Even a well-prepared climber can fall victim to Denali’s many dangers
Mountain climbers die. That is one of the risks of the sport. Many of them are ill-prepared, overrating their fitness, or underrating the danger of climbing to high altitude. There is a body count for many peaks. As of 2016, about 120 people had died while climbing Denali. A magazine article of a few years ago estimated that Mont Blanc, which saw its first recorded climb in 1786, has seen between 6,000 and 8,000 deaths, with dozens of people perishing each year. Located in the Alps, the French peak has attracted thousands upon thousands of would-be climbers from all over the world for ages.
New Hampshire’s Mount Washington—the place where the highest recorded wind velocity on the planet, 231 miles per hour, was measured in 1934—stands just 6,288 feet high, but has experienced more deaths than the typical 26,000-foot peak in the Himalayas. The first recorded climb of Mount Washington took place in 1642, meaning some Pilgrim probably took a hike to the top. Since 1849, when officials began recording such things, about 150 people have died on the peak. Altitude is not the reason so many people die on Mount Washington. Wild weather, temperatures recorded deep in the negatives, and super high winds conspire to pin down climbers and cause fatalities. The message from these fearsome statistics is that mountaineering is not for the faint-hearted.
Guides who are hired to lead citizen adventurers to the top make a basic assumption that a client has some kind of climbing background, has trained hard for the journey, and will listen to the best advice offered. Sometimes that is true and sometimes it is not. Vern Tejas, an inexperienced trip leader in the 1970s, had learned much by the time he completed the first solo winter ascent of Denali. The accomplishment only enhanced his reputation. He was a far more seasoned guide, but as circumstances proved, sometimes it doesn’t matter how much effort is put into careful planning or how closely the weather is monitored, nature rules and can overpower the best-made itineraries.
Unfortunately, if someone guides as long as Tejas has—more than thirty-nine years—the odds are that something awful will happen on a climb.
Yes, 1988 was a special year for me, but in one very significant way, it was terrible. A terrible thing happened on a guided trip of Denali only months after I completed the winter solo.
Even a well-prepared climber can fall victim to Denali’s many dangers
As a guide, I think of myself as a caregiver, a shepherd, someone who takes care of my people. We build a rapport. Above all, it is safety first. And yet, on my very next climb of Denali, I lost a client. It is a big scar on my life. It is a blemish on my guiding career. There is a hole in my heart where I failed one of the people who was paying for my services and my services were not good enough. It is not something I like to talk about. It’s one of the worst chapters of my life.
Lynne Salerno was a climber with a really high threshold for pain and discomfort on a nine-person Genet Expeditions trip. There are many ways to die in the mountains: being battered by storms, covered by avalanches, falling into a crevasse, falling down a ridge, running out of food, freezing, or contracting illnesses such as pulmonary or cerebral edema. Some climbers are so focused and determined to reach the summit that they put themselves at risk. Although a guide cannot read clients’ minds, it is his responsibility to monitor their condition and step in if he believes a climber is overdoing it and has misplaced judgment. We are the eyes and ears. Sometimes, it is difficult to tell if climbers are simply performing admirably and applying all they’ve got to make the top, or if they are straining their body too much.
Lynne, who was thirty-one at the time, was super-motivated to reach the 20,310-foot summit. I learned later, by talking to her family, that she had a learning disability, but pushed herself through school with tenacity and hard work. Damning the torpedoes and full-speed ahead, she got through school and apparently applied that determination to reach the top of the mountain. Chief climbing ranger Bob Seibert interviewed Lynne’s brother and father. They told him Lynne had suffered an illness as a child that affected her speech, writing ability, and part of her brain. She did not learn to talk until she was six years old, and the illness left her with dyslexia, but she was a very determined woman who, once fixated on a goal, worked hard to achieve it. Another side effect of Salerno’s illness was a high tolerance for pain and ability to absorb cold.
