ICE, ANXIOUS WAITING, AND A SECOND DEATH
Originally Published at The Nature Magazine.
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In 1979, a 27-year-old Briton plunged to his death on the Matterhorn. His sisters must wait 34 years for the glacier to release his body.
Frans Heusdens steps outside the tiny Solvay hut on the northeastern ridge of the Matterhorn – 4,003 metres above sea level, 475 metres below the summit – and looks down to where the lights of Zermatt should be shining bright. Yet the young Dutchman cannot see anything. It’s dark, and his view is blocked by thick clouds.
Not a sound can be heard, even the wind is finally still. Suddenly, the clouds begin to glow. Yellow. Red. Blue. In all kinds of colours. ‘Am I hallucinating?’ Then he remembers that it’s New Year’s Eve – 31 December 1979. The colours are caused by fireworks; the sound is swallowed by the clouds. Frans Heusdens is alone. His companion Jonathan Conville fell off a rock three days and seven hours ago, only 20 metres from the emergency hut.
Inside, there is a 2-way radio, but it doesn’t work when it’s 25 degrees below zero. For days, the weather has been so bad that he has been unable to alert anyone.
MEETING UNDER EXTREME CONDITIONS
Down in the valley, the mountain rescuer Hermann Biner is celebrating New Year’s Eve. The 27-year-old doesn’t know yet that in a few hours’ time he’ll be called up to search for a missing mountain climber on the Matterhorn glacier. Nobody in Zermatt has noticed what has happened up at the Solvay hut.
Only Paula Biner, at the Hotel Bahnhof, has a bad feeling: the Dutchman and Briton, who left more than six days ago to climb the Matterhorn north face, have still not returned. The hotel is like a ‘home’ for young mountain climbers. When visibility is good, Paula Biner accompanies the climbers’ ascent with her binoculars. Not this time. The weather conditions weren’t good enough.
Down in the valley, the mountain rescuer Hermann Biner is celebrating New Year’s Eve. The 27-year-old doesn’t know yet that in a few hours’ time he’ll be called up to search for a missing mountain climber on the Matterhorn glacier. Nobody in Zermatt has noticed what has happened up at the Solvay hut. Only Paula Biner, at the Hotel Bahnhof, has a bad feeling: the Dutchman and Briton, who left more than six days ago to climb the Matterhorn north face, have still not returned. The hotel is like a ‘home’ for young mountain climbers.
When visibility is good, Paula Biner accompanies the climbers’ ascent with her binoculars. Not this time. The weather conditions weren’t good enough. conquer the mountain via the same route as all the others, but via the north face. In winter. Only a few mountain climbers had achieved that so far. There’s ice and snow everywhere, the days are short, and the risk of avalanches is high.
There are hardly any anchor points in the almost vertical wall. But Frans and John want to prove that they’re in the same league as Alan Rouse, Alex MacIntyre, and all the other extreme mountain climbers of that time. The two men had met at the north face of the Petit Dru in Chamonix. The weather had been terrible and they’d had to bivouac.
Lightning had struck the rock over and over again, just 50 metres from Frans and John, and the stone had become searing hot. They survived and decided to climb together from that day onwards. The more extreme, the better: the west face of the Aiguille de Blaitière, the Bonatti pillar or the Mont Blanc du Tacul – they conquered almost everything there was to conquer around Chamonix at the time.
NAME TAGS IN THEIR UNDERWEAR
Frans and John say goodbye to Paula Biner on the morning of Christmas Day 1979. They go up to the Schwarzsee lake by cable car around 11am, put on their skis, and climb up to the mountain station at the Hörnli lift. From there they climb towards the Hörnli hut, always along the ridge. They spend the night above the Hirli [local expression for Matterhorn] and reach the Hörnli hut the following morning, around 3,260 metres above sea level.
Frans has been climbing since the age of twelve, and John is also ready for the summit. He is different from the rest of his family; not like his parents or younger sisters Katrina and Melissa. He loves mountain climbing and hates school. He is not interested in a career in the pharmaceutical industry like his father. He’d rather join the army – the Parachute Regiment, an elite unit for only the strongest men.
Later, he moves to Scotland with the intention of training as an outdoor instructor. Jonathan has a dark sense of humour – he loves Monty Python. Before his first night jump as a paratrooper, he secretly packs a paper bag filled with mince meat and potatoes.
