Too high, too late...two dead
Hiroki had already been to
the top four times.
Labour Weekend 2013. Ten Auckland Alpine Club members set out to climb Mt Taranaki’s difficult East Ridge. A major storm was brewing but they thought they could beat it. Six got down safely. Two veered off course and spent an awful night out in the blizzard. Two more were marooned high on the mountain and clung to life for two nights, texting pleas for help. Nikki Macdonald investigates what went wrong, and recounts the epic efforts of volunteer searchers who tried, tried and tried again to reach the trapped pair.
"Are you kidding, the summit is just there," came a female voice from across the ice buttress.
Rowan had just yelled to the splinter group of four that his team was bailing back down the mountain. Michael and Brendan had returned from soloing to the summit, where they'd had their heads almost ripped off by the screaming gale. Susann was hypothermic and out of it. It was time to go.
Well past time, in fact. Rowan Smith and fellow snowcraft instructor Hiroki Ogawa had exchanged emails earlier in the week, worried about the marginal forecast. Rowan - the trip organiser for the Auckland Alpine Club's annual Labour Weekend Mt Taranaki climb - considered cancelling. "I agree the weather looks s...," he emailed his mate. Hiroki reckoned Saturday might be OK, "as long as we get off the top by mid day", before the evening's forecast gale westerlies and snow.
But that Saturday, as they climbed, no-one had checked their watch for hours. Rowan reckoned it was about 12.30pm. It was 4.20pm.
A jutting ice face separated the two groups trying to climb the mountain’s intimidating East Ridge - the equivalent of trying to get from one side of a classroom to the other, with all the desks piled in the middle. It was too dangerous for Rowan to sidle across to pass on Brendan and Michael's summit weather warning. He assumed the remaining four would also realise the time and risks, and turn around.
On the other side of the ice face, Hiroki and partner Nicole Sutton were pitching with Kirsten Spencer and John Salisbury. Nicole was a keen rock climber, but mountaineering rookie, having completed the club's snowcraft course just three months earlier, like five out of the 10 climbing the East Ridge that day. Hiroki had reached the mountain's crown four times before and John was a six-time summit veteran. Kirsten was an experienced rock climber, but a relative newcomer to ice.
The original plan was to rope-climb the technical East Ridge to the summit, climb into the crater and down the easier, more forgiving North Ridge - the route summer trampers take to conquer New Zealand's most-climbed mountain.
The summit was still 120m away - that’s four rope pitches with their short 35m climbing ropes. But no-one in the second group wanted to descend the breathtakingly steep face they'd just spent five hours picking their way up. They figured climbing to the crater and over to North Ridge was their safest bet.
So, at 4.30pm, with forecast snow and -14 degree wind chill, the four continued up.
The party of 16 climbers had arrived at Tahurangi Lodge the previous evening, various shades of late. They'd mostly left Auckland after work, driving south via supermarkets to buy shared food, through the goblin forest at the base of the volcano, parking up at North Egmont visitor centre, at 900m.
With a day pack and fresh legs, it's a 60-90 minute slog up to the Alpine Club's lodge, which was to be their climbing base. With gear-laden climbing packs, it took some more than two hours. They don't call it The Puffer for nothing.
John’s crew was first to arrive, at 11.15pm, having left Auckland about midday. Rowan came shortly after, at about midnight. Nicole and Hiroki arrived at 1am and Kirsten was last in at 2am.
Among the early-comers, there was some discussion of routes, but mostly the climbers hung their ice axes and drifted to sleep about 2am.
Rowan had told those wanting to climb the East Ridge they should be up around 5.30am. But when he emerged from three hours sleep, only he and Hiroki were up.
There was no formal briefing about who should take which route. The 16 organically sorted themselves into two groups. The less confident chose the easier North Ridge, which is graded 1- in the seven-grade Mt Cook system, and can be free-climbed without ropes. That included Maree Limpus. She'd climbed Mt Cook, but hadn't been on crampons for about 15 years. Rowan told her the grade 2+ East Ridge wasn't the best route to ease back into things.
Kirsten was 44 and had been rock climbing for 20 years, since getting an instructor's certificate as a phys ed teacher in England, where she’s from. She'd joined the Alpine Club 18 months earlier, and been on six other club trips. A tough nut, she likes a good challenge and decided to take the East Ridge. She packed four sandwiches, 5 snickers bars, 1 ½ litres of water, two bananas and some almonds for the climb, and stuffed two snickers bars in her pockets for snacks. She expected it to be steep, and tiring, and that everyone who went up would come back down.
