Here is the exciting conclusion of Ross and Sonja’s story about the crevasse accident. I’m grateful to them both for sharing this very personal account.
I quickly realized what happened and I was pinned down for the moment. Soon however the other rope appeared over the ridge and several minutes later was down at the site. Soon my rope was secured and I could get up and survey the situation. When I walked over to the hole where my wife fell through, she couldn’t be seen. She was very communicative, however, screaming “Ross, get me outa here!” She was in a state of hysteria but she calmed down in a few minutes. Fortunately she didn’t seem to have suffered too much damage. She had lost her ice axe, as it must have dug into the ice and tore the wrist strap off her hand, resulting in her wrist being quite sore. Other than that, she seemed to be in pretty good shape other than being 25 feet down in a crevasse. Thankfully, she had not hit her head.
We looked at our situation. Our rope had deeply cut into the lip of the crevasse so it wasn’t going anywhere. We had the other rope but no pulleys and we had a couple of prusiks. We hadn’t brought pullleys because we weren’t going to need them, right? After attempting a couple of things that didn’t work, we considered our options. Here it was, 1981, long before cellphones, and you were much more on your own. It was getting late, probably near 7:00 PM and even though the days are long in early August, it meant maybe 3 hours of light remained. Things were looking iffy.
Our group of five was two couples, Ken and Bev, Sonja and I and then Phil. Phil said he would go for help. Two or three years before, Phil had been dubbed “Flying Phil” by a friend of mine who said “he’s Flying Phil because I can’t keep up to the guy.” I believe the name was hatched on a climb of Mt. Baker in 1978. So here it was, Flying Phil’s chance to live up to his nickname. So off he went by himself, down the rest of the Swiss Glacier and over to basecamp, then down the Hermit trail to the highway and the ranger station. In the next photo, X marks the spot of Sonja’s fall into the crevasse. S marks the summit of Mt. Rogers.
The Swiss Glacier and Mt. Rogers
In the meantime, up at the crevasse, we kept talking to Sonja to keep her spirits up as best we could. However, we knew all our eggs were in Phil’s basket. Sonja, in the meantime, did her own things to kill the time. She managed to put her crampons on while hanging in mid-air, no small feat. We had taken our crampons off at the foot of the headwall due to the slushy snow. Another activity was watching bugs get it on in front of her 25 ft down in the crevasse – life gets it on everywhere! She also had some time to her own thoughts. We were in a rocky stretch of our marriage at the time, so she was hoping it would bring us closer together. Our next anniversary will be our 45th, so I guess it worked! Amazingly, she managed to keep her spirits up as the time wore on with her hanging by her sit-harness. We took turns talking to her constantly to make sure she was staying alert, which amazingly she was. She was hanging freely, not encumbered too much, so she could move her arms and legs while she hung there.
Meanwhile, up top, I was wondering how this all happened. I think we might have let our guard down, as we had done all the steep stuff and it was just a matter of going down a fairly gentle part of the glacier, then back to base camp. Sonja tells me that I didn’t warn her about the crevasse. However, I do distinctly remember stopping and probing around the crevasse before determining that it could be jumped across. I don’t know what she was doing at that point; however, there was lots of spectacular scenery to look at, so maybe she didn’t notice what I was doing. At the same time, maybe I had only stopped for 30 seconds. I wasn’t too worried at that point, as I’ve always said that I don’t worry about things I have no control over. Bev was pretty apprehensive, having her climbing buddy down there, while Ken – nobody has ever figured out what he thought about!
We were beginning to get worried about the time. It was getting on towards 9:00 PM and the sun was heading behind the peaks to the west. Sonja, down in her hole, was blissfully unaware of the impending darkness coming up much sooner than we’d like. However, a new development came into view. There was a rope of 3 climbers coming up the lower part of the glacier and maybe 800 feet below us. We assumed that they must have been alerted by Phil on his trip down. But the main thing was, we were no longer alone. We hadn’t seen anyone else on the mountain all day. It had been a lonely vigil up to then but we had a feeling of optimism for the first time since the accident. We watched as the climbers continued up the glacier rapidly. When they were maybe 200 feet below us, a newer development happened that would change our lives. We heard a helicopter!
