Weather limits search efforts
Chances Slim Missing Mt. Hood Climbers Are Alive
By Joseph Friedrichs, 12-16-09
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Although no official report has been issued, it is unlikely that the two climbers missing since Friday on Oregon’s Mt. Hood are alive, according to Portland Mountain Rescue.
An authority on mountain survival spoke with family members of the missing climbers Tuesday and told them that the possibility of Katie Nolan, 29, of Portland, Ore., and Anthony Vietti, 24, of Longview, Wash., surviving conditions on the 11,249-foot mountain for this many days is exceedingly slim.
Rescue workers are still on standby, but whiteout conditions and the risk of avalanche made any search effort impossible Tuesday and unlikely in the coming days.
Portland Mountain Rescue team leader Steve Rollins said it would take four or five days of good weather to ease avalanche danger, and such weather on Mt. Hood at this time of year is unlikely.
“If there is anything we could do, we would do it,” Rollins said at a news conference. “We will go to extreme lengths to rescue people, but we have to come home at the end of the day.”
Images from the cell phone of Luke Gullberg, the climber whose body was found Friday, revealed that all three climbers reached Reid Glacier, and suggest that there was an accident involving Nolan. Investigators believe Gullberg then tried to rappel to get help. His body was found at the 9,000 foot level, at the base of the 1,500-foot headwall of the Reid Glacier.
Investigators suspect Nolan was injured because mountaineers found just one of her gloves Saturday with the body of Gullberg at the base of the Reid headwall. The slope rises at a 50-degree angle from the glacier to within a few hundred feet of relatively easier climbing to the top above 11,000 feet. They found neither of Gullberg’s gloves, Thompson said, leading them to think that Nolan had lost one of hers in the accident, that Gullberg had left her his, along with his pack, and that he had headed downhill, taking Nolan’s single glove for whatever warmth it would provide. After a fall in which he suffered bruises and scrapes, Gullberg died of exposure. Nearby were tracks and some of his equipment, including a camera whose pictures gave rescue workers information about the route and equipment the climbers too.
The Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center still has the avalanche danger listed as high, with the following analysis and forecast for Mt. Hood:
“The current snowpack conditions have all the makings for sensitive avalanche releases. The cold dry weather experienced over the past week caused significant near surface faceting and weakening of and near the prevalent crust layers in the upper snowpack.
“Added to the current avalanche recipe was shallow amounts of cold low density snow received intermittently prior to the current snowfall, as well as some existing surface hoar layers. Therefore we now have generally 4 to 8 inches of weak snow poorly bonded to a crust that has now been loaded with 1 to 2 feet of increasingly dense snow affected by warming that fell overnight Monday and early Tuesday....
“Briefly decreasing rain or snow is expected early Wednesday along with some cooling. This should allow for a slow decrease in danger. However renewed rain or snow Wednesday afternoon and night should maintain mostly unstable snow at all but the lower elevations.”
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Comments
I just finished reading a Spike Walker book about Coast Guard helicopter rescues, "Coming back Alive" (St. Martin's Press--2001), and the absolute value of an electronic locater is driven home in this book with a big hammer. It is the ONLY reason lost mariners can be located at night, in hundred mile an hour blows, snowing at sea level, waves 70 feet with rogue waves of over 100 feet, and in this maelstrom, no constancy of wave direction or spacing. Unreal conditions. And helicopters with pilots and crew with night vision hear the signal and can see the strobe on the EPIRB (that is the acronym for the required marine locator beacon) trailing the tied together crew in survival suits in 40 degree water riding a roller coaster of breaking waves and troughs so far below the crests. Up and down, and rescue baskets trail back in the wind or get caught in waves, and it was just mind boggling the conditions of some of the rescues. And sometimes the rescuers don't come back. For the Coast Guard, the mind set is that you have to go on SAR missions, but you don't have to come back from them. Risk. And this book entails vivid descriptions of unbelievable skill and risk taking, and the meshing of the extremes of human performance with the extremes of mechanical performance. I know that kind of effort and skill has been expended on people who were too selfish to rent the $5 locator beacon, and there have been risks taken beyond comprehension by the "Crag Rats" of Mt. Hood.
The ending is sad. But it is not like this is a new deal. That mountain claims human life with a cold regularity. I am sad for the families, and for the futures lost. And all over the "purity" of an experience without the safety net of a locator beacon.
So the Mt. Hood question is about the freedom to NOT have a beacon, and that comes with the freedom to die alone with your group decision to NOT have a beacon.
