Tragedy no stranger on Mount Hood

PORTLAND — On a brilliantly sunny day in May 2002, Steve Rollins was among rescue mountaineers working to pull nine climbers from a glacial crevasse on a flank of Mount Hood.

A Pave Hawk helicopter was assisting in the operation, hovering just above Rollins.

As Rollins watched, the chopper tilted, its blades sliced into the snow, and the aircraft crashed, tumbling over and over until coming to a stop.

"It was like, 'am I really seeing what I'm seeing here?' " said Rollins, president of Portland Mountain Rescue, a group of volunteers.

"I was right under the tail rotor," Rollins said. "They say those events are dreamlike and in slow motion. It was totally like that."

Miraculously, no one died in the crash of the helicopter — although some crew members were thrown out its open door. All but three of the climbers who had fallen into the crevasse were pulled out alive.

Mount Hood can be a perilous place.

That was proved again this past week, when missing climber Kelly James of Texas was found dead in a snow cave 300 feet below the summit. His climbing partners, fellow Texan Brian Hall and Jerry "Nikko" Cooke of New York City, have vanished. Sheriff Joe Wampler says they may have fallen off a precipice or been buried by snow.

On Wednesday, Wampler said he was abandoning the search rather than put rescue teams at peril as winter's weather worsens.

Mount Hood is practically on the doorstep of Oregon's largest city, and thousands attempt to reach the summit each year — mainly during May and June, when snow conditions are the least dangerous.

At 11,239-feet, the glacier-flanked volcano in the Cascade Range is dwarfed by peaks in the Andes and the Himalayas.

But the mountain has a long history of tragedy.

No state or federal agencies compile figures on fatalities on Mount Hood, one of the most heavily climbed mountains in the world. But a list compiled by The Oregonian newspaper from its archives showed 35 have died since 1981.

They include a snowboarder from Argentina who tried to ride his board down from the summit in May 2002 before falling off the 2,500-foot cliff above Eliot Glacier — the same spot that may have claimed the lives of the remaining two missing climbers in the long search this past week on Mount Hood.

One of the deadliest Mount Hood accidents occurred in May 1986.

Seven students and two adults leading a spring climb for the Oregon Episcopal School died on the mountain after they dug a snow cave during a sudden storm that caused whiteout conditions.

The guide, Ralph Summers, and three students survived.

Another veteran Portland Mountain Rescue climber, Rocky Henderson, was part of the search team 20 years ago and since has seen many other desperate situations unfold.

Henderson said each tragedy holds a lesson to be learned.

"What would I do if my buddy got injured right now? Do we have a plan? Does my cellphone have good batteries? What is our plan if the weather turns bad? What is our plan if we don't make it back before it gets dark?" he said.

"It is possible to avoid some of these unfortunate situations."

Mount Hood has a unique mountain locator unit program — electronic rental devices that send out signals to help rescue crews track climbers who use them.

Henderson estimates that only about half the climbers on Mount Hood bother to carry the devices. But he said everybody on the mountain should have some way of tracking their location, such as the rental units or GPS satellite devices. Just carrying a cellphone with a backup battery can make a difference, he said.

"Even then, there's no guarantee you can get help in time," Henderson said.

Wampler, the sheriff who oversaw the effort to find Kelly James, Brian Hall and Jerry Cooke, had these words for those who want to attempt to reach Mount Hood's summit:

"If you're going to [climb to the summit of] Mount Hood or any other mountain, it has to be well-planned, and time of year has a lot to do with that."

And you have to have enough provisions to last for a while, in case you get into trouble, the sheriff said.

"You plan on having to stay out there in case something happens."