HotmailWidow wants answers after Mount Hood death
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Fall complicated climb
At about 10,500 feet, Karen James wrote in her book, one of the climbers, probably her husband, fell and was injured. All three were left "twisted and dangling from the same rope," she wrote.
Wampler said that while James probably fell, it is impossible to be sure whether the two others did as well. Marks on James' body were consistent with a long, steep ice slide.
They were somehow able to recover and resume their climb up the couloir. At the top of it, they dug out a platform, where they probably rested.
Tracks show they then climbed to the summit, roped together, with the injured man between the two others. The storm was so bad the three couldn't find a way down, Wampler said, so they dropped down 300 feet or so the way they had come up and dug out a snow cave for the night.
Probably early Dec. 9, Cooke and Hall went for help, leaving the injured James in the snow cave. Someone who was supposed to pick them up at a lodge that day told authorities on Dec. 10 that they had not come down.
Wampler and Steve Rollins of Portland Mountain Rescue called Karen James and began rounding up volunteer searchers.
Zero visibility for searchers
When Kelly James got through to his wife and sons Dec. 10, Karen James also had Wampler on another phone line. She told the sheriff her husband was "very weak and holed up in a cave somewhere," according to a recording of the conversation supplied by the sheriff's office to The AP.
She told Wampler the three had reached the summit, but "they're all split up now," and Hall had gone to seek help.
"Can you get him tonight?" she asked the sheriff.
"We'll get 'em started tonight. It's going to take us awhile," Wampler replied.
Search crews started before dawn on Dec. 11 but were turned back by the storm.
"I remember on the first day out on the mission we had almost zero visibility," Rollins said. "It occurred to me that if I can't even see the ground underneath my feet we hardly had a chance of finding any evidence" of the missing climbers.
35 lives lost in 25 years
No real break in the weather came until Dec. 16. Searchers found the cave with Kelly James' body in it the next day, along with his cell phone and camera, goggles, his pack and peels from an orange. The search for his companions was called off four days later.
Autopsy results indicated that James probably died of hypothermia within a couple of days.
Mount Hood remains an invitingly white icon on Portland's eastern horizon, seemingly made for postcards. But in 25 years it has claimed at least 35 lives.
Karen James says she is past the worst of her grief and that she knows her family will be reunited in heaven. But she has not returned to Mount Hood.
"A lot of people see this big beautiful thing," she said. "I can't help but just see a beast."
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