Mt Kenya north-east face
Photo Cosley & Houston

Mount Kenya rescue, 1970

by Jim Whittell

Leafing through the AAC(UK) Summer Newsletter I was intrigued by, and enjoyed, Jacky Rix-Brown's piece on Mount Kenya and her expedition in 1970. It prompted many memories because, as she mentioned, I trod much of the same ground a few months later under rather different circumstances. With my Nairobi climbing mate Silvano Borruso we were amongst the first arrivals on Mount Kenya in what became the epic rescue of the Austrian doctor, Gert Judmaier.

The call-out to the Kenya based mountain rescue volunteers - not in any sense a professional team, more a group of reasonably experienced and willing climbers - came in the early hours of Sunday 6 September 1970. Around 03.00 there was a crunching on the gravel outside the Nairobi School where we were living at the time. It was the police. There had been an accident on Mount Kenya and I should get myself to Nanyuki police station as quickly as possible. So I did, leaving my wife and three young children to cope, and without the slightest idea of what would happen or when I would be back. I arrived at Nanyuki around 06:00, and Silvano Borruso arrived an hour or so later. As no-one knew at that time whether the fallen climber was still alive (he'd been lying alone, exposed and seriously injured at 17,000 feet for the best part of 24 hours) we agreed with the Duty Officer that we should set off without delay. Others would follow. We had a rough plan to establish whether we were dealing with a rescue or a recovery.

We made good time to the Kami Hut and after a short rest set off again on a half circuit of the mountain in brilliantly clear moonlight. I remember that trek as extraordinarily beautiful and presenting no great difficulties. We reached Top Hut just as the sun was coming up and, on cue, a small plane appeared. The hut radio was not in good working order. Try as we might, we could not make contact with the pilot, but were pretty certain that as the pilot, Bill Woodley of the National Parks, flew over Batian and then us at Top Hut, he was waggling his wings – a positive signal. It could have been for us (if he could hear us but not the other way round), or if not us it must be for the injured climber. Either way was encouraging and suggested a rescue might be on.

Silvano and I now had to get back to the Kami Hut where others would be assembling. The quickest route was to drop down a steep slope on the northeast side of the ridge. Gone were the clear skies of our night-time traverse. The cloud was down and visibility extremely limited. Almost entirely dependent on a compass course, we were getting worried that the channel down which we should have dropped just did not appear. Suddenly and momentarily a sort of vortex in the air produced a narrow tunnel down through the cloud to a clearly visible Kami Hut, way down at the bottom. The image disappeared as quickly as it had come, but it was enough for us to realise we were several points off course. This meteorological quirk was extraordinary and saved us from what could have become serious difficulties. Weary, and some 30 hours after leaving Nanyuki Police Station, we were back at the Kami Hut for the second time; a place transformed and humming with climbers, porters and activity. We delivered our message that, though we had failed to talk to the pilot of the over-flying aircraft, we were pretty sure he had waggled his wings at something - and if it wasn't us, it must have been Gert Judmaier. Either way it looked as though he was still alive.

The task of acting as leader of the whole operation, using the Kami Hut as a base, fell automatically to Robert Chambers (now at the University of Sussex) who had, by far, the most experience of the country, the mountain and managing people. It was a job he did with great skill, especially as the human cost of the rescue mounted. The immediate needs were to get a high-level party up to Judmaier to administer first aid and keep him alive. Also required was a supply route to deliver all that was needed - plasma, food and equipment - to the Kami Hut and then on and up, to a hand-over point on the mountain close to Shipton's Notch, the site of the accident. Concerned that I was not that fit or acclimatized, I offered to become a mule and, as a result, I found myself teamed up with Kisoi Munyao, the Kenyan who had raised the national flag on the summit of Mount Kenya on Independence Day. We climbed well together. Kisoi led, I carried, and we made two ascents of Batian to a point above Firmins Tower.

Plasma, food and rope were brought up by a wonderful American, Jim Hastings, in his helicopter. His first trip provided Kisoi and me with our initial load, most importantly plasma. Setting off early in the morning we felt considerable responsibility. We had in my backpack a large part of the plasma stock held by Nairobi Hospital; almost certainly we could expect no more. The climbing itself was reasonably straightforward, apart from the stones. Once the sun was up and the ice melted, there was a fairly continuous cascade, small ones occasionally pinging off our helmets; the big ones, which rushed past with the noise of an express train, fortunately fell further out.

