Home | Current News | Newslettters | Club and Climbing Nights
Trips | Trip Reports | Contact details | Library | Buy and Sell | Support our Advertisers

Pete’s Post from Antarctica - September 2005

“Here’s the situation”, said Lonnie, the Winter SAR Leader. “Jack and Jill were walking the Castle Rock Loop, when they had an argument. Jack stormed off in anger, and has checked back into McMurdo Station. Jill hasn’t checked in, and is now two hours overdue. We’ve searched everywhere in town, and it is assumed that she isn’t here. That’s all the information we have”.

The temperature is minus 30 degC and there’s a 20-knot northerly wind. This means serious windchill - the human body will lose heat at the same rate as on a calm day at minus 60 degC. Anyone stuck in the open, or down a crevasse will be in serious trouble.

“Pete, I want you to take command of the team today. Bo and I are both unavailable.”

My heart rate went up a notch or two. Why me? I’d better do a good job - someone’s life might depend on my decision-making. The first step is to send out a hasty team to drive around the Castle Rock Loop to check any shelters. They will concentrate on covering the ground fast, rather than a thorough grid search. Meanwhile, the rest of the team will assemble all our medical and rigging equipment into another vehicle.

“Jay, you’re our primary medic. Can you take a small medical kit and go with Rex and Jack. I’d like you to take a PistenBully vehicle and drive around the Castle Rock Loop from the Arrival Heights end. Stop and check the NASA satellite dome, the two emergency shelters, and anywhere you see open crevasses or footsteps. Just take a climbing rope and your personal gear. Let’s get moving as quickly as possible, and give me a radio check on MacOps frequency when you are mobile. Any questions or suggestions?”

First task accomplished. I’d got the hasty team away.

“Greg, can you please start loading the rest of the medical gear into the Hagglunds. Deborah can help you. We’ll need the Stokes Litter, KED and SKED, as well as the hypo-wrap and normal medical kits. The rest of us will concentrate on loading all the rigging gear and ropes. We’ll take the Arizona Vortex in case we need to rescue Jill from a crevasse. Let’s aim to be away from here in fifteen minutes. Any questions or suggestions?”

What else do we need; have I forgotten anything; have MacOps been informed; is the doctor on standby? Is my personal gear all ready to go; is my own radio on the right channel? Yes, it must be - there’s the test call from the hasty team.

“Hedley, will you drive the Hagglunds. Greg, can you sit up front and use the spotlight to look for footprints, especially when we get near the icefall. I’ll sit in the back seat so I can concentrate on communications and logistics. We’ll drive out to the other end of the Loop, and search the CosRay buildings as we go. We’ll also search the emergency shelter at Silver City, and the toilet building at the skifield. I’d like to stop at Crystal’s Crack where we’ll walk along in front of the Hagglunds for 200 yards with spotlights in case Jill walked off the road and fell in the crevasse. We’ll do the same for the big crevasse across the road up the Kiwi Ski Hill. Now does anyone have any additional ideas, or is there anything I’ve forgotten?”

Once we were under way, my stress levels went down a bit. We searched various buildings, and heard on the radio that the hasty team had done the same. It was reasonably sheltered on our side of the hill, but the hasty team reported very cold conditions with moderate visibility on the windward side of the ridge. We checked the crevassed area known as Crystal’s Crack, but there were no signs of any open crevasses or any human trail. We continued up the hill beside the skifield that Scott Base operates during the summer, and stopped at a well-known crevasse marked with crossed flags.

“There’s something in here”, shouted Deborah, who had quickly roped up and ventured to a collapsed part of the snow bridge right beside the road. “It’s Jill”, she said once she shone the torch down the hole. “She’s on a dodgy snow bridge about ten metres down. I can see the crevasse is much deeper than that – maybe another fifty metres.”

While I contacted the hasty team by radio, I asked Deb and Greg to set up a personal snowstake anchor, and to abseil down to Jill. Their first task would be to secure her from falling any further, and provide reassurance and warmth while we prepared a hauling system to extract her. They would put a cervical collar on Jill to support her neck, and would manoeuvre her into the litter or KED that we would be lowering down once we were ready. Hedley’s job would be to stay at the edge of the crevasse (roped to a personal anchor) to provide a safety overview and a communications relay between the people down the crevasse and the rest of us on the surface.

This is good, I thought to myself. We’ve got three kiwis here to boss around these ten yanks. We won’t need any big discussions about how to do things. Hedley will keep an eye on the people down the slot and Blake can supervise the building of the belay system and anchors. I’ll supervise the construction of the main hauling system, anchors, and assembling the Arizona Vortex. These Americans are very good at what they do, but sometimes they waste too much time talking about it first.

Building the anchors was quite quick. For each of the two rope systems we dug four T-Slots and equalised them together into a bombproof anchor. We were slightly cramped for space, because I decided to keep everything on the area of snow that is surveyed and marked as a road. This saved us having to probe out the surrounding areas for hidden crevasses. We also used slings connected to hardpoints on the Hagglunds vehicle as a backup anchor.

The hasty team had arrived mid way through the construction phase, and all three of them quickly fitted into the new roles I allocated them.

The Arizona Vortex is a large kitset tripod with a pulley that we use at the edge of the crevasse or rock face we are raising the victim from. It makes the top transition from vertical lifting much easier, as the rope doesn’t bite into the snow at the edge. Because it is quite heavy, we often leave it behind. But it is perfect when we can drive right up to the rescue area.

Within about 50 minutes, Jill and one of her attendants was hauled out on a static rope with a 9:1 pulley system. We’d put her in a KED to support her spine, since space in the crevasse was too limited for a Stokes Litter to be practical. The belay team provided a safety backup on a separate static rope using a tandem prussic belay. The other rescuer had to prussic out of the slot on the same rope she had used to abseil in on.

As soon as Jill was out, we put her on a backboard and placed her in a hypo-wrap to warm her. We loaded her into the Hagglunds ready for transportation to the medical centre. It only took a few minutes to de-rig and clear the site, and we all headed back to McMurdo for a debrief.

“In all the years I’ve been coming here”, said Lonnie, “this has been the smoothest running scenario we’ve ever had. Well done, everybody”.

It was only a scenario, but the stress was real, the darkness was real, and the cold was real. Personal safety was just as important as in a real rescue too.

We haven’t had a “real” callout this season, and I hope we don’t have one. But we’ve got a very competent team, and we take our training very seriously. And we have lots of fun with our American friends.

Pete De Joux