September 2010 Issue 102

by Peter Hinchliffe

At nine o’clock that morning a small aircraft flew round Mount Kenya’s twin peaks, Batian and Nelion.

I was on the other side of Lewis Glacier, standing on top of the mountain’s third peak, 16,355-foot Lenana.

The plane circled and circled, coming close to the rock of the ancient volcano.

Exhausted, exhilarated, having climbed higher than ever before in my life, I turned to my companion Mark MacAlpine and said, “Obviously wealthy Americans, doing Mount Kenya the easy way.”

I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

I’d driven up from Nairobi the night before, looking forward to a mountain adventure, though somewhat apprehensive. At the time – 1970 – I was news-editing Kenya’s leading newspaper, The Daily Nation.

My first glimpse of the great mountain was a heart-stopping remember-for-ever moment. The setting sun was highlighting its summit, painting the snows red.

Next morning, accompanied by Mark, an African guide and a team of porters, I was trudging up through the vertical bog on the lower slopes, the squelchy black ground sucking longingly at my boots.

We emerged onto moorland, there to be amazed by giant groundsels and rosette plants, so well adapted to freezing nighttime temperatures that they are more than 20 feet tall. Base camp was a series of small green tents in the Teleki Valley at a height of more than 14,000 feet.

After a cold and mostly sleepless night, and a 4 a.m. bowl of porridge, the guide led Mark and me up a steep scree slope, then out onto Lewis Glacier. The glacier swept down to a permanently frozen waterfall. I had visions of skidding out of control down that glacier, then over the fall to crash onto rocks.

As the glacier steepened, the guide hacked out a few steps, aware of my apprehensions. Soon we stepped onto rock and reached the cairn on Lenana’s summit. There we took pictures, had a drink of tea and a sandwich, watched the circling plane, then started the descent.

We went back to the camp for a brief rest, then down, down, retracing the steps of the previous day. When we reached the vertical bog, it started to hail. Water penetrated my orange anorak. Mud oozed over my boot tops.

My wife Joyce was in the Land Rover that came to pick us up when we reached the forest on the lower slopes. “Did you see anything of the rescue attempt?” Joyce asked innocently.

Rescue attempt?

The circling plane was spotting the location of an injured climber. Two young Austrian climbers had scaled rocky Batian, Mount Kenya’s highest peak at 17,058 feet on the previous day. While I had been dozing in the relative comfort of a small tent, they had spent the night on the rocky summit.

At first light, they started down. On the second pitch, they used a rock as a belay point. The rock came loose, and one of the climbers, Gert Judmaier, fell 60 feet onto a ledge.

He was seriously injured, breaking a number of bones.

The hail that fell on me as I descended through the vertical bog fell as snow on the summit. It was the heaviest snowfall of the century.

Judmaier was trapped on that mountain for nine days. A helicopter used in the ongoing rescue bid crashed, killing its pilot. Eventually Judmaier’s father, an eminent Austrian medical man, arranged for a four-man Austrian mountain rescue team to fly out to Kenya to bring his son down.

Judmaier was back at work six months later. He became the nestor of gastroenterology at the University Hospital Innsbruck. In 1988 he received teaching authorization for internal medicine, and in 1994 he was given the title of university professor.

The Austrian government provided funds to establish a mountain rescue training center on Mount Kenya.

I came down from the mountain cold, wet and weary, longing for a warm meal and a 12-hour sleep. But first I had to write a rescue story for the Daily Nation, and secondly to tell the world about Judmaier’s plight with a second story for Associated Press.

A month after that I “did” Kilimanjaro the easy way. I was on a demonstration flight of a passenger jet that East African Airways intended to buy. We flew from Kenyatta National Airport, over the African plains to Kilimanjaro. I sipped gin and tonic while looking down on the snow-capped peak 200 feet below me.

© Peter Hinchliffe 2010

This entry was posted by peter hinchliffe on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Made in Yorkshire. You can be notified of any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment in the box at the bottom of the post.

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