Haute Route Disaster Article from OO

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@valais2, I remember that passage and it did strike me as a little arbitrary. I mean, you could argue that the root cause was him deciding to climb that mountain in the first place! And I’m sure that if you asked him about his packing before the incident, he would have said that going light would allow him to move faster etc which makes it safer…

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@Arno, yes that’s absolutely right … play safe … don’t do a high risk route as they did, particularly jumping in the deep end in South America with an Alpine strategy. The journey up the flutings sounds horrendous. Good to read and light years above my ability. But it’s interesting that ‘desperate to get down’ and ‘ridge traverse manageable but taking much longer than we expected’ was something which is peppered throughout the descent section. So I felt that undue rushing was a feature of the descent. I’ve been there…bad decisions and mistakes easy if you feel you are at risk from being behind schedule. And they had no means of melting snow, so no means of extending the descent by a day or so. But you are right, that all may be too much post-hoc rationalisation.

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@phil_w,

Where did I specifically say those two links were about loss of signal? (I didn't)

"Deliberate jamming" is however mentioned in the second link, this leads to a loss of signal reception.

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A few things that struck me:

#1 The majority of groups seemed to sack off the idea either staying in the Dix for the day or going down. It seems 3 separate groups decided against that. I would be questioning why go against the majority? There was no question that everyone knew a storm was blowing from what I can make out. So why take the risk?

#2 If you do take the risk surely you would inform the hut, colleagues, friends of your plans. There were people in the hut that would surely have gone out to the cairns to try to find them. Would have been quite clear early afternoon there were issues. Just seems like a compounding error.

#3 Seemed like the guide was bloody minded. Was he always like that?

#4 We are told all the time not to rely on tech. My understanding that in bad weather that route is almost impossible (or at least very dangerous) without GPS. So surely the don't rely on tech means you don't go.

#5 Not eating and drinking and continuing on seems another faux pas. I remember reading once that if you are lost you should stop, eat and drink, make a plan. It seemed like they were just ploughing on.

We all make mistakes and get in dicey situations once in a while but you would hope an experienced guide would know much better how to handle the situation. Am I being harsh?

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@Layne, I suspect a lot of this came down to there being no particularly good options once they got a certain way up the Pigne. It’s all glaciated up there so just heading back the way you came would be “non trivial” in zero vis

It doesn’t answer your question of why they didn’t just stay in the Dix hut or head down. It is pretty straightforward getting down to Arolla from there and if memory serves you can get over to Zermatt in a (big) day from Arolla so it wouldn’t have scuppered their plans of completing the route

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This is the PisteHors report: https://pistehors.com/25418532/4-deaths-on-chamonix-zermatt-haute-route

what I remember of the day was that we were skiing in Val d'Isere but had already decided to stop around 2pm because of the forecast and head home. The wind got up around midday and was very strong at altitude but fine in the valleys.

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Those are the shots... I think this is the same place shot in summer 1984, half a century ago, film and 1970s camera technology.

I definitely remember a water pipe somewhere, but I can't see it in any of my old shots, so maybe it wasn't, or maybe it was somewhere else back then.

Those look like the cairns. In the video, from them you could see the hut, on a clear day of course. Looking at them they don't solve the problem for people without electronics. The video also suggests the party were at one point at the far end of the pipe and they knew it. The guide must have known how to get from both of those places to the hut... I guess he was done by then.

The route back from the Dix to Arolla is over the Pas De Chevre. I don't think the video mentions them even considering that in the video. They were of course "on a schedule", a big risky thing.

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4 of us did that same route (guided) a few years ago. After a guides meeting in the Dix Hut, our guide said that the weather forecast for the day was poor, so the 2 other guides had suggested that we all travel together, via the Pigne D'Arolla summit to the Vignette Hut (safety in numbers?) However, the other 2 groups were much faster than us; though when our guide mentioned that, the other 2 said it wasn't a problem and we would still stick together. Our guide discussed it with us and explained that there was an alternative route, via the Pas De Chevre, missing out the Pigne summit - which he said was his preference. We went with our guide's alternative suggestion and then climbed the Pigne the following day (in glorious weather) Very Happy

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This article is so sad and really gave me food for thought, having been there, on that route, in similar circumstances. It really did make me think about how much trust people like us put in guides...

@Bergmeister, who was the guide? Deserves credit for that recommendation IMO! Following a faster group in bad conditions in an exposed area like that does not sound like a sensible idea to me. Just puts everyone at more risk.

You know it makes sense.

