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When things go very wrong No matter how much you train for it, rescuers say, nothing quite prepares you for the shock and tragedy of a body-recovery mission. (Video courtesy Bob Zook) |
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Excerpt from The Falling Season: In 1988 the famous physicist Heinz Pagels fell almost two thousand feet from Pyramid Peak when a rock gave way under his foot. His body was in an inaccessible, near-vertical location. The only way to reach it was to fly a rescuer in on a cable hanging under a helicopter. Bob [Zook], dangling like a fishing lure, was carefully deposited by the pilot on a narrow ledge twenty feet from Heinz’s mangled body. After hammering several steel pitons into the rock for an anchor and clipping his rope into them, Bob ventured out into the gully where the body was lodged. He slid a sling under Heinz’s armpits, retreated from the deadly rockfall raining intermittently on the body, and waited until the helicopter returned. Then he clipped the sling to the cable dangling beneath the bird and watched as Heinz was lifted from the mountain. A year later Bob was on his first big wall climb, a multiday undertaking up the side of a Utah canyon called Space Shot. After a day of climbing alone, he anchored himself to the sheer red rock twelve hundred feet above the valley floor. He rigged an artificial ledge the size of a cot and, still in his climbing harness and clipped to his anchors, squirmed into his sleeping “I was in and out of sleep all night long in a beautiful canyon. Absolutely gorgeous setting. I heard this noise, a very loud noise. It was a rustling, banging sound, kind of like rockfall. But it was in the wrong direction. In my dream I woke up and I heard a voice out there also. I said, ‘That’s not right, there can’t be anything out there, because that’s space, that’s
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