A rock climber that fell hundreds of feet descending a steep in the North Cascades mountains of Washington survived the fall that killed his three companions, walked to his car in the dark and then led to a public telephone to ask for help, the authorities said on Tuesday.
The surviving climber, Anton Tselykh, 38, was released from a tangle of strings, helmets and other equipment after the fall on Saturday night. Despite suffering internal bleeding and head trauma, Tsellykh eventually, for at least a dozen hours, made the walk on the salary phone, said Okanogan County Sheriff Dave Yarnell.
The climbers who were killed were Vishnu Irigireddy, 48, Tim Nguyen, 63, Oleksander Martynenko, 36, said Okanogan Dave Rodríguez’s county.
The authorities have not yet been able to interview the survivor, who is located in a hospital in Seattle, said Rodríguez, who is still unknown to the autumn and Tselykh trip.
Falls like this lead to three deaths are extremely rare, said Cristina Woodworth, who leads the Sheriff’s search and rescue team. Seven years ago, two climbers were Killed in a fall in the Captain in Yosemite National Park in California.
The group of four was climbing the first winter towers, the irregular peaks divided by a cleft that is popular among the climbers in the North Cascade range, about 160 miles (257 kilometers) to the northeast of Seattle. Tselykh was hospitalized in Seattle.
The group of four met with a disaster that night when the anchor used to secure their strings was torn from the rock while they descended, Rodriguez said. The anchor they were using, a metal peak called Piton, seemed to have been placed there by past climbers, he said.
They collapsed for about 200 feet (60 meters) in a bowed Gulch and then 200 other feet fell before resting, Yarnell said. The authorities believe that the group had been ascending, but turned around when they saw a storm.
A three -people search and rescue team arrived at the autumn site on Sunday, Woodworth said. The team used coordinates of a device that the climbers had taken, which had been shared by a friend of men.
Once they found the site, they called a helicopter to remove the bodies one at the same time due to the rough terrain, Woodworth said.
On Monday, the responders poured on the recovered team trying to decipher what caused the fall, Woodworth said. They found a Piton, basically a small metal spike that leads to rock or ice cracks and uses as an anchors by the climbers, which was still cut on the ropes of the climbers.
“There is no other reason that would connect to the rope unless you remove from the rock,” Rodríguez said, the coroner, and pointed out that the pythons are typically ranked quickly in the rock. Rodríguez added that when rapper, the four men would not have been hanging from the One Piton at the same time, but that they turn to move through the mountain.
Pythons are often left on the walls. They can be there for years or even decades, and can become less safe over time.
“He seemed old and worn, and the rest of his team seemed newer, so we assumed he was an old python,” said Woodworth.
The rock climbers are assured by ropes to anchors, such as pythons or other climbing equipment. The strings are destined to stop their fall if they slide, and generally the climbers use backup anchors, said Joshua Cole, guide and co -owner of North Cascades Mountain Guides, which has been climbing in the area for about 20 years.
In general, it would be unusual to approach a single Piton, Cole said, adding that exactly what happened on the wall that night is still unknown.
“Eventually, if possible, we would like to get more information from the surviving party,” said Woodworth.
Needles are a popular climbing place. The route that the climbers were taking, Cole said, was of moderate difficulty and requires moving between ice, snow and rock.
But the conditions, the amount of ice versus the rock, for example, can quickly change with the weather, said, even week or day by day, changing the risks of the route.
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Bedayn reported from Denver.
