To Ride the Mountain Winds by Leslie Symons

Author:Leslie Symons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd

A Cairngorm victory

The Cairngorms in the Scottish Highlands are only a third as high as the Grandes Jorasses but formidable precipices border great elevated, almost Arctic, plateaus, and offer plenty of scope in winter for advanced ice climbing. The Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team provides the ground-based search and rescue services for the northern parts, supplemented when necessary by other teams including the RAF Mountain Rescue Teams.

On a cold New Year’s Eve (Hogmanay, the most celebrated day of the year to the Scots) a mobile phone call from a narrow ledge high on a Cairngorm climb led to the MRT and a Sea King from Lossiemouth heading out into the dusk. The leader of the climb had dislodged a boulder on a part-frozen ice route and this had smashed into his father who was acting as his second.

At 15.45 the Sea King flew into the corrie but the turbulent and gusty conditions made it impossible for it to hover close enough to the cliff for the rescue to be effected, so the pilot flew down the valley and picked up the Cairngorm rescue team members:

‘… the pilot performed a minor miracle of the flying arts by riding the wind on the lip of the corrie to lower both Team and equipment onto the plateau above the casualties.’

By 16.00 the leader on the ground had started the rescue operations. The easiest way to lift or lower a stretcher is vertically but in the case of spinal injury, which was suspected in this case, every effort must be made to keep the casualty horizontal. Double the usual number of ropes are needed and rope management is complicated. Two strong climbers abseiled down and made the casualty secure on the narrow ledge. When all was ready another rescuer went down with the stretcher, keeping it away from the wall to avoid dislodging more rocks. For fifteen minutes the three rescuers cut away with their ice axes to make the ledge a little wider. Then the stretcher was lowered, with one rescuer between it and the cliff to keep it away from the rock. This was the crux of the operation and extremely nerve-wracking for all. To help the operation flares were lit by members of an RAF MRT, who had also rushed to the spot to provide extra manpower, then the son was lowered while the father was carried down to safe ground. When the helicopter pilot again tried to fly into the corrie to lift out the casualty the weather made it impossible. He had to be carried on a stretcher all the way to the road where an ambulance was waiting. It was 23.45 before the teams stood down and too late to join families for greeting the New Year so they made the best of it at the team’s Inverdruie base. (Allen with Davidson, 2009, 248–53)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.