Late in the afternoon and lightly snowing, four rock climbers were making their way up a steep gully between two peaks in Washington’s North Cascades Range. They chose to turn around and go down the mountain, which is what killed three of them.
As they went down, the four people connected their ropes to a piton that had already been set up by another climber. A piton is a metal spike pounded into rock cracks or ice to hold ropes in place. As one of the men started to rappel off the piton, it came loose from the mountain and all four of them fell through snow, ice, and rocks.
About 200 feet (60 meters) below, they fell and landed in a steeper ravine. They slid for another 200 feet and stopped in a mess of ropes.
The fall killed three. One person was knocked out.
It was dark when Anton Tselykh woke up. It had been hours since the fall.
He got out of the mess of ropes, gear, and other things that were in the way over the next few hours. He then walked to his car over rough rock and snow terrain with the help of an ice tool that looked like a pick.
He drove for about 40 miles (64 kilometers) before he found a pay phone in Newhalem, an unincorporated town about an hour’s drive away. He called for help there. It had been eight hours since he woke up on Sunday morning.
Tselykh told the police what happened from a hospital in Seattle on Wednesday morning. He was still healing from head injuries and internal bleeding. Susan Gregg, who is in charge of media relations for UW Medicine, said in an email that he was in good enough health at Harborview Medical Center and not in the critical care unit.
The 38-year-old Tselykh agreed with the police’s ideas about what killed his three friends, who were named as Vishnu Irigireddy (48), Tim Nguyen (63), and Oleksander Martynenko (36).
After Tselykh’s call, a search and rescue team of three people went to the scene of the fall, said Cristina Woodworth, who led the team and talked to the only survivor on the phone Wednesday. The team used coordinates from a GPS device the climbers were carrying. These coordinates were given to them by one of the men’s friends.
Because of the rough terrain, the bodies had to be taken away one at a time by chopper, Woodworth said.
Responders looked through the found gear to try to figure out what went wrong. Police in Okanogan County said that the piton was still attached to the hikers’ ropes when they found it. He said it was hard to get the pins out of the rock, and the anchor on the rope was a sign of what had happened.
Joshua Cole, co-owner and guide of North Cascades Mountain Guides and a climber in the area for about 20 years, said that putting up a backup anchor is something that most climbers do. It’s still not clear if the four had a back-up.
Woodworth said that the four climbers were friends and that some of them had climbed together before. They also seemed pretty experienced. He also said that Tselykh was “obviously very much affected by this.”
The test equipment company Fluke Corporation said in a statement Wednesday that Irigireddy was vice president of engineering there.
In the statement, it said, “Vishnu was an amazing leader, and his loss is deeply felt across our organization.”
Martynenko’s wife, Olga, said Tuesday in a Facebook post that her husband, whom she referred to as Alex, also left behind their boy. She sent a link to a fundraiser that would help “during the worst time of our lives.”
“My love, I still can’t believe you’re gone.”