On the descent however, Hadow slipped and knocked Croz, and then dragged Hudson and Douglas with him down the mountain. The rope that connected them all broke and so saved the other 3 climbers, the four fell to their deaths on the Matterhorn Glacier 1,400 metres below. The bodies of all but Douglas were later found. In Wympers book he reveals a nightmarish account of the moment the others fell:"Every night, do you understand, I see my comrades of the Matterhorn slipping on their backs, their arms outstretched, one after the other, in perfect order at equal distances—Croz the guide, first, then Hadow, then Hudson, and lastly Douglas. Yes, I shall always see them…"
While discussing this story with Luigi, I was reminded of a passage I read from Sir Chris Bonnington’s climb of Everest, when he described coming across a woman frozen in the glacier on his descent from the summit, buried upto her waist in the ice, half clothed and hair blowing in the wind but her body completely frozen. It was as though as the glacier retreated or melted, she had been exhumed from the ice.
I commented to Luigi that maybe Douglas would eventually be exhumed from the Matterhorn Glacier as we are in such a rapid phase of global warming and the glaciers around the mountain are the smallest they have been for years. He said that bodies have been found many times in the surrounding glaciers trapped from unsuccessful attempts of the local peaks. as the ice retreats.
The most famous 'Glacial Exhumation' was from the thawing of the Similaun glacier, on the Austro-Italian border in 1991 of Otzi, a nomadic hunter who had lived about 5300 years ago.
Nathan referred to this phenomenon as “Body Popping”, which I rather prefer to the macbre title of this entry.
No comments:
Post a Comment