Three King County residents died in a North Cascades rock climbing accident over the weekend when their equipment failed as they rappelled down the side of a steep gully near North Early Winters Spire, about 16 miles west of Mazama, the Okanogan County sheriff's office said.
After falling hundreds of feet, a fourth climber sustained internal bleeding and a traumatic brain injury, but survived. He walked back to the trailhead just east of Washington Pass and drove to Newhalem, where he used a pay phone to call 911 at about 11:30 a.m. Sunday. He was taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Okanogan County Undersheriff David Yarnell said by phone Monday.
"He didn't realize he had as significant of internal injuries as he did," Yarnell said.
The sheriff's office has not released the names of the climbers who died, but said they were 36, 47 and 63 years old, according to a statement the agency posted on social media on Monday. Two of the three lived in Renton and one lived in Bellevue, Yarnell said. The Okanogan County coroner did not immediately respond to phone and email inquiries Monday.
(Frank Mina / The Seattle Times)
The four were rock climbing in the Early Winter Couloir and started descending in the wedge between the north and south spires after noticing a storm coming in, Yarnell said.
The couloir is a mixed climb along a ribbon of snow and ice that splits the North and South Early Winters Spires, said Joshua Cole, co-owner of North Cascade Mountain Guides.
Conditions in mixed alpine routes like the Early Winter Couloirs can vary not only month to month, but also by the time of day, Cole said. Climbing those routes requires various techniques and equipment such as ice tools and rope. Variables like weather, how clear it was overnight, snowfall and the number of warm days we've had in the spring can make the route more or less dangerous.
"This route that they were on, there was no exception to that," Cole said. "Even a very experienced climber could head up to this route expecting certain conditions and find them to be different."
The fall happened either late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, said Cristina Woodworth, head of the sheriff's search and rescue team.
Woodworth said the climbers fell about 400 feet.
"It seems like they fell through pretty steep vertical terrain for about 200 feet and then about 200 more feet of kind of tumbling, moderate terrain," she said in an interview late Monday.
It took the survivor "a number of hours to self-extricate" from the fall site and walk back to his vehicle, which he had parked near a "user trail," often referred to as "the hairpin" and that goes up to Kangaroo Pass, Woodworth said by phone Monday.
All four were tied to the same anchor point, which Yarnell said is "not preferred." Investigators will try to determine whether the climbers were using a preexisting anchor point, or their own gear.
"All we know is that the anchor point that they were all tied off to failed," Yarnell said.
After examining the equipment late Monday, Woodworth said it appeared the anchor point — known as a piton — ripped out of the rock.
"You could be climbing a route and come across a piton that was placed decades ago, even," she said.
Two sheriff's deputies and the agency's search and rescue coordinator were first to respond to the scene. The Snohomish County helicopter rescue team extricated the three who died from the "technical, mountainous terrain," according to the Okanogan County sheriff's office's statement.
Seattle Times reporter Gregory Scruggs contributed to this story.
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