Hope fades for missing climbers
MOUNT FORAKER: Sue Nott and Karen McNeill are believed to have had no fuel or water for six days.
By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News
Published: June 10, 2006
Last Modified: June 10, 2006 at 02:20 AM
Two of North America's most celebrated female climbers are now feared to have perished on the slopes of Mount Foraker, leaving Denali National Park with a new and troubling mystery:
What happened to 36-year-old Sue Nott of Vail, Colo., and her climbing partner, 37-year-old Karen McNeill of Canmore, Alberta?
Not since the disappearance of Japanese national hero Naomi Uemura on nearby Mount McKinley in 1984 has such an intensive search been launched from the park's Kahiltna Glacier base camp with so few results. Rangers found a backpack, sleeping bag and other gear that had apparently fallen as the women climbed a route known as the Infinite Spur.
Tracks believed to be those of the women come within a thousand feet of the 17,400-foot summit.
But nine days of searching have found no other hint of the duo who two years ago became the first women to conquer the challenging Cassin Ridge on nearby McKinley.
Faint hopes remain that Nott and McNeill, a native of New Zealand, could be alive. Miracles have happened in the mountains before. Climbers everywhere are familiar with the story of comatose and hypothermic Beck Weathers, left for dead high on Mount Everest in the Himalayas only to rouse himself and walk back to life.
As clouds swirled in the winds hammering Foraker's summit Friday, National Park Service spokeswoman Kris Fister said search-and-rescue teams would remain on standby through the weekend. They want to get one last, good look at the summit before officially calling off the search, she said.
Unfortunately, rescuers now know it will take some sort of miracle for Nott and McNeill to have survived.
Ranger Daryl Miller noted the two have gone at least a week without fuel for their stove. Without a functioning stove, there is no way to melt snow for water in the high mountains of Alaska, and without water, humans cannot survive long. The general rule is three days.
Nott and McNeill appear to have been without water for at least twice that long.
Still, the general consensus of rangers and other climbers is that if anyone has a chance of enduring the impossible, it would be these two. Not only are they two of the best climbers in the world, said Colby Coombs of the Alaska Mountaineering School in Talkeetna, they are two of the toughest.
Coombs, however, also knows from personal experience that Foraker can claim the best.
He lost climbing partners Tom Walter and Ritt Kellog in an avalanche near the summit of the mountain in 1992. Only by luck did Coombs survive.
His climbing team had completed a tough, technical ascent of the Southeast Ridge and was trying to retreat up and over the mountain in a whiteout when a slab of snow over blue ice let go and swept them away. Something similar might have happened to Nott and McNeill, but that is only one of many possibilities.
They could have been blown off the mountain by high winds. That is what is believed to have happened to Uemura, whose body has never been found.
They might have fallen into a crevasse and then been buried by drifting snow.
They could have been forced to bivouac in a snow cave high on the mountain only to find themselves trapped by bad weather until their fuel ran out, they're bodies began to fail them and hypothermia claimed them.
They might even have battled over the summit through fierce storms and died in a fall trying to descend one of two less-steep, but still dangerous, ridges.
Whatever went wrong, searchers and other climbers agree it began with the loss of Nott's backpack and the sleeping bag attached to it. For one thing, the radio with which they might have been able to call for help was apparently in the pack when it fell from somewhere high on Infinite Spur. So were the extra clothes Nott appeared to have crammed into a stuff sack to use as a pillow while camped and a full water bottle.
The full water bottle leads many to believe the pack fell at the start of the day, as the women broke camp and prepared to climb.
Once the pack disappeared, the women had a handicap. The loss would not have put them in immediate danger, but it could have triggered a cascade of events that would eventually prove tragic as has happened many times before in the unforgiving Alaska Range.
All indications are the women started up the mountain after losing the pack somewhere below 14,000 feet on the Infinite Spur. Tracks have been spotted at 14,800, 15,800 and 16,400 feet, according to the Park Service.
Though it might seem illogical to nonclimbers that the women would head up when already in some trouble, the move is understood by other climbers. Climbing up is usually easier than climbing down, especially as the difficulty of the route increases.
Descending Infinite Spur would have required a number of rappels. Those would have made for slow going, and at every one the women would have been required to abandon the gear used to anchor that leg of the descent.
They might have worried about having enough gear to make the bottom, or simply decided it was faster and easier to keep going up and over the top.
"You want to go the fastest, easiest way," Coombs said, "(and) after a hard, technical route, you prefer to do a walk off if you can, just top out and go down."
From near the summit, the women would have had access to Foraker's Southeast or Sultana ridges, both of which are far easier to descend than Infinite Spur. But if they neared the summit in hopes of gaining access to those ridges on the days the Park Service believes they may have, badly deteriorating weather greeted them.
"They were trying to move in weather that was gusting 60 (mph) at 14,000 feet (on McKinley)," Coombs said. Sixty mph gusts can pick up even large men and body slam them. Nott and McNeill are smaller, and on Foraker, the winds were probably much, much worse.
"It's a bad-weather magnet," Coombs said. "There isn't a prevailing wind. It's coming from all over the place, including straight down.
"It gets quite a bit of weather that can be bigger than you are. (Wind) is the single most dangerous weather event out there. It can blow your tent away. It can blow you away."
Coombs spent some time Friday morning discussing this with John Varco, Nott's partner and an internationally accomplished mountaineer. They faced the growing sense of dread that the search for her and McNeill might end with no one knowing what happened.
"It's just sad," Coombs said. "It's tragic, and it's rippling through the climbing community.
"Sue's parents left (Talkeetna) today. Karen's are coming. It's the saddest thing. That's the hardest part about these things, talking to the parents. They've had the ultimate loss."
