A mountaineer from the Eden area has been recovering after an epic climb on a remote mountain in the Republic of Tajikistan, above the northern border of Afghanistan ended in disaster.
Simon Yates, aged 60, from Great Salkeld, suffered five broken ribs and two crushed vertebrae in a fall, as he and fellow mountaineer Mick Fowler retreated following an attempt to make a first ascent of a route on a 6,083m peak called Patkhor. There followed a harrowing retreat as Mick — an award-winning climber known for his ascents of challenging unclimbed lines with small teams — helped Simon down the route and then went to get assistance after a call for a helicopter went unanswered.
To make matters worse, both men were without food for six days because some of their freeze dried meals had gone bad, which made both of them very ill during the early stages of the climb.
Simon recalls that, from a base camp at around 3,750m, all seemed to be going well as they headed up, carrying all they needed with them, to a col — or shelf — where they set up a lightweight temporary camp — known as a bivouac.
At this stage the pair were optimistic, but they then ate a freeze dried meal which they thought tasted bad and this turned out to be the case, with both suffering intense illness over the following hours.
They were forced to discard six of the 10 meals they had with them, but calculated that if they dropped to half rations and all went according to plan they had enough sustenance to complete the climb and descend the south side of the mountain — although with no food for the two-day walk out.
Still feeling unwell, they continued their climb and things seemed to get back on track but their summit attempt was thwarted by bad weather, poor visibility and harder than expected ground, so they retraced their steps back to the previous bivouac spot.
“We spent the rest of the day pondering the situation and wondering whether it would be sensible to continue if the weather was good the following day,” said Simon. “As it happened the snow continued throughout the night and the following morning we readily made the decision to descend.”
They ate the last of their food that evening and started to descend early the following morning. They reached a lower bivouac that day and set an alarm for midnight in order to get down exposed ground before the sun loosened stones — but this failed to go off and they ended up spending a day there without food. The next day they started to descend at around 1-30am but on their third abseil the anchor point failed and Simon fell around 100m, sustaining the injuries to his ribs and back.
Fortunately, they were able to continue down, although Simon was unable to carry his rucksack and this had to be jettisoned. They managed to get to a flat spot at about 4,200m on a glacier, from where they tried to arrange a helicopter rescue.
They waited a further two days on the glacier, without food or a tent and sharing one sleeping bag, before Mick descended and met a rescue team on its way up to help. Out of the previous 10 days, four had been on half rations and this was their sixth with no food at all.
Mick directed the rescuers to Simon’s position but the following day it became clear no helicopter was going to arrive and Simon started what turned out to be a painful three-day walk down to the road, from where he was able to head back home to recuperate. Looking back, he says it was his first serious mountaineering accident in a climbing career spanning almost 40 years, but that it was still a “good trip”.
“It was a great objective and I really liked the people in Tajikistan,” he said. “It hasn’t made me any less keen, but I definitely got some lessons from it.”
He added that he is heading back to the Himalayas this month to climb the higher but technically easier Pumori, in Nepal, as part of a four-man team.
The Patkhor accident was a marked contrast to the climbing epic for which Simon is best known, which saw him lower his badly injured partner Joe Simpson much of the way down a mountainside in Peru until Simpson fell over a cliff.
On the point of being pulled off the mountain himself and thinking his companion dead, Simon was forced to cut the rope linking the two, but Simpson survived the resulting fall into a crevasse and crawled back to their camp. His book about the incident, Touching the Void, was an international best seller.