Everyone in the plane is nervous. Soon they will all have to jump into black nothingness. Jonathan pretends to feel ill, holds the bag to his mouth and pretends to be violently sick. A short while later he calmly starts to eat the content of the bag. When the others begin to feel sick, Jonathan breaks out into loud laughter.
They are ready for their ascent on the morning of 27 December 1979. Frans takes a last photo of John in front of the Hörnli hut. With his thick beard and bushy eyebrows, the Briton looks older than he is. He is wearing his red jacket, blue hard shell trousers and a woolly hat, and carrying a backpack and a rope. Shortly before his departure, his mother had insisted on sewing name tags into his socks and underwear.
After climbing for six hours, they set up their bivouac when they reach the couloir and wait for the night to pass. It is bitterly cold. John wears two pairs of gloves. It takes them almost the entire next day to reach the upper end of the couloir. Only 500 more metres to the summit. It will be dark soon. They decide to set up their bivouac.
But then the bag with the gas cooker and the entire supplies for the next few days plunges down the steep cliff. Without the cooker they cannot melt snow, have nothing to drink. From one second to the next, the summit becomes unreachable, yet descent is impossible. They have no choice: they must get across to the Solvay hut, even though the traverse is much more difficult than the direct ascent would have been.
They try, but have to abort their attempt as the gneiss is too brittle, and agree to abseil first, and then climb up to the emergency hut.
The rock appears to be safe; it is almost as large as a train coach. Frans fastens a rope and abseils first. Two metres. Three metres. John stands above him. It is just after 5pm, night has already started to fall. Suddenly, the rock begins to slide. Frans falls, crashes sideways into the rock, and his crampons break into several pieces.
He manages to hold on, but the rock on which John is standing separates from the Matterhorn and crashes 700 metres downhill. Frans doesn’t hear John scream. He doesn’t see him fall, because it’s already dark. But he is sure that John didn’t make it. It is impossible for him still to be alive. He calls his name: ‘John!’. He calls again, but his voice is swallowed by the howling wind and heavy snowfall.
GLACIAL ARCHAEOLOGY
WITNESSES OF THE PAST
As glaciers retreat, the past is brought to the surface. Equipment, tools and articles of clothing give us information about how people used to live in the past. The ice can preserve objects and even human bodies for hundreds, even thousands of years. The window of opportunity for glacier archaeologists is limited to just a few weeks in late summer. What is visible today, could already be covered by snow or debris tomorrow.
In 2013, the Institute for Cultural Research in Graubünden launched the initiative ‘kAltes Eis’ (‘cOld Ice’) with the aim of recovering items from glaciers before the onset of decomposition. Alpinists are encouraged to report finds straight away. www.kalteseis.com The South Tirol Archaeology Museum in Bozen is showing a special exhibition of discoveries in the Alpine Glaciers – among others, ‘Theo’ from the 16th century (see ‘Discoveries in the Alpine Glaciers’, p.26). ‘Frozen Stories’ will be shown until 22 February 2015. www.iceman.it/de
NEW SNOW COVERS ALL TRACKS
John has fallen to his death, but he, Frans, is alive. ‘Shit, I survived.’ He mustn’t enter a state of shock – that would mean death. Two hours later, Frans arrives at the Solvay hut. The 2-way radio doesn’t work. He holds out for one night, survives another. And another. There is nothing to eat or drink in the hut. He tries to keep warm, sleeps in his sleeping bag most of the time, covered in blankets.
He dreams of chicken and coke. It is only on New Year’s Eve that the weather begins to calm down. He steps outside and sees the clouds glowing in various colours.
Nine hours later, Air Zermatt receives Frans’ emergency call. On Tuesday 1 January 1980, at 10.30am, the 18-year-old Dutchman is flown out of the Solvay hut. He has lost almost 12 kilograms and has slight frostbite on his ears, but no bones are broken.
Three hours later, Hermann Biner and a policeman are set down at the Matterhorn glacier, 700 metres below the site of the accident. He knows that it’s impossible for the Briton to have survived the fall. They use probe poles to carefully search the snow. The crevasses are covered in new snow. Hermann Biner has recovered many bodies in his time. There have been years when 20 or more mountain climbers lost their lives.