One might think her innate pluck and will to keep going would be beneficial in high-altitude climbing, but that is not always the case. Often, those can be good assets in the mountains, but she didn’t know when to stop. Dr. Peter Hackett, the high-altitude specialist on Denali who ran a medical study at the 14,000-foot camp, was the physician who did the inquest into her death and the autopsy. He concluded that she died of exhaustion-hypothermia. She ran her tank dry and died. I didn’t catch it in time, and she didn’t give me any clues either. Basically, I let her commit suicide. I want that lesson to stay in my mind forever when I’m dealing with other people.
I am an enabler; that is my coaching instinct. I want to give clients every chance to reach their goals. The trick is to know how much is too much, and that’s the hard part. I sensed Lynne was having some difficulty, so I sent others in the group to the top with an assistant guide.
She kept saying to me, “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
I said, “No, we’re going to stay here and wait for everybody else to come down.” The others in the party were moving much faster. I wanted her to rest more before descending. “Lynne, I’m going to let the other guys go. We’re going to wait here a little while.”
She said, “Yeah, but I’m getting cold. What I need to do is move, so we can just climb up, and we’ll go down with them.” Lynne could work her way through stuff a lot of people couldn’t, but I didn’t know that then. She talked me into leading her to the summit.
Although Lynne did not have experience at high altitude, she had taken mountaineering courses through Alaska Pacific University and climbed in the Chugach Mountains next to Anchorage. It had been a winter course, so she had been out in harsh, cold conditions and passed. Nobody else on the team had that kind of background. They had climbed a few mountains before trying Denali, but they hadn’t gone through Alaskan winter instruction like that. In that sense, she was the most experienced cold-weather climber besides the guides.
She said, “I’m good. I’m good. Let’s go. I want to get there so badly.” She ran out of fuel getting to the top, and I let her do that. I didn’t see it. She did it, though. She got there. But she collapsed on the summit, melted into my arms, and I immediately began trying to get her to a lower altitude. We glissaded on our butts down to the Football Field. Unbeknownst to me, some others in the group who had descended earlier were courting frostbite and other injuries, as well.
The Football Field is at roughly 19,500 feet of elevation, not far below the summit, but a long way to high camp. She was beyond exhausted. We were high on the mountain, but we couldn’t stop trying. There were two other guys with us and we had to carry her across the Football Field. It was there that I realized she was comatose. She was not going to be able to help herself. She was a heavy lady, and we were all too tired to carry her up Archdeacon Hill. Worse, there was now a lot of wind and snow and we really shouldn’t even have been there. We had to help her, but that was a bad place to be as the weather deteriorated. The three of us were in danger, too. I slipped my hand up inside Lynne’s jacket and shirt and felt that her belly was frozen with no pulse or sign of breathing. She was gone. Lynne died on May 18, 1988 and we couldn’t do anything more for her. We had to get out of there for our own safety.
It was concluded that the cause of Lynne’s death was hypothermia and exhaustion to which other circumstances contributed. My judgment of her fitness failed, and I should not have allowed her to talk me into taking her up the final approach to the summit. When the weather rolled in, trapping us up high, it precluded calling in a helicopter rescue. The only other climbers around at the time were those from our team who had to evacuate the high point quickly. There were no other groups nearby to help. It was never completely clear whether any other kind of immediate assistance would have made a difference. It was suspected, but not definitively stated, that Lynne’s youthful illness contributed to her death. I have been haunted by Lynne’s death all of these years. Lynne Salerno is the only climber who ever died on one of my trips, and I hope to God such a thing never happens again. I have never forgotten her and hope that my experience on that climb was a terrible lesson that has helped me help others in high places.
I had worked with the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group, but those were almost all body recovery trips from airplane crashes, drunken fishermen who fell overboard, or avalanche victims. Once or twice a year, we rushed in looking for a live body, and those all had good results. Once we had thirty people combing the woods for a lost child. It was damp and he would have become hypothermic if he stayed out alone all night. We found him. On avalanches, by the time the group gets to the scene, it is usually too late. You have about thirty minutes to rescue someone under the snow. Thirty minutes is your golden window.
