Complete: Memories of a Climb

By Michael French

One man's personal account of the first alpine-style ascent of the Messner Route on the South Face of Aconcagua.

In early 1980, three men set out to summit the highest peak in the Southern Hemisphere - Argentina's Aconcagua, standing at 22,838 feet. The trio would ascend via the Messner Route on the South Face, a route that had

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael French
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798987408711

Michael French

Michael French is an adventurer and a calculated risk-taker with a live-life-to-its fullest attitude and roll-with-the punches spirit. After a distinguished military career and retirement from the United States Air Force, Mike served in the State Department as a foreign service officer. The combination of experiences that colored his younger years in the military, the events of his second career, and the fortitude gained from his adrenaline-pumping hobbies have made him into who he is today. Now spending much of his time on the water, and with the energy of a teenager, Mike maintains and sails his beloved Ericson sailboat on the waters of Southern California and beyond, days, weeks and sometimes months at a time. When not at sea or at the marina, Mike resides in the coastal town of Encinitas with his wife, Patty, who indulges Mike's desire to explore and push limits, understanding and accepting that Mike hasn't yet "got it out of his system." Insta; sv_PeregrineHeart

Book preview

Late Spring / Summer 1979

1

Beginnings

Portland, Oregon

304th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron

U.S. Air Force Reserve (USAFR)

Icould hear the APU (auxiliary power unit) crank up right outside my office window and knew that the maintenance guys were about to do an engine run up on one of our helicopters. Soon, the tips of its rotor blades would be spinning some 20 feet from my desk, making everything inside this part of the PJ building dance. Thought and conversation on my side of the building would be difficult at best. Time to wander next door to Operations and chat.

Just about then the phone rang, and in 1979, you did the very best you could to actually answer the phone. There was no call back feature, no caller ID, no way to know who was wanting a piece of your time. It turned out to be Brian Berg, a friend and fellow PJ, and by all accounts a bit of a wild character, but then most of us were sort of wild by normal standards. I had to tell him I would call him back as I could barely hear what he was saying. All I could make out was crazy project and stupendous.

By now though, the Huey’s engine had spun up to 100% and the engine noise, combined with the rotor noise, were the only things one could hear. Hoping he could hear me, I repeated that I’d call him back and hung up.

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Air Force Rescue was, and is, an interesting subset within the USAF and U.S. military. Primarily dedicated to combat search and rescue, units are often tasked with special missions, and on a not-to-interfere basis, may also do civilian SAR (Search and Rescue). And we do civilian SAR very well.

Within this subset are some of the best people in the Air Force, be they admin and maintenance or pilots and crew. Those personnel who have actual hands-on contact with people rescued or things recovered are known as Pararescuemen, or PJs – the most highly-trained and extremely versatile recovery specialists in the world.

I could go on for quite a while as to what a PJ is (or at least what I think a PJ is). It’s probably better if you’re really interested in knowing, to do the Google search thing for the term USAF Pararescue.

Like all our close brothers within the military community, we are trained in SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, escape) techniques, static-line and free-fall parachuting and jumping with ridiculous equipment, open- and closed-circuit scuba, free-fall swimmer deployment from helicopters, rappelling and fast-roping, climbing, snow and ice travel, small arms use, the occasional aerial gunnery qualification, and the list goes on. However, since our primary mission is rescue, unlike many of our brothers, we are also medics or Emergency Medical Technicians.

Today, operational PJs maintain a higher level of medical qualification than we did…but back in the day we did help set the standard.

To give you an idea of the current level of medical expertise, you should check out an article in the December 26, 2019, issue of Esquire Magazine, titled Pararescue - The Special Ops Unit That Rescues Navy SEALs. (And no, the article is not about rescuing Navy SEALs, but rather about a jump mission to a freighter on the high seas that had suffered an explosion and fire involving four seamen, two of whom died and two who were burned critically.)

The ability to use any of the techniques employed by standard or elite U.S. military forces, and being a medic/rescue/recovery specialist, paves the way for small groups of PJs to be deployed and sometimes embedded with other U.S. military units, both in combat and peacetime SAR.

My training days were pretty heady and exhilarating. Can you imagine yourself as a young, 20-something and being paid to learn to scuba dive, skydive, hike, climb, medically treat and rescue people?

A PJ has sometimes been described as a jack of all trades, master of none. A more correct version might be jack of all trades, master of some. Due to the geographical location of a unit and the local topography, you would often find PJs gravitating toward a specific skill because it was in their backyard, and they liked it.

A unit in the desert was pretty good at desert operations, a unit on the coast conducted lots of training scuba operations/dives. A unit in Alaska was one of the premier units for wilderness rescue. And so on.