Use of guides sounds a bit like use of third parties in IT sometimes. Quite often business management think they don't require management which is false. Especially if it's a new relationship.

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@abc, plus sleeping in refuge. A lot of the French huts are not guarded in the winter and you end up carrying a stove, food etc and it sucks the joy out of the skiing.

It is an issue with guides as you can see the documentary the guide had a job in sardinia following the HR and this perhaps had some bearing on his decisions. Like you, it reminded me of my job where the bosses never want you to have a second of downtime so I rush from one job to another because the only thing that matters is as close to 100% billing in the monthly reports. You need a bit of slack for a well functioning system.

Back to guides, I remember when I climbed Mont Blanc the guided groups had turn back times. Don't reach the final col by 8am, too late for the guide who would reroute to another summit or turn around. My group, the one I was co leading, had an easy schedule from the cosmics of 2 hours to each of the cols. We arrived almost last at the summit at 9am, the other groups had already gone down. We were 4 and the fly in the ointment was the two inexperienced members had both arranged to do stuff that evening ! and wanted to descend as quickly as possible. In the end we arrived back in St Gervais around 9pm. We should probably have returned via the 3 monts blanc as I think we'd have made it fairly easily to the cable car before it shut.

As for staying put. I remember Ken Roberts, who posted on snowheads, told me about a tour he did with the Eagles in the Southern Alps. Ken realised a storm front was coming in and told the group he would head down first thing in the morning and somehow get back to his car. The rest of the group saw a logistical nightmare and said they'd wait out the storm. They waited all week for the weather to clear and the conditions to be safe and ended up following Ken's route down. Ken meanwhile had headed somewhere else to tour.

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@abc, you can base yourself in a hut and do daytours. You can do a point to point tour. You can mix it up. There are indeed lots of variations of the Haute Route and there are lots of haute routes in different parts of the alps.

That’s the beauty of the European hit system - you can make what you want of it

For me, there is a feeling of accomplishment doing a point to point tour by skis (or by bike). It’s great feeling like you have traveled a long distance under your own steam even if (as my group did last year) you end up sharing a EUR600 taxi ride to get back to the beginning

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@abc, It used to be, certainly in summer in the quieter parts of the alps, that you simply turned up at a hut to ask for a place for the night and there was lots of flexibility. In more recent times there has been a big move towards booking places (which was always true in the busier huts on popular routes like the Haute Route, or Mt Blanc) which takes away a good deal of spontaneity and allowance for bad weather etc. It can add to pressure to do a certain route no matter what the conditions so as to keep to hut bookings. I can see how some might see it as all too regimented but there is real pleasure and a sense of achievement in getting from point A to point B whether on skis, walking or bike. Simply basing yourself in a hut for a few days to climb some of the local peaks is not really the same.

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@abc, totally fair - I’ve never done the Haute Route and it’s partly due to my perception of it being rather regimented for the reasons @munich_irish gives. A winter room Haute Route earlier in the season has some appeal…

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Yeah I think it is... lack of flexibility in schedule and route which is where the initial ("root"?) risk comes in. After that it's how you manage it.

You get a similar thing in caving where people have to "book in advance" a cave to descend... and then the weather doesn't cooperate, but they take the risk because they won't be able to get back there for a long time if they don't. Those things affect risk taking. I note however that in the video that the guide House takes specific extra precautions. I'd be surprised if that isn't a fairly common occurrence, he didn't seem to think that either the weather or his response to it were remarkable. That's the professional guide doing his job, I'd say. He knew he could do it in a white out, but only if he had a complete recent GPS track.

Even decades ago we avoided the High Route because it was busy with those guided groups. There are lots of other places to go. When I first went to Monument Valley I hated it - it was a dusty place full of tourists, and the good stuff was too far away. Then I went with a local who knew how to get to the places the tourists don't know about. Then I got it.

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The so called "Haute Route" is just some tourist thing that guides sell as a trip to punters. There are plenty of trips you can do without fighting for bunk space with snoring French ski tourers.

You know it makes sense.

But few touring days in the Alps match Vignettes to Zermatt IME. And the fact that it is well travelled means you can do it in relative security without a guide (in good weather)

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

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@davidof, ...re snoring I had worse in the Bertol Hut. Up there with the kids and the French guy next to me, in his sleep, suddenly rolled over and grabbed me in an embrace. Argh!

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@Tristero, great link to SRF/youtube vid. Thanks

When you see the route to hut at approx. 4:10 I was thinking I wouldn't be exactly keen in good conditions (I hate heights/exposure).

