CLIMBER TRAPPED ON MOUNT LOGAN
Argentinian has enough food for 10 days
To Argentinian climber Natalia Martinez, it would have sounded like a freight train was tearing full-speed down Mount Logan, Canada’s tallest peak.
As a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck the southern Yukon just before sunrise on Monday morning, she would have heard the deafening sound of a landscape coming apart: multiple avalanches and towering pieces of glacial ice crashing to the ground.
“She didn’t know it was an earthquake, she thought the hanging glacier on which she was camping had moved,” Martinez’s partner, Camilo Rada, told the National Post in an interview from Vancouver.
Although spared by the quake, the veteran climber is now trapped 3,000 metres up, being battered by storms inside one of Canada’s most treacherous mountain landscapes.
“Everything just became a lot more dangerous,” said veteran Yukon mountaineer Ryan Agar, author of the Yukon Climbing Guide.
A second 6.3-magnitude earthquake also struck the southern Yukon just after 7 a.m., and the region has since been hit with more than 100 minor aftershocks.
The shaking sent items tumbling from shelves in Yukon homes and businesses. Several Whitehorse buildings also remain evacuated as engineers examine their structural integrity.
This is a particularly busy year for climbing on Logan. While there are other climbing parties on the peak, they were relatively unmolested by the Monday quakes.
But unlike them, Martinez was attempting the famously difficult East Ridge.
“In places, it’s literally a knife edge, and there’s a 10,000 foot drop on either side of you,” said Agar.
After that, said Agar, climbers have to navigate a field of “seracs,” hanging blocks of glacial ice.
“It’s such a wild place, that anything unexpected can be a problem.”
Martinez had already gotten though the worst of the ridge, and had been planning on six more days to summit Logan and descend to a pickup point through the relatively tranquil King’s Trench.
But now the ground around Martinez has been rendered so unstable by the quake that she can’t safely climb up or down from her campsite.
Rada has been in daily contact with Martinez via satellite phone. According to him, Martinez’s life was spared purely due to her prudent Sunday night selection of a campsite.
Set apart from hazards such as avalanche run-outs and crevasses, the camp was able to stay intact even as neighbouring areas were buried, collapsed or otherwise thrashed by the shaking.
Still, said Rada, “the debris reached quite close.”
As aftershocks pounded the area throughout Monday, Martinez moved to an even safer redoubt; a narrow ridge that should place her above any additional avalanches.
Equipped with 10 more days of food, Martinez is now busy keeping her campsite cleared of blowing snow.
As Mount Logan is located within Kluane National Park, Parks Canada coordinates all rescues from the peak.
Under normal circumstances, a rescue helicopter would have been immediately dispatched. However, the response has been delayed to the area being battered by storms and high winds.
“The helicopter will leave ASAP, but that doesn’t seem to be earlier than Friday according to current forecasts,” said Rada.
On prior helicopter rescues from Mount Logan, climbers have typically been directed towards areas suitable for the aircraft to set down.
Only in extreme cases, such as in the evacuation of an injured climber, do more complex extractions need to be planned.
Martinez is from Patagonia, the mountainous weather-beaten southern tip of South America.
The Mount Logan ascent was to be her most challenging solo climb to date. However, the climber has a lengthy record of conquests under her belt.
In 2013, she and Rada summited Patagonia’s remote Monte Sarmiento. Using a new route, they became the first to reach its peak in 57 years.
The next year, she was part of a party of five that summited five previously unclimbed peaks in a remote corner of a Patagonian icefield.
In 2015, she and Rada became the world’s first to summit Mount Malaspina, a 3,776 metre peak located near Mount Logan.