A good year turns horrible
The scraping of an ice axe, then a sickening silence marked our worst alpine accident. Tom Hunt reports.
New Zealand, 1953, fizzed with national pride. The year would end on a tragic note when the Wellington to Auckland overnight express plunged into the river at Tangiwai in the central North Island, killing 151, but there was more than enough reason for joy that postwar year.
A beekeeper by the name of Edmund Hillary became the first person to scale the world’s highest peak and – later that year – a young Queen Elizabeth was coming to visit.
On July 26, 1953 a group of nurses set out to scale Mt Egmont, now known as Mt Taranaki.
They were not out to make the history books in the same vein as Hillary.
In fact, as Graham Hutchins and Russell Young write in New
Zealand’s Worst Disasters," half the people of Taranaki province had either climbed the mountain, or trudged its lower slops, or dreamed of one day making it to the top’’.
The nurses would, nevertheless, enter the history books as the victims of our worst alpine tragedy.
Of the 31 in the party that day, 18 were from the New Plymouth Nurses’ Tramping Club. Six would soon be dead.
It was a clear day, with a light but cool breeze, when they set out late in the morning, divided into six ‘‘ropes’’ and led by chief guide, 25-year-old schoolteacher Keith Russell.
The sparkling day down below disappeared as they climbed and the wind picked up to a ‘‘strong piercing blow’’, Worst Disasters says.
It was 3.45pm when they reached the summit. The winter sun was already sitting low in the sky. They stayed for just a few minutes at the top in a southeasterly wind gusting to 75kmh.
Derek Quickfall, one of the few that day wearing crampons, was not part of the large nurses’ group but led the way down, taking on the laborious task of chipping out steps. Those that had been cut on the ascent had already been filled in with wind-blown ice and snow.
It was 6.30pm, in a group led by Russell, when a nurse dropped her ski stick. Worst Disasters describes the sickening minutes that followed: ‘‘Russell moved to assist her, but as he was doing so another girl fell and dragged the rope with her.
‘‘Russell adopted a prone position in an attempt to stop the plunge, but all seven climbers on that particular rope disappeared over the bluff.’’
On the 60-year anniversary of the tragedy, Quickfall – who was next to the ill-fated group – described the sound of Russell’s ice axe scraping hopelessly on the frozen snow.
‘‘There was too much momentum. He couldn’t hold them. There was no shout or cry. There was just silence.’’
Of the seven – Russell, Andrew Lornie, Ruth Caldwell, Janet Cameron, Julie Cassells, Ellen McBeth and Ann Tomlinson – in the silent fall, six would die. Only Tomlinson would survive.
‘‘I guess a few of them fell at once. I tried to hold the rope but it was ripped from my hand,’’ Quickfall recalled.
When he got to the gorge – 12 metres below in the narrow and rocky Maketawa Valley – the rope holding the seven together had broken. The dead and wounded were scattered over 300m.
‘‘As a 21-year-old, and finding dead and dying people all over the place. What could you do.’’
Though just four of the six who would die from the fall were nurses, the tragedy went down in history as the Nurses Accident.
The 100 rescuers who made their way up the mountain were not enough to stop the death toll climbing to six, as the fallen climbers were moved first to a nearby hut, then to the North Egmont Hostel.
Hutchins and Young wondered whether New Zealanders in those postwar years had become less cautious in their outdoor pursuits.
Indeed, of the larger group that had gone up that winter’s day, just two were wearing crampons. Eleven had just ski poles. ‘‘They may have been throwing caution to the wind after all the negativity and denial of the period 1939-1945.
‘‘Or was it simply a matter of people underestimating Mt Egmont and its potential danger?’’
For Quickfall, who still lives in the shadow of the mountain, this coming week’s anniversary will pass with little ceremony.
‘‘It’s in the past, it’s something that happened,’’ he said this week. ‘‘You can’t change history.’’