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If you stay in a hut for longer than you booked because of weather or some other reason, you can end up sleeping on the benches in the public areas or on the floor using your spare clothes and rucksack as bedding / pillow. Trust me, this is less than comfortable. Weathering a bit of a storm to get to a bed can be a lot more attractive. The storm came approx. 4 hours earlier than expected.

These tech Gadgets can always screw up just when you need them, that‘s why you should always check & test them just before a major tour. e.g. After using my Garmin Fenix 6 watch for years it suddenly lost the maps recently. Of course I only realised this while trying to use it. Another time Garmin was hacked by the Russians. A map (real paper or downloaded) and compass should always be taken in the high mountains.

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Most people do the Haute route starting on the weekend and going with the masses. I‘d only consider it starting midweek.
Prefer routes off the beaten track, away from the crowds which are more physically challenging myself.

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If the weather’s bad most people cancel and the huts are half empty so it’s rarely an issue to stay an extra night due to bad weather and shift subsequent reservations. I don’t understand the logistics concerns? The huts are well stocked and with merino undies and base layers you can travel very light so apart from your toothbrush there’s no additional luggage to carry. Don’t knock the Haute Route until you’ve done it - in good weather and with a nice group of friends it’s a cracking experience.

After all it is free · Last edited by After all it is free on Sun 7-05-23 10:38; edited 1 time in total

Can I just return to the issue of psychology of group guiding…

This SPIEGEL article is quite a nice piece of old fashioned investigative journalism:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/that-s-it-we-re-dead-disaster-strikes-along-the-alps-haute-route-a-1220184.html

It includes some details additional to the other articles quoted so far. This quote began to ring some bells for me:

Tommaso Piccioli says the guide, Mario Castiglioni, made fatal errors. He wasn't sufficiently equipped and didn't know the route. Piccioli says he's fighting to ensure this accident is not without consequence. Strict rules could be imposed for guides, for instance. "It's hard to talk about this," he says. But he does so anyway -- not least for his friend, Betti. "She died because of someone else's mistakes."

For Lisa Hagen, the matter of who is to blame isn't quite as clear. She says she knew Mario Castiglioni to be a responsible guide. He doesn't have the opportunity now to defend the choices he made. That's why she decided to speak up.

So….

I have done days with professional guides and there are some key reasons for using them, in my view.

1
they know an area or route inside out - they know the local avalanche risks, they know the terrain, they know where they are when things get tricky. Now I know that even centimetre-perfect knowledge can be confounded by white out and storm. But I have been in places in those conditions and - even under a lot of time pressure and fatigue - have navigated using a combination of strong mental model of location, dead reckoning, calculation of distance, compass and map, and gps. The thing in there is a model of where you should be. You need to know the place or route. That’s a strong reason for getting a guide: they know a route or area that you don’t.

2
They have a higher level of general mountain craft than you. Are they on top of route finding, decision-making, avalanche evaluation, kit use, contingency management, time-keeping, team evaluation and many more. If your level of mountaincraft is the same as the guide's, then they are essentially just an expensive same-status member of the group.

3
They have kit which you don’t have; for beginners, avalanche gear, axes, harnesses etc. For experts, satellite phones etc.

Question here…how many times had the guide done the route? If they had no or sparse direct knowledge of the route or specific demanding sections such as the descent and traverse to the Vignettes , then the only reason for the guide being there are reasons 2 and 3. I think this a quite a big deal.

I have done some big days with someone who thinks they are an excellent route finder and nav expert and who ALWAYS makes a mistake late in the day when they are tired. One trip (not with me) involved a descent into the wrong valley, which turned a nice day into a risky epic. My remedy when with him is to navigate in parallel by myself - it annoys the hell out of him but tough, on more than one occasion it has meant possibly live-saving and certainly time-saving ‘that’s not the right way’ moments.

It is hard not to be sympathetic with Tommaso Piccioli's opinion. The guide has "devoir de diligence" under swiss federal law and Mario Castiglioni broke this on a number of levels. I'll post a link here for people to make up their own minds: https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/2013/87/fr

and I think Steve House was sailing close to the wind. It would have been interesting to know what backup plan he had if the GPS had failed. It seems like retracing steps down the Serpentine is non-trivial.

It is interesting that the storm broke much earlier on the HR than where I was in Val d'Isere where it was very windy but still clear at 3000m at midday.

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@davidof, very useful link - many thanks

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Haute Route Disaster Article from OO

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