A winter barometer for hardiness
By Gary Fallesen
We paused on the Tuckerman Ravine Trail several hundred feet below the summit of ice-encased Mount Washington. I suggested that my climbing partners go ahead. “I’ll wait here,” I said. A day spent in wind-chill of minus-59 and worse had taken its toll on me mentally.
But my climbing partner Kevin Flynn was wiser than me. He had been up this mountain five times in winter. When he applied with a team to climb Denali they asked for his resume. Multiple winter ascents of Mount Washington qualified him for that trip.
Washington, first climbed in winter on Feb. 10, 1862, is a barometer for a climber’s hardiness. The mountain has produced some of the world’s worst weather: a record 231 mph wind on April 12, 1934; winds of 100 mph or more on one of every three days in January, when the average wind-chill is minus-49. Winters here are equal to the worst conditions reported in Antarctica. These conditions have contributed to the greatest loss of life on any peak in North America.
“I want to get you this summit,” Flynn said to me.
Not only did he know me well enough to see that I just need to be coaxed to the top, he realized the danger of leaving someone on the summit’s cone — far above timberline and fully exposed to nature’s wrath. We ascended together to the summit, where the sunshine and 65-mile visibility make the minus-69 wind-chill tolerable.
“We were blessed,” Gary Smith, our other climbing partner, said in the pack room after we had finished our roundtrip back to the Joe Dodge Lodge at Pinkham Notch.
The day had begun with the weather observatory on the summit recording winds gusting to 114 mph, but with the forecast calling for improving conditions. Constant winds of 75-95 mph were predicted to be “diminishing,” which meant down to 45-75 mph. In reality, they ended up decreasing to 35-40 mph. Tame by Mount Washington standards.
Our ascent was a far cry from the same day six years previous. On Jan. 15, 1994, the weather worsened — as predicted — catching an ill-prepared pair of young climbers in a death trap despite the efforts of 11 men from the Mountain Rescue Service.
“I remember the Tinkham-Haas rescue very well indeed,” said Nick Yardley, who was the head guide for the International Mountain Climbing School in North Conway, N.H., and the director of the Mountain Rescue Service. “It was one of the coldest days of my life — 85 mph winds, minus-35 (temperature), which puts the wind-chill well below minus-100. We all had frost-nip on the face.
“It was a sad rescue — one over-ambitious kid with an ego leading another to his death.”
Derek Tinkham and Jeremy Haas were experienced mountaineers on college break. They were determined to do a winter traverse of the Presidential Range — with Haas setting the pace. Never mind the high winds and extreme cold forecast for that weekend.
After spending one night bivouacked at the northern end of the range, the pair climbed Madison and Adams. Then trouble set in. Tinkham slowed, became unsteady on his feet, and finally collapsed at the top of Mount Jefferson — more than three miles from the summit of Washington. He was suffering from hypothermia; his body’s core temperature dropping with the mercury outdoors. It was now minus-27 with winds in the 80s and gusting to 96 mph. Haas tried to get Tinkham into a sleeping bag, then left him.
It took Haas four hours to reach the weather station on top of Washington. Once inside, his hands horribly frost-bitten because he’d lost his gloves while helping Tinkham, he told the observatory crew about the situation. A call was placed down to the valley. But because of the brutal conditions, a night rescue was deemed impossible. Yardley’s team set off at 5 a.m. the next day in weather still too harsh for climbing. Despite being dressed as if on a Himalayan expedition, one rescuer was halted below timberline by cold feet, another pulled up lame after postholing on Jefferson, and a third had his eyes frozen shut.
“When we found Derek, he had on barely enough clothes for a moderate spring day on the mountain,” Yardley said. “We’d been told he’d been left warmly wrapped up — that is the only reason we bothered going out in such conditions. In reality, he wasn’t even in his sleeping bag above his knees.”
Tinkham had already succumbed to the vicious weather. He was dead at the age of 20.
Yardley was involved in about 20 rescues on Mount Washington from 1987 to 1995 — a span during which 10 people died climbing. A native of Scotland, where the weather also demands respect, he has climbed in Alaska, Canada, Nepal and Peru. “I have never been so cold as I have been on Washington,” he will tell you.
“Cold, wind and lack of visibility … are the issues on Washington. With the jetstream touching down on Washington, the severe cold and wind is far more severe than people ever expect. Despite the nice words that people write about these situations in the papers afterwards, I’m not sure I can remember any rescue that was a pure accident. In most cases, ego, ignorance or poor judgement was the cause of the situation.”
He believes “judgement — or a lack of it — was the main issue” in Tinkham’s death.
While members of the Mountain Rescue Service need to remain detached from victims, it is hard not to carry something heavier than a corpse down from the peaks – especially if it is a lost soul.
“My overriding memory from the rescues is that life is so very frail and so easy to lose,” Yardley said. “It has really helped me live life to the fullest and appreciate the simplest things in life. Seeing the loss of so much life has made me cherish and seek out and enjoy mine so much more.” |