided “The Star,” another Malaysian publication, was that “Muhammad Illaham descended alone to Camp Five to get help from the rescue team to extract the two other climbers, including one with a leg injury.”

The reports differ from the park service account that has Illaham encountering a guide at Zebra Rocks who helped a frostbitten and in trouble Illaham back to high camp where he was tended to by guides and other climbers until park service rangers reached the scene.

By all accounts, Illaham was lucky to survive Denali after being aided to that camp.

After snatching the injured climber from high camp, the helicopter, according to the park service, just made it back to his base of operations in Talkeetna before more weather moved in high on the mountain. There the pilot transferred the injured climber to a LifeMed helicopter for a flight to hospital while all those high on Denali prepared for an incoming storm.

On Thursday, the park service reported “rangers are on standby to reach two distressed climbers located at 19,600 feet on Denali. The men, ages 36 and 47, have been bivying in a crude snow cave since late Tuesday night, following an extended summit push that left their team exhausted and hypothermic.”

Given the amount of time there, many experienced climbers expected that neither would survive, but Lot hung on until 6 a.m. today when the helicopter pilot was again able to display his heroics.

“Wind conditions allowed for the pilot to return to the Football Field at 19,600 feet with a short-haul rescue basket at the end of a rope line,” the park reported. “The surviving mountaineer climbed into the basket and was flown down to the 7,200-foot Kahiltna basecamp, then evacuated to the Talkeetna state airport for transfer to a LifeMed air ambulance.”

The body of the dead climber remains on the mountain. The park statement said the man’s name would be released pending notification of next of kin.

The Malaysians last week on Motorcycle Hill with busy Denali Camp 2 below and to the right/Wayne Pence photo

Fog of uncertainties

Why the park has refused to identify the men is unclear. Ollig did not respond when asked for an explanation today.

The park first identified the trio as Malaysians on Thursday when stories were already trickling back from the mountain that a slow-moving, unacclimated trio of Malaysians were in trouble, and their predicament was starting to appear in the Malaysian press.

On May 23, other climbers had reported the group near 11,400 feet on the mountain, “moving slow,” but saying they planned to summit on Sunday.

Malaysian news reporting would indicate they arrived on the mountain on or about May 9. Fourteen days to reach the slope above Camp Two would indicate very slow progress up the mountain, but the Alpine Club Malaysia reported that by Sunday (May 26) they had “reached Higher Camp 5 @ 17K, in good condition & healthy. About to start the hike to the top of Denali in 3-4 hours.”

“The trip from high camp to the summit and back takes most parties 13-14 hours and is usually the hardest day of the expedition,” according to the American Alpine Institute. 

The Malaysians appear to have started their summit bid either late Sunday night or early Monday morning. Twenty to 24 hours later, they texted Denali rangers with the report they were near the summit, “hypothermic and unable to descend.” There was little rangers could do at that point but offer advice until they could figure out how to assist.

After Illaham struggled into high camp with news of his companions in serious trouble above, the unidentified guide offered to go try to help the two men while others on the mountain questioned how the Malaysians could have marched themselves into such a predicament. One veteran Denali climber today offered the opinion that the problem was “a.) they were not fit; b.) not acclimatized for a summit bid.”

As to acclimatization, the park service recommends mountaineers ‘climb high and sleep low’, and don’t ascend more than 1,000 feet (300 m) per day above 10,000-feet (3,000 m) elevation” while ferrying supplies up the mountain to prepare for a summit bid.

Fit climbers experienced at altitude can reasonably bend that schedule and go for the summit in a week from 11,400 feet; the Malaysians, if reports are correct, were planning to do it in half the time.

It has until this moment, however, been impossible to track down the climbers and try to verify this information because of the park service’s refusal to identify them for reasons that remain unknown.

In an email on Wednesday, Ollig said, “it is NPS policy to release identifying information about a living individual involved in an incident or of a patient transferred to a critical care facility.” He did not and has not replied to a request for a copy of that policy made later the same day.

Other parks apparently do not abide by the policy, or if they do, the policy is very new.

Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado in October went into considerable detail about an incident involving Chad “Pallanh, 49, of Fort Collins,” who went missing in the park.

And just last May, Denali National Park and Preserve identified “Tatsuto Hatanaka, a 24-year-old male from Setagaya-ku, Japan,” who was rescued after falling from the much-climbed West Buttress to the Peters Glacier. 

This has long been Denali policy, the argument for it being that American taxpayers who foot the bill for much of the cost of Denali rescue operations should know who the money is being spent on.

Ollig’s reference to a “patient transferred to a critical care facility” would suggest the possibility that the Alaska Region of the park service might have recently decided its reporting of accidents on public land falls under the guidelines of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, commonly called HIPAA, which governs “health plans, health care clearinghouses, and to any health care provider who transmits health information in electronic form in connection with transactions for which the Secretary of HHS has adopted standards under HIPAA (the “covered entities”).”

The NPS, however, is not a covered entity. More than that, the names, ages and addresses of people rescued in national parks are not “health information,” which is the only thing HIPAA is intended to keep secret. An argument might be made that HIPPA prohibits the park service from talking about the extent of injuries to a rescued climber, but it does not prohibit the park service from identifying climbers for whom its staff, and sometimes volunteers recruited by the park, risk their own lives to rescue.

And there appear to be no laws or regulations stipulating that the “privacy” of Americans rescued in national parks should be protected, let alone the privacy of foreigners engaging in potentially dangerous adventures in those parks.

But what Denali park officials were or are thinking on the matter is purely speculative at this point because the park isn’t talking.

The good news is that Ollig reported that after the last rescue Lot “was in surprisingly good condition according to the staff in Talkeetna. Walking on his own. He was taken by LifeMed to an Anchorage hospital.”

As for the other survivor,  Illaham, word on the mountain was that he was badly frostbitten and is now in danger of losing his hand and feet to his cold injuries.

Correction: This is an edited version of the original story which misidentified the helicopter pilot now flying the park service’s high-altitude rescue helicopter.