A lifelong skier and snowboarder, 29-year-old Nicole was no stranger to snow, or blizzards. But she was a mountaineering novice, so had planned to take the North Ridge. Two minutes before leaving, she told her climbing buddy Sarah Hamilton she'd changed her mind: “I’m going up the East Ridge,” she said. “Hiroki has convinced me.”
Nicole had studied environmental science and commerce and worked at environmental planning consultancy Boffa Miskell. Hiroki was a geoscientist and post-doctoral fellow at Auckland University. The couple had met two years earlier and planned to get engaged.
It was a bluebird day when the 10 East Ridgers left Tahurangi Lodge, at about 7:30am, expecting the circuit to take about 6 hours.
Rowan did not re-check the forecast before leaving as he thought it was too early for Metservice’s daily 8:30am update. In fact, the mountain forecast is issued at 7:30am.
There'd been no talk of turn-around times and only hurried discussion about group safety gear, such as snow stakes and ropes. The rule of thumb for rope-pitching is one stake per person. They only had five between the 10 of them.
The group split early for the traverse around the mountain to the east side, but regrouped at East Ridge for morning tea. It was toasty warm and the sun was softening the surface snow to slush, making it slow going. At about 11:15am, some 500 vertical metres from the summit, the face briefly steepened to 45 degrees and the team cracked out the ropes.
Rowan had put on his climbing harness earlier - at the same time as his crampons - and was surprised to see others had not. Rookie Susann Beier found it hairy, trying to pull the harness leg-loops over steel spikes, while balancing precariously on the slope.
They’d originally planned to only rope-climb the most exposed, upper section to the summit. But the novice climbers hung on to the security of being tethered to the mountain. "If we use the ropes from here we are not going to get to the top today", Rowan said to Hiroki. "It is what it is," Hiroki replied.
They'd removed rope-pitching skills from the Alpine Club snowcraft course syllabus so its recent graduates were at best inexperienced. With five people on one 60m rope, it was taking more than an hour for the whole group to plod their way up each pitch.
In an empty classroom at AUT, Kirsten Spencer shows the implacable calm and toughness that must have anchored her to life that night on the mountain.
She still climbs, but it's always been about being there, rather than reaching the top. There are scars - one finger has lost all feeling, from the frostbite. And there's residual anxiety - whiteouts harbour new fear.
She and John went back to the mountain in the summer, to see where Hiroki and Nicole were stuck, and where they had slept that awful night. It was sunny, glorious - an altogether different mountain. She can't imagine what it would have been like that night so close to the summit.
"I must have been sleeping in a hot tub compared to what they were in."
John Salisbury
At the inquest, John credited his survival to Hiroki’s technical skill. He, too, has kept climbing. The psychologist he met for 10 sessions doubted most of those involved would, but he was soon back out running the winter taster courses that earned him the Alpine Club's inaugural ice axe for Volunteer of the Year, in 2008.
Going back was a salve - “It was just good to do it, laid the ghost - that you couldn’t get up it, or that it was an awful place. It was just a mountain being a mountain.”
He climbed 6000m Bolivian peak Huayna Potosi in 2015 and it was the most miserable experience ever. Apart from being married, he jokes.
But he's not unscarred - during our interview, his climbing partner sat in for moral support, in case he got emotional. At the inquest, he couldn't bear to read out his statement.
At one point, the 68-year-old in a Boddington's t-shirt calls time out. He's right there on that mountain, reliving the hell. The experience has made him more cautious and more willing to speak up when uncomfortable. He can no longer walk down snow slopes forwards, and wind puts the willies up him.
Things have changed since he learned snow skills, when climbing was an apprenticeship. You learnt from veterans, then went out with your mates, got into horrendous messes, and learnt from the experience. But better gear gives the ability for bigger messes. And the "Red Bull approach" fosters extremes - hanging off things, skiing off cliffs.
"If things go wrong, they've not had the build-up of experience. And this went wronger than I've seen in 50 years."
John defends the decision to go over the top - believing there was as much potential for disaster descending the East Ridge. Both decisions were right, both decisions were wrong, he says.
But there were plenty of lessons to be learnt - better preparation and communication; a whistle to call time; and new snowcraft graduates should be restricted to grade one climbs for a year, he suggests.
Investigators talk about swiss cheese; Paul Andreassend talks about lemons lining up - the idea that disasters result from a series of mistakes or misfortunes that add up to more than the sum of their parts. The Alpine Club's review of the tragedy identified a parade of sour citrus: a lack of gear checklists and briefing procedures; lack of experience; failure to check equipment and fix turnaround times; a poor decision to continue climbing; bivouacking too high on the mountain; inadequate food and emergency equipment.