More than once on high mountains, however, there have been other close calls. Five years ago, I guided a seventeen-year-old girl on Aconcagua in South America who began breathing funny. She did not know how to take care of herself and was not interested in learning how. She would not eat enough because she wanted to lose weight. She would not drink enough because she did not want to have to pee. She was not interested in learning my pressure breathing method because it was too much work.
I told her, “Don’t pant like a dog. You’ll die like a dog.” I sometimes use that phrase to wake people up, but this girl almost did die. She came close, very close. She eventually passed out, and we carried her down. With more oxygen and some medicine, she came to and was able to descend with help.
Pressure breathing is a key element in my plan to help climbers get the most from themselves as they ascend to high altitude. I am probably the biggest proponent of pressure breathing in the world. Also known as positive pressure breathing, pressure breathing is simply exhaling forcefully enough against resistance that it momentarily increases the air pressure inside the lungs.
By increasing the pressure in our lungs, we can drive O2 into our bodies. The pressure simulates being situated at lower altitude and allows us to gain more oxygen. Done correctly, pressure breathing can provide up to fifteen percent more oxygen than normal breathing. That fifteen percent can make the difference in getting a headache or not, making the summit or not, but you have to work at it.
First, blow out hard through pursed lips. The harder you blow, the greater the pressure in your lungs and the more oxygen will enter your bloodstream. Puff your cheeks out hard like Louis Armstrong on the trumpet. It’s like blowing out candles or blowing a kiss. Doing it properly makes noise and looks uncool. That’s why some people give up on it, and that can be their undoing. After nearly forty years of guiding experience, I know it works, though. I did a sub-three-hour race in the Honolulu Marathon using this technique and my nickname was “Choo-Choo” because I sounded like a steam locomotive as I passed the competition.
The next year on Aconcagua, we had a man who wouldn’t take good care of himself. His tent-mate, a medic on the team, declared him hypothermic. We stripped off the man’s clothes and both jumped in a sleeping bag with him to warm up his core body temperature. The following day, another guide led the other people up to the next camp while I walked this guy down to lower altitudes. It was not in the cards for him. I couldn’t have him not taking care of himself. I didn’t blame him, but to get him to turn around I said, “Hypothermia will kill you, man.” This guy apparently had a mental issue from cracking his head open in a car accident. He was intelligent as hell, but not wise at self-tending. He was doing things that were not beneficial for his survival. His lack of self-preservation put an end to his climb. He returned the next year for another attempt and nearly died from dehydration.
Many times on Denali, I have assisted in bringing down someone from another climbing group who was suffering from altitude sickness. Often, I had good experiences giving them Decadron. Soon enough, the climber ties his own boots on and walks down. The important thing in those situations is to get the guy down as fast as possible. Most of the time, if he drops to a lower altitude, the edema goes away.
Physical carries are really the last resort, but I have done it. If you have to make a litter, you need a lot of people to help balance it on the descent and take turns. Eight people will suffice, but you really need twelve so there is some relief.
I probably have a half-dozen saves to my credit. The only time I tried mouth-to-mouth, which isn’t easy to do, was on Lynne Salerno, but to no avail. I have friends who gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for an hour to a corpse. When we left Lynne Salerno behind at the Football Field, I knew she was dead. I didn’t want anyone else to get killed in that storm, so I led the other two guys down from there. One was already frostbitten, so I had to leave or the tragedy would have been worse. Of all of the joy I have experienced in the mountains, watching Lynne Salerno die on my watch represents the single saddest moment of my nearly four decades guiding on big mountains.
In 1990, the Mountaineering Club of Alaska established a Lynne Salerno Climbing Wall. It was constructed in the basement of the Atwood Center on the campus of Alaska Pacific University, the same school where she took her mountaineering course before climbing Denali, for use by students and faculty.