My question concerns the very humanity of attempted location of missing climbers in white out conditions, in high avalanche danger conditions, and that selfless people risk their lives to find the people who are so special they don't need the beacon, the pinger. Public money, effort, risk, and where is the USFS who owns the land the mountain represents? No rules. No comment. It is up to the local sheriff's departments of Clackamas and Hood River counties to mount rescue attempts. You wonder what that "pork" in PILT payments goes for? Some of it is being spent looking for unfortunate fools as I write. It is either that, or local taxpayers paying to look for fools from other jurisdictions who have "rights" to be there, and the "right" to not have a rescue beacon. Hopefully, the "pork" from PILT payments will keep mountain rescues and SAR efforts going for the people from all over the US who come to climb Mt. Hood.
I'm kind of getting weary of hearing stories like this. Is it a surprise that this mountain will win in bad weather. It seems year after year it's the same headline.
Frankly, what's really getting old about this is the narcissism of the climbing community especially as it pertains to "selfless rescuers" risking their own lives who have families that they love and that love them too.
It's getting to be a waste of dollars just that echoes the same waste of dollars that we see go up in smoke in the California fires each year.
In no way am I demeaning the people for their lives. I do feel they made terrible mountaineering choices, and not having a locator beacon was a foolish decision. And in so doing, put others at risk. Good people with good intentions can make bad decisions for themselves and others without any malice in their hearts.
In 2002 a $17 million Blackhawk helicopter crashed during rescue operations on Mount Hood and two years before that another one went down on Mount Shasta.
Climbers should be required to buy rescue insurance that covers the full cost of SAR operations, and if they go up without a rescue beacon the bodies should be left until they melt out.
The same goes for those who think highmarking in snowmobiles is "fun."
your snide, sarcastic remarks are both insulting and innapropriate. Way to disrespect both the deceased and their mourning families.
The reason we shouldn't require beacons is that will lead less- and less-qualified climbers to try because they "can always get rescued if we get in over our abilities." Of course, this can happen with beacons being optional, as we just saw in the Grand Canyon. But if required, I think this will put more rescuers at more risk themselves.
And in our litigious society, if beacons are required so you can be rescued, and you're NOT rescued, you know your heirs will sue....
Yet how do we say to a rescuer, "it's too dangerous -- don't go rescue that person"? Sometimes the call is obvious (winter storms on Mt. Hood) -- but chances are that a person needs rescuing BECAUSE conditions are dangerous.
Requiring insurance is appealing -- but there's have to be enough use so that the per capita cost could be reduced to a small amount. That might be OK for climbing Mt. Hood, but what about Activity X? Why should I pay to do my "safe" activity so you don't have to pay as much to do X?
But if the cost's too high, can I opt out by agreeing not to be rescued? And if I do that, will you really NOT rescue me? (Really? I call for help and you say, "No, sorry, you don't have rescue insurance"?!!)
Which brings us right back to where we are today....
So the issue of locator beacons is really a USFS deal on Mt. Hood, and they have stayed out of the fray because mountain climbers are mostly paying enviros who matter more to the USFS than the rest of us. Counties that have the mountains are getting PILT (payment in lieu of taxes) money from the Feds because there is no way for counties to collect tolls on public land use, and no way to collect property taxes from the Feds. But it is the country sheriff who has law enforcement and safety responsibility for the climbers on Federal land inside the county boundary. And somebody has to pay for it. That is the county government.
So, all those who don't like the Feds paying "PILT" money to counties should also be advised that local government money is tight, and there is a coming time when looking for someone's frozen ass in a blizzard is not going to happen just due to no money. Oregon has way, way too little money for education, and 60% of its land publicly held, producing zero for supporting state and local government. If the PILT money goes away, and it is predicted to do so in the next two years, best you don't move here until you have educated your kids, own and can shoot a firearm, have sufficient resources to live, and are too old to need to climb mountains. Unemployed techies and artsy-fartsy twenty and thirty somethings are here in droves, and work is not. They are unemployed and enjoying each other's company. They vote for more government and can't close the deal because they don't make money and don't pay income taxes in this state with no sales tax. Oregon is a state where the entitled keep making noises about entitlements but provide no plan to fund them except "tax the rich more." That is the UN Plan for Climate. Tax the United States more to send the money to third world hell holes. We don't make stuff anymore, and have outsourced a lot of the service industry. The US is broke, and so are the agencies that have to rescue the fools, the unfortunate, and the mad men and women who must push the envelope to feel "alive." If mandatory beacons will save money, that is reason enough to require them. And it should be that or go unfound. If you can't pop for the five bucks to rent one, what the hell are you doing there in the first place?