:28:00
So he would stop me.
:28:02
I would stand on my
left leg, my good leg,
:28:04
so that I could get
the weight off the rope.
:28:07
I gave him enough slack to
be able to unclip the rope
:28:10
thread the rope back through the lowering
device, with the knot on the other side
:28:14
clip it back to himself and
lower me the remaining 50m.
:28:25
He'd make himself reasonably secure,
and I down climbed to join him.
:28:30
And we'd repeat the process again.
:28:36
Simon was trying to lower me fast,
:28:38
and it meant that my foot kept jabbing
in and jabbing in and bending the knee.
:28:44
Excruciatingly painful.
:28:46
I can remember feeling angry with
him because he was hurting me,
:28:49
and I was thinking "do it slow",
:28:51
and I also knew that he had to do
it this fast. He hadn't got a choice.
:28:56
And he was very grim faced,
I remember looking at him,
:29:02
wondering if he was pissed
off with the whole thing.
:29:07
I couldn't take too much notice
unfortunately of these cries of pain,
:29:11
because we got to go down.
:29:20
We would dig these holes from
the sitting in the powder snow,
:29:23
and they would last about the length
of the time it took to lower me.
:29:27
And in fact they were
crumbling around him.
:29:30
And he was lowering me on a 9mm,
well 8.8mm rope. That's that thick.
:29:33
But hands sort of frozen.
:29:36
What he did was quite extraordinary,
:29:38
and I've never heard of any single
handed mountain rescue like that.
:29:56
We were now lowering in a full storm. I
don't know what the wind chill factor was,
:29:59
but it would be like -80
or something like that.