Sole survivor of deadly North Cascades climbing accident shares details

We’re learning more about the climbing accident that left three men dead in the North Cascades last weekend. The men were identified yesterday as 48-year-old Vishnu Irigireddy of Renton, 36-year-old Oleksander Martynenko of Bellevue, and 63-year-old Tim Nguyen of Renton. One man survived what the Okanogan County Sheriff's Office says was a 400-foot fall.

It's one of Washington state's worst climbing accidents since 2014, when six climbers fell to their deaths at Mount Rainier. KUOW’s Kim Malcolm spoke to Seattle Times reporter Catalina Gaitán about what happened.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: What do we know at this point about these men and how they might have known each other?

Catalina Gaitán: The Okanogan County Search and Rescue coordinator spoke to the survivor today by phone. He's currently at Harborview Medical Center recovering. He told her the four of them are good friends. They were on a shared climbing trip when a piece of equipment failed, and tragedy happened.

Tell us where these climbers were when the fall happened.

What we know so far is from the Okanogan County coroner. He said the four men were trying to climb up the North Early Winters Spire, which is about 16 miles west of Mazama in the North Cascades. This was on Saturday. The men were starting to lose daylight. Some light snow had started falling, and it was getting colder, so they decided to abandon the climb and start descending instead.

They were going down a really steep gully that's between the North and South spires. The survivor told the search and rescue coordinator they had all attached themselves to the same anchor point, which is a piece of equipment known as a piton, embedded in the rock face. The four men were attached to it somehow, and one of them was rappelling down when that piton came loose from the rock face, and caused all four of them to fall about 400 feet.

It's terrible to think about, and it's simply remarkable that anyone survived this. But this one man did. What do we know about how he made it out after the fall?

It is really remarkable. The first 200 feet of the fall, according to officials, was pretty much vertical, and then the last 200 feet was moderate terrain. The four men ended up in a tangle of rope and rocks and snow. The three men who died sustained blunt-force trauma injuries. The fourth man told the search and rescue coordinator today that he was unconscious for several hours. The fall happened around 5:30 p.m. That's when they started their descent. By the time he woke up, it had been several hours later. He had a head injury and internal bleeding, and through that, it took him about eight hours to disentangle himself.

Once he got himself untangled, he used what they called a pick-like ice tool to climb about three quarters of a mile and 1000 feet of elevation back to a user trail near Highway 20, where their car was parked. Then he drove about 42 miles west to Newhalem, where he found a pay phone and called 911. That was about 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, which is about 17 hours after they initially fell. Then they took him to Harborview Medical Center.

What are the investigators looking at at this point? I know it's early days, but I suppose they're going to be looking very closely at that anchor point.

They started by examining the men's gear on Monday. They had some climbing experts look at all of it. They said the men had helmets on and had appropriate climbing equipment and gear for what they were doing. It was all pretty new and in good shape. None of it was old or worn out. All of the climbing experts agreed that the thing that failed was this previously used piton.

It's not uncommon for people to use previously used pitons that they find in a rock face. And some of these pitons can be decades old. Climbers like to use more than one piton. To have all four people relying on the same piton is not preferred. That's what the Okanogan County undersheriff told us.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.