My unit at the time of Brian’s phone call was the 304th ARRSq, located on Portland Air National Guard Base at the Portland, Oregon International Airport. It was one of six Reserve and Guard USAF rescue units. All six units maintained the same level of currency and qualifications as active duty units. This enabled any one unit, or a current and qualified individual, to be immediately deployed and augment or assume the mission of another squadron.

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Sometime later, when the engine and rotor noise stopped, temporarily anyway, I returned Brian’s call. He was the NCOIC (non-commissioned officer in charge) of a small Pararescue Section in a Rescue Detachment at Holloman Air Force Base (AFB), New Mexico. Though never having directly worked together, we had met several times over the course of our careers and based on the limited contact, rumors, tall tales, wild stories and hallway reputation, we respected each other as PJs and as climbers. He was tall, lean, sinewy and had a great strength to weight ratio – pretty much what you wanted in climbing. He had good reach being tall, could hang on to small holds by his fingertips and had developed decent strength in his legs for carrying loads. Somewhat acerbic by nature, you either liked him right off because you were on the same wavelength, or you didn’t like him at all. I liked him.

Brian had been stationed in England for several years before being assigned to Holloman, and while there, one of his pastimes was to venture into the British hills, scramble, boulder and climb. While in England he had also managed to get to the Continent and had climbed on the Matterhorn on its classic Hörnli Ridge. All this was as a part time alpinist – the hours you put in as a PJ (or for anyone in the military) can be quite long.

Brian began our conversation by recounting a string of improbable (but mostly true) events on various TDYs (temporary duty assignment away from a home station) we had been on, and then started complimenting me about performance on a climb on Denali I had participated in the year before. I knew at that moment I was being set up for the actual pitch of the conversation. He went on to talk about wanting to scale a peak in South America with a small group of climbers. It wasn’t just a peak – it was the highest peak actually – and he wanted to do this on a previously unclimbed route, on the most difficult side of the mountain, alpine style. And, oh, by the way, he was hoping I’d join him.

I couldn’t even pronounce the name of the peak much less tell you exactly where it was. To my astonishment, instead of turning him down flat, I said, maybe…well, probably yes.

❖

A segue about my participation in the earlier climb of Denali.

I had transferred to the 304th ARRSq in Portland from the 303rd ARRSq at March AFB, California (near Riverside). While at March, as an FNG (fucking new guy) and rookie, I discovered that I found climbing, and just about everything with it, to be enjoyable. I learned that I loved the smell of the sun warming exposed granite and the feel of an ice axe or ice hammer taking a bite into perfect ice. The exposure to 10, 100 or 1000 vertical feet of air below you was exhilarating, electrifying and terrifying, often all in the same pitch. I discovered that I liked the focus required on moves difficult for me.

That’s the same focus that climbers of today so eloquently express as centering, visualization and clearing the mind. I enjoyed the preparation for a climbing trip as well. I was somewhat anal regarding organization. To maximize the time available for actually climbing, I would plan and organize an outing in detail, trying to minimize any loss of time during travel and the approach. I relished poring over older texts on how mountaineering expeditions had been organized and planned.

While I was with the 303rd, the squadron deployed to Alaska several times, both for training and to assist and pull alert for the active duty USAF Rescue unit based outside of Anchorage. There, I renewed friendships with assigned PJs, and was introduced to glacier travel and snow and ice climbing.

Returning to Southern California, I continued to climb when I could, mostly on technical rock, and of course did conditioning runs on and between peaks in SoCal.

Wanting to experience a bit more altitude than what I could find locally in SoCal, I convinced a PJ buddy, Richard (Dick) Grady, to go to Mexico with me and climb the three classic volcanoes: Iztaccihuatl, Popocatépetl, and Pico de Orizaba. None are difficult to climb unless you seek out the most difficult variations of routes simply to do so. They do, however, represent a physiological challenge and will give an aspiring big mountain climber an idea of whether they can actually handle being at or above 18,000 feet.

Dick and I arrived in Mexico City one early afternoon in December 1977, rented a little VW bug and immediately began our drive to the first volcano. After nightfall, we were nearing the Paso de Cortez between Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl. Arriving at the Paso de Cortez somewhere around 11 p.m., we parked off the road in a wide pull-out area of some kind and we slept (sort of) in our VW beetle that night.

Getting up early and grumpy but with decent weather, we easily summited Iztaccihuatl (17,160 feet) and returned to the car. After driving in the daylight for only a few minutes, we found a hostel nearby and had a much better second night. The next day we summited Popocatépetl (17,802 feet), and once back at the hostel asked around about how to get to the base of Orizaba (18,491 feet). Based on the conversation flow and map reading, we figured out it was going to take us at least one entire day to re-stage for that attempt.

We blasted out of Paso de Cortez early the next morning and managed to find Tlachichuca, the town from which most climbers staged at the base of Orizaba, by late afternoon. Asking anyone we saw with