Having dropped our load, and almost out of this chute on our descent, we could hear the clatter of the helicopter as once again Jim Hastings headed up towards the Kami Hut. He had said on the previous evening that, if he could, he would bring us up some fruit the following day. The explosion that suddenly echoed round those rocky cliffs followed by a total silence left little room for any doubt that there had been a catastrophic accident. Our return to the Kami Hut was awful. We knew pretty much what we would find. A wonderful guy killed bringing us stuff we could have done without, and all because he was so near the helicopter's ceiling. At the last minute, it seems, he had decided to make a second approach and banked to turn away, slipped sideways and dropped. His rotor hit the rock and the whole aircraft exploded.

At roughly the same time, Bill Woodley was trying to deliver rope to the high-level party, so that Gert Judmaier could be lowered down the North face strapped securely to a stretcher as soon as he was thought fit to be moved. Bill's technique was to have an accomplice trail a 700ft length out of the plane door as he flew as close as he could to where Gert and his rescuers were hunkered down. As soon as the lower end of the rope caught on the rocks, the accomplice would let the other end go, resulting in the rope laid out across the ridge. It didn't work out that way. The cloud was down, visibility was poor, and it was an extraordinary feat of piloting to take the aircraft close into the mountain and turn away only “when I felt the backwash from the rockface”. He tried it twice but neither of the opes was ever found. And for us, back at the hut, with Jim Hasting's accident so raw, the sound of that engine straining somewhere in the cloud just above us is a memory that time has not dimmed.

That rope was still needed, so Kisoi and I set off once more on the Thursday or Friday, this time with another 700ft coil round my shoulders, looking and feeling like the Michelin man. It was extremely heavy and awkward to climb with, and on many occasions I depended on a 'tight rope' from Kisoi. Once again, we ran the gauntlet of stones and left our load near Shipton's Notch. There was no drama as on the previous day and by late afternoon we were once more back at the hut. But that evening there was the sad sight of two men setting off down the mountain, a blanket stretched between them containing the body of a porter who had succumbed to pulmonary oedema; and it would be wrong to pretend that there was no murmuring about the mounting cost of rescuing one mountaineer. Two deaths and still no rescue. This was, though, an argument to which I did not and do not subscribe.

It was against this background that, with a certain edginess in the atmosphere, when we were in radio contact with Nanyuki Police Station, we were asked if we would take a call from the Austrian government. We had no radios that would both transmit and receive; some would do one, some the other. And frequently it worked better if receivers and transmitters were in different positions, with questions, answers and discussions shouted between the two. Of course, we said yes, we would take a call. I happened to be on a 'receive' set and will never forget the disembodied voice coming out of the darkness: “I am the Secretary to the Austrian Cabinet, and I have a question. Would you be prepared to accept an Austrian mountain rescue team?”. It occurs to me that perhaps there is a record of this conversation somewhere in Vienna. Be that as it may, it needed little discussion to reply that a professional team would be more than welcome. We were all competent climbers, but we were way out of our comfort zone and knew that the proposal to lower Gert down the North face without proper painkillers and medical attention could prove fatal. “Good” said the Secretary, “they will leave tonight and will be with you tomorrow”. And, indeed, they were. My memory is that on arrival at the Kami Hut they scarcely stopped but went straight on up to where Gert was lying, saying something to the effect that they would dope him up with morphia, strap him to their sort of alpine wheelbarrow and get him down quickly. Then they could work on him…

… and that is where the story is taken over, far better than I can describe, by Reinhold Messner's excellent 2016 TV docu-drama, 'Still Alive'. And it also marked the point at which I and one or two others bowed out and made our way on a bright sunny morning back down the track to the roadhead, all the way down following clear lion paw-prints in the rain-softened ground. Thence to Nairobi, my wife and family and the job I was contracted to do; I had had no contact at all with them since leaving home the previous weekend. The following day there was a simple and poignant funeral service for the American who didn't make it home. A lot of the details, at this distance, are hazy, but the main events of that week can still bring a lump to my throat.

Editor’s note: The Reinhold Messner film can be seen at https://www.servustv.com/natur/v/aa-24jk77qk11w12/, courtesy of Servus TV. In it there is an interview with the late John Temple, another AAC(UK) member who also played a major part in the rescue, although it is masked by the German narration. We have obtained a further description of the rescue, written by Gert Judmaier’s companion Dr Oswald Ölz in 1999, which covers the events after Jim had left the scene. An English translation, published in 2011 in the journal Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, can be seen at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1080603210003029 by kind permission of the publishers, Elsevier. Finally, there is a chapter on the rescue edited by Hamish MacInnes in ‘The Price of Adventure’ (Hodder & Stoughton, 1988) and this includes commentary from Robert Chambers and a member of the Austrian team. The same chapter, without illustrations, also appears in ‘The Mammoth Book of Mountain Disasters’ (Robinson, 2003).

Standard route no. 9 was used in the rescue
Guidebook extract courtesy of Mountain Club of Kenya

Newspaper cutting showing rescue location
Photo Daily Nation

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