In temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius, exhausted and dragging his injured friend to safety high up a Himalayan mountain, there was never any question in Ben Dare’s mind of leaving his mate behind.
The 29-year-old Queenstown structural engineer and his still-recovering climbing buddy, Scott Scheele, 24, arrived back in New Zealand yesterday, almost two weeks after the dramatic 36-hour rescue. The pair said it was simply a "relief" to be home.
Scheele, an American working as a Fox Glacier guide, can only remember snippets of the ordeal.
He and Dare were part of a team of four mountaineers planning to tackle Anidesha Chuli, called the "White Wave", in one of the most remote regions of the Himalayas.
The pair had set out from the group’s Camp-2, at an altitude of 6000m, about 3.30am on May 4.
At 3.30pm, when they had reached about 6450m, Scheele fell about 90m.
Dare said the first he knew of the accident was when he noticed the ropes, instead of going up to where Scheele had been climbing above him, were hanging down.
It was snowing, but in a brief clear moment he saw Scheele hanging about 45m below – upside down and unconscious.
"After seeing how far he had come down, I was fearing the worst," Dare said.
By the time Dare secured the ropes and made his way down, Scheele had "started to make a bit of noise" – something met with "overwhelming relief" on Dare’s part.
"I was just glad to see he was alive," he said.
Dare believes Scheele fell while transitioning from climbing on ice to snow on the crest of a ridge.
He either fell into loose snow or triggered an avalanche.
The impact split Scheele’s helmet in two.
Over the next 36 hours, Dare lowered Scheele down the mountain face one rope length at a time, then abseiled down and repeated the process.
Dare said he was telling himself: "Don't rush anything, don't panic. Just take it step by step, each rope length one at a time."
The next day, reaching the base of the face, and still a few hundred metres from the camp, both were exhausted.
With oxygen levels about 45 per cent of that at sea level, Dare half-carried, half-dragged Scheele and his pack through knee-to-thigh-deep snow back to camp, where a helicopter crew – "a bunch of Italian guys" – was called in to fly Scheele to Kathmandu.
Dare spent the next nearly two weeks waiting at the hospital before Scheele was well enough to be discharged and head home.
Scheele said, for his part, the entire rescue and the first week he spent in hospital was "a blur".
"I pretty much remember just what I've been told," he said.
Scheele’s injuries were mainly "mental" from the knock to the side of the head, and he had been told it may take many months for memories of the incident to return.
Other than that, he escaped with minor cuts and scrapes.
Both men planned to get back climbing sooner rather than later.
"It’s one of those unfortunate things. Accidents do happen," Dare said.
