Another death on Mt Washington

Strange that I haven't seen it posted many places, especially on Mt Washington's rescue site, but it appears there's another unfortunate death.

An older man in his 60's was with his son descending from the summit towards Tuckerman Ravine, and he fell into a deep crevasse. Rescue services lowered workers into the crevasse but couldn't find him and couldn't reach the bottom of the crevasse safely. This happened the Sunday before Easter, they couldn't find him 4 days after the fall, and I have seen no stories posted about it since.

This time of year the mountain is particularly dangerous, with snow bridged crevasses, undermined snow, avalanches, ice fall, rock fall, etc.

I'm going Sunday but I won't take any un-needed risks, the weather forecast is looking pretty poor, and avalanche warnings have been considerable for days now. I could have my try on Washington foiled again...

Yeah, me and my buddy were planning to head up there the last weekend of March but our ladies coerced us into taking us to see Keller Williams in Burlington instead. Not a bad tradeoff. Then whenChristy heard about the accident last weekend she tried making a "no Mt Washington in winter" rule. It scares the heck out of her everytime I go there. With good reason.

I heard about this about a week ago. After having considered the "traverse" and seeing the amount of incidents on Washington this year I will persue a summer or fall option for that trip.

-MJG

This incident was posted on VFTT's New England forum with a number of responses.

sad news

iClimb, did you ever get to come out and try Mt Hood?

no sage. I will eventually get out that way when funds permit it. I'm only a couple months out from finishing up my residency and grad school and I plan on climbing denali by age 35. So there will certainly be the need to come out west at least once to get in some high altitude experience to see how I react before denali.

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