Coroner Christopher Devonport picked out just two - the failure to monitor time and the failure to turn back in the face of threatening weather. He quotes climbing veteran Geoff Wayatt's mountain safety manual Alpine Skills: "Turning back early is wiser than risking being caught in a storm and coping with an exposed bivouac."
The search, too, copped criticism. The SAR debrief faulted communication, the lack of a police liaison at Tahurangi Lodge, the lack of previous joint training, and the delay caused by RARO members having to drive.
Devonport concluded the RARO rescuers would have reached Hiroki and Nicole earlier, had the Taupo-based commercial helicopter ferried them to Taranaki. Whether that would have changed the outcome, however, remains unknown.
At the inquest, police blamed the failure to call in the Taupo helicopter on a misunderstanding - a message that flying conditions were unsuitable for a fixed wing plane was taken to extend to helicopters too. However, both the Air Force Iroquois and the Taranaki Rescue Helicopter were still flying at that time.
In a 90-minute interview, Paul Andreassend never once uses Hiroki and Nicole's names. As an emergency department nurse you learn to numb yourself to death. But since that gutted cigarette outside Tahurangi Lodge, he has replayed again and again his hours on the mountain, wondering if it could have ended differently.
"You get there and they're alive - you can't help think 'What the hell else could I have done?'."
The only thing that might have made a difference, was getting to them earlier, before advanced hypothermia set in. But without clear air for a helicopter evacuation, there's no telling whether that would have changed anything.
Paul is warm and frank and uncompromising. It's his job to tell movie bosses like Sir Peter Jackson what they can and can't safely do. He criticised the police's management, but says what's important is that everyone learns - which he believes they have.
His knees still ache from those hours on the ice but it hasn't put him off. He still gets out in the mountains - walking, climbing, just being there.
"It's not about getting to the top. That's when people die."
Mike Johns
It's becoming more common, says Mike Johns, that searchers are not searching at all, but trying to reach a known point where victims are. That massively increases expectations. And sometimes you can't win. When he rescued a group of Chinese climbers last year, and a searcher copped an ice boulder to the head, some said they should never have been up there, others gave him an award.
"There's a bit of a growing trend, publicly, that we're seen to be semi-professional rescuers. That we should be able to do the job every time. It doesn't always work out like that."
Jeremy Beckers
It doesn't make them think twice the next time the SAR phone rings, but the criticism does sting, says Jeremy Beckers.
"It annoys me - that so many armchair experts, who have no idea what they're talking about, are more than happy to talk in the media and give their two cents worth. Each job we do is quite a dynamic situation. What may start off as a fairly basic, straight forward search, can turn into something quite substantial. And whenever we start a search, it's usually with very limited information. As the information comes through and is built upon, the taskings change, the plans change, and people are making the best decisions they can at the time."
Still, he'll be out there again, trying to make the best of horrid weather, joking with the builder, the vet, the butcher, the retired 70-something, who have all dropped everything to tool up and search for free. As well as the lost time and income, there have been close calls.
"You really are putting your life on the line."
Hiroki and Nicole
Why did they stay there - Hiroki and Nicole - so high on the mountain? Kirsten has been asked the question again and again, by the inquest lawyers, by police, by the coroner, by the alpine club. But there's no knowing. Nicole was tired. She thought she'd just killed someone. And while they dug in before calling for help, maybe, once they thought rescuers were coming, they didn't want to move.
They asked too - every which way - about that fateful decision to go over the top. Kirsten says it wasn't her voice that several climbers heard yell: "Are you kidding, the summit is just there". And she still thinks the decision was reasonable under the circumstances.
"I don't think you can pinpoint one thing - I think it's a series. If Hiroki and Nicole had come a bit down the mountain, would that have changed anything? If we'd turned around and not gone over the Shark's Tooth, would that have changed anything? If is a very small word, but incredibly powerful."
SOURCES:
Extensive interviews with John Salisbury, Kirsten Spencer, Paul Andreassend, Mike Johns and Jeremy Beckers; Witness statements to police; Coronial files; New Zealand Alpine Club review; Cellphone text logs; Alpine Skills, by Geoff Wyatt; Classic Peaks, by Hugh Logan
WORDS: Nikki Macdonald
VISUALS: Chris McKeen and Andy Jackson
GRAPHICS: John Cowie
LAYOUT AND DESIGN: Caleb Carnie