THE RESCUER

SHATTERED bones, bloody wounds, avalanches and frozen bodies – mountain rescue stalwart John Allen has witnessed almost every horror imaginable.

In 1971, six teenagers and their female instructor died after getting caught in a blizzard on Cairngorm, in what remains one of Scotland’s most devastating mountaineering catastrophes.

Moved by the tragedy, John, a Highlands-based pharmacist from Glasgow, signed up to join Cairngorm Mountain Rescue.

By the time he retired in 2007, he’d devoted 35 years to saving lives, taken part in more than 1,000 rescue missions and seen first-hand just how dangerous Britain’s mountains can be.

Sliding

Now 70 and an MBE, he recalled: “There are one or two incidents that stick in your memory and one that I always mention is two lads who came up from London one April.

“They were coming off one of the hills called Ben Alder, but they hadn’t been out in the winter in Scotland before.

“They were sliding down the slope when one of them went down what I would call a mini-crevasse and ended up 60 feet down in a ledge under the snow. He had broken both legs and was a long way from help. I remember, we were told a climber had broken his leg and ended up in a snow-hole, but the reality was that he was actually in what was like a pothole in the snow – and he was down about 60 feet. We had to go down into this pothole under the snow to pull him up.

“The accident happened at about 4pm and we didn’t get him to hospital until 4am the next morning. It was a long time to lie with two broken legs and he ended up getting lots of screws and plates put in his ankle and his legs.

“There was a risk of hypothermia and his body shutting down but because it was so cold it helped to cool him down and he remained in a hibernating state so he survived when he might have bled to death.”

Unfortunately, a handful of rescue missions prove too much even for highly-skilled teams like John’s and, inevitably, there are those who succumb to the elements.

John, a married father-of-two, who lives in Kingussie near Aviemore, continued: “It’s always sad when people die.

“Back in 2005, there were two young lads from one of the Northern colleges who went off to do a technical climb. They were in their 20s. They’d gone out on a particularly bad day. We went out to have a look for them but we couldn’t find them because the weather was so bad. The next morning they were both found frozen to death.

“They’d gone up to do a climb, but couldn’t get up because the weather was so bad so they’d retreated. On their way back out of the quarry, they couldn’t survive, the weather was so bad and both of them died.”

According to John, knowledge, experience and a respect for Mother Nature are the keys to survival in the mountains.

He said: “If you’re going to go on the hills in Scotland, you have to be aware of what the weather can do to you.

“The first thing you need to be able to do is navigate in bad weather but that doesn’t mean using GPS or a mobile phone.

“You need to be able to use the old-fashioned map and what we call a silver type of compass that uses no electronics, so you’re not