One gets used to it. And one doesn’t get used to it. The Briton’s body could be anywhere – 20, maybe 40 metres deep in a crevasse. Or in the cleft between the glacier and the rock. Or somewhere completely different. They find a glove, and a bivouac sack. They give up after a few hours. It’s pointless. RECOVERED FROM THE ICE: Ice Pick & Crampons 500 METRES BELOW THE
500 METRES BELOW THE SUMMIT:
jonathan conville fell to his death on 28 december; frans heusdens made it to the solvay hut
RECOVERED FROM THE ICE:
Ice Pick & Crampons
HOPE AND GRIEF
On the same night, in a cottage near London, Anne Conville hears on the 7 o’clock news that two mountain climbers have had an accident, with only one survivor. Half an hour later she calls the police in Zermatt to find out if the casualty is her son. The policeman confirms that it is. She wants to send out search parties – they have to find her son. Perhaps he’s still alive.
Perhaps he managed to get to a cave somewhere. Perhaps he’s trapped in a crevasse and unable to get out. Perhaps he’s trying to descend the mountain and needs help.
Even weeks later, she is still writing letters to the police in Zermatt and to the mountain rescuer Hermann Biner. She hopes that the glacier will release her son’s body in the summer. If only she knew where Jonathan is. If only they’d find him, his body at least. Maybe then she’d be able to understand that he is no longer alive. Truly understand. But like this? At some point, the letters from London stop coming.
Jonathan’s sisters Katrina and Melissa are unable to mourn for their brother. Only years later do the emotions and the pain rise to the surface. They don’t want to burden their parents even more; try to fill the gap that Jonathan has left behind. They set up the Jonathan Conville Memorial Trust (‘In the Name of the Son’). As long as she lives, Anne Conville never gets over the loss of her son.
MANY REPORTED MISSING AT THE MATTERHORN
In Zermatt, the story of the young Briton is slowly forgotten. Other sons fall to their death, other mothers write. The most frequent letters are from the mother of a Czech climber, who went missing in the 1990s. On 21 August 2013, the Air-Zermatt pilot Gerold Biner thinks he has discovered the mountain climber by accident. It is 2pm, and Biner is on a transport flight to the Hörnli hut.
He lets his gaze wander across the terrain as he always does when the glacier is free of snow in late summer. Twenty-eight mountain climbers have been reported missing at the Matterhorn since 1951, and many more went missing in the years before, when no records were kept. However, Gerold Biner is only looking for one: the Matterhorn’s first climber Lord Douglas, who fell off the north face 148 ago and is the only one of his party of four whose body has not been found.
Gerold Biner’s expert eye registers anything unusual immediately – anything that stands out in the landscape, even small items like a sock, or inconspicuous ones like an ice pick. First he spots something red, and then a hand. It can’t be Lord Douglas – mountain climbers did not wear red clothing in the 19th century. Gerold Biner alerts the police straight away. Shortly afterwards, he and a policeman are set down at the foot of the mountain’s glacier, 1,200 metres below the Solvay hut.
The red jacket is covered in milky glacier sand, but otherwise almost intact. All fingernails are still on the mummified hand. They also find blue hard shell trousers, crampons, a broken ice pick, cotton underwear, a green water bottle, a tattered yellow tent, and a packet of dehydrated food with a Chinese label. A few metres further on they find a plastic shoe, along with a foot and sock. They don’t find a scull.
They pack everything into a bag and take it to a forensic pathologist in Sitten. Gerold Biner is convinced to have found the missing Czech. Had he flown over the glacier just a few days later, the red jacket may have been buried under glacier sand, debris or snow again.
At the end of August 2013, Katrina receives an email. ‘My name is Bettina Schrag. I am the forensic pathologist in Sitten and responsible for the Matterhorn region’, it says. And: ‘Please could you contact me?’ Katrina feels sick to her stomach, her heart is racing. She calls Melissa straight away.
THE LAST PICTURE:
Jonathan Conville outside the Hörnli hut on 27 December 1979
THEY HOLD HIS HAND AFTER 34 YEARS
And all of a sudden, all the emotions that have disappeared from their consciousness over the past 34 years come back: they are shocked, confused. Everyone will say: ‘It’s a miracle!’ But there is no joy; at first there is just anger. ‘Unlike our mother, I didn’t want them to find him’, says Katrina. ‘The Matterhorn was the perfect grave for Jonathan.’ The sisters travel to Sitten on 30 August.