As the helicopter looped its way up towards us, the rope of climbers arrived. They had indeed been informed by Phil and rapidly came up to help. What a great bunch of guys! I seem to recall that they were from Washington State. About two minutes later the helicopter set down and two guys emerged to figure things out. It was time to watch the pros at work. In seemingly little time they had a Z pulley set up and it was time to make it work. After raising her up a ways, the rope cut into the lip, so they lowered her back down and readjusted. Soon they had her on the surface and her rescuer said she sure tied herself onto the rope – it took him a couple of minutes to untie her, she had tied so many knots. After 3 hours in a sit harness, was her circulation cut off, meaning she couldn’t walk? Actually, she did alright, and was able to walk over to the helicopter and they helped her in okay. They took off, leaving Ken, Bev, myself and the Washington climbers on the glacier.
Meanwhile, in the helicopter, Sonja told them that they better go back up to get me or else she didn’t want to go down. His reply was he didn’t know, because it was getting pretty dark. However, they got down, took her into the Ranger Station and came back up to get me. They landed, and Bev and I quickly got in and off we went. It was pretty exciting as the ground dropped away very quickly and we looped around towards the valley bottom. But it was getting really dark- we had squeaked it in by the skin of our teeth! Meanwhile, up above, Ken returned to basecamp with the U.S. guys.
When we landed and got out, the first people we saw were Brian and Colin, back from Sir Donald. Also, there was the hero of the piece, Flying Phil. What a guy! I don’t know that I could have done it (too slow). My wife owed her life to him. We went in to see Sonja and she was doing remarkably well for someone that had undergone quite an ordeal. She had given her tests, making sure she could urinate and they said she could go. Brian, Colin and Phil said they would go up the trail in the dark by headlamp and stay at our basecamp. Then in the morning they would pack up and bring our gear down. Nice to have great friends! Sonja, Bev and I slept in my ’81 Toyota Celica, where Sonja and I at least had a change of clothes.
The rest of the guys showed up at the parking lot pretty early, around 7:00 or 7:30 AM the next morning with all our gear. It was really great of them. We were soon organized for the long haul back to the Coast where you could get caught in horrendous traffic if you left too late. We also had to go through Armstrong to drop Phil off. After all that, I had to be at work at 6:00 AM Tuesday.
However, after four days of work, I had arranged a week off to go climbing with Phil and the Desert Mountaineer at the Columbia Icefields, where we made an unsuccessful attempt on Mt. Columbia (because of avalanche hazard). We had to settle for Snowdome. After that, I headed back to the Coast where I didn’t do another summit until October 17th with Sonja, Ken and Bev. I think the combination of an intense period of climbing, 40 hours a week and more on the job, and a lot of driving, plus the emotional strain of the accident, left me exhausted.
The long-term effect on Sonja finally led her to avoid glaciers, although she did Mt. Ruth in 1982 over glacier. Another interesting day trip we did on Aug 29, 1982 was where we left Surrey at 5:30 AM and drove down to Mt. Rainier National Park where we reached the summit of Pinnacle Peak at 12:45 in pouring rain, and Plummer Peak on the way back.
Sonja on Pinnacle Peak
We then went back to Seattle for a Grateful Dead concert that night (a marathon in itself) and returned home to Surrey by 2:00 AM, very tired but fulfilled. On Sonja’s 30th Birthday, we went up Mt. Tomyhoi with Mark, Cheryl (who I climbed many subsequent peaks with) and Phil.
L to R – Mark, Sonja, Cheryl, Phil on Mt. Tomyhoi.
However, after that her interest faded and she only did a couple in 1985 and none since. My dreams of being another Martin and Esther Kafer were dissolved. We had done some good things in that period, though, including Mt. Spickard in northern Washington. The fall in that crevasse changed everything.
The Desert Mountaineer managed to drag this story out of me despite 33 years of trying to keep it in the farthest recesses of my mind. It was something I never really wanted to think about again. However, I really enjoy his blog and am glad to contribute.
Readers, I’d like to direct your attention to a piece that goes along perfectly with this story. Brian Rundle has an excellent website called Pan Granitic Highway, and he has just published an account of his involvement in all of this – he was one of those who went to retrieve the gear up on the mountain. So please, without delay, check it out.