They provide a DNA sample – a simple cheek swab is sufficient. These days, relatives do this as soon as a mountain climber is reported missing, but at the time of Jonathan Conville’s accident, this was still science fiction. Dozens of boxes containing bones are in storage in Sitten, with little hope of ever finding out who they belong to.
Soon they will be allowed to see their brother, after 34 years. They are nervous. Melissa is 53, Katrina is 56, and Jonathan is still 27. They are allowed into the room, a plain office. He is lying on a table, with the tall mountains visible behind him through the window. Jonathan had plunged into the cleft between glacier and rock, and had been pushed along stones and rocks for about 1,000 metres, buried under tons of ice. The body is no longer complete, only a few bones and an almost intact hand are left.
Katrina and Melissa hold the hand of their brother who died 34 years ago. It is a moving moment – incredibly sad, but also incredibly beautiful. They sit with him for an hour. Jonathan’s belongings are tidily arranged on another table, as though he had put them out for his next mountain tour. Name tags are sewn into his underwear and socks: ‘Conville’, it says.
The forensic pathologist had googled the name and come across the Jonathan Conville Memorial Trust’s website. On it, she found a photograph of a man with a thick beard, a red jacket, blue hard shell trousers, and a rope – it all matched. Melissa had uploaded the last photograph of her brother only a few weeks earlier.
Melissa and Katrina have no doubts: this is Jonathan. Yet it takes another two months until the forensic pathologist confirms that his DNA profile matches that of his sisters. Jonathan Conville died twice: the date given on his coffin was 21 August 2013; but at the cemetery for mountain climbers in Zermatt, where his ashes are buried, 29 December 1979 is engraved into his grave stone.
On 5 September 2013, Melissa and Katrina track down Frans Heusdens. After the accident he continued to climb routes so dangerous that thinking about them today sends a shiver down his spine. ‘Why not? I was aware of the potentially fatal risks, just as John was.’ He knows that this sounds harsh. But that is how it was. A few days ago, Frans turned 53. Sometimes he dreams of the accident.
They are not nightmares, but dreams about details. In those dreams he can see himself, hanging alone on the rope, after John had fallen off the rock, into darkness. He can even smell the rock.
DISCOVERIES IN THE ALPINE GLACIERS
AEROPLANE: GAULI GLACIER, 2012
On 19 November 1946, an American Dakota C-53 crashes on the Gauli Glacier. Six days later, all twelve passengers are rescued in a spectacular rescue mission. It is followed with great interest around the world and is considered the birth of Alpine air rescue. After that, the Dakota disappears into the ice – until teenagers discover a propeller 66 years later.
SKELETONS: ALETSCH GLACIER, 2012
Four mountain climbers from the Lötschen Valley in the Aletsch region have been missing since March 1926. In June 2012, a tourist couple discovers the remains of three humans – the three missing brothers that have been missing for 86 years. The fourth member of their group has still not been found.
ARROWS AND QUIVERS: SCHNIDEJOCH, 2003
A married couple from Thun discover a piece of birch bark, which turns out to be the lid of a quiver that held bows and arrows more than 4,500 years ago. One year later, pieces of a pair of trousers, arrows and a cup are found on the Schnidejoch. Only the owner of these items remains missing. He would be at least 1,000 years older than Ötzi, the glacier mummy from South Tirol.
SKELETON: THEODUL GLACIER, 1985
A sword, a dagger, a flint gun, several knives, remains of clothes and shoes, as well as parts of the skeleton of an approximately 45-year-old man were discovered on the eastern edge of the Theodul Glacier, south of Zermatt, between 1985 and 1990. The man, known as Theo, was carrying several coins that had been minted between 1575 and 1588.
IN THE NAME OF THE SON
JONATHAN CONVILLE MEMORIAL TRUST
Shortly after Jonathan Conville’s death, his family founded a charitable trust to enable men and women between 18 and 30 years of age to take part in mountaineering courses. Already, thousands have been able to learn the basics of mountain climbing with the help of professional teachers. The trust encourages safe practice in mountaineering to prevent accidents. The ConvilleCourses are supported by the British Mountaineering Council and private donations.
Jonathan Conville’s sisters:
Melissa Conville (left) and Katrina Taee