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Sitting in his room at Mercy Hospital in Durango, Gerry Roach has some advice for other climbers.
“Don’t fall down,” he says with a knowing smile.
Roach, who will soon celebrate his 80th birthday, knows what he is talking about.
It has been 48 years since he climbed all of Colorado’s peaks over 14,000 feet, 40 years since he climbed Mount Everest and 38 years since he became the second person to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents.
Despite his age and astounding climbing résumé, Roach experienced needing to be rescued by helicopter for the first time.
As he and his wife, Jennifer Roach, were descending a mountain in the San Juans known only as Peak 13,302 (previous reports incorrectly said the party was on a peak named V8) on Aug. 9, Gerry stepped between two boulders and was thrown off balance.
He fell backward, down a slope of loose rock that Roach and his wife estimate was approximately 50 degrees.
“I heard him swear, and I looked back and he was already airborne,” Jennifer said.
Gerry recalled tumbling about 100 feet down the rocky slope.
“Every time I came down, I hit my head – bam, bam bam,” he said.
Jennifer rushed to him, and found him bloodied, but moving.
“When I stopped, I got in a standing position under a vertical chunk of rock … I made a few steps, plopped down on a flat rock, and announced that I needed a chopper,” Gerry said, chuckling at his own unfortunate declaration. “I knew that I wasn’t going to walk down.”
It was 5 p.m.
Jennifer checked her iPhone and found that she had no service, nor was her phone capable of sending a satellite SOS signal. Unfortunately, she had also left her SPOT emergency beacon in a different backpack.
Unbeknownst to the Roaches, another member of their party who had opted not to summit the peak, Jim Ballard, saw through their binoculars Gerry falling from the valley floor, more than 1,000 feet below.
Ballard attempted to climb up to reach the Roaches, as another member of their party drove an ATV to South Mineral Campground, where they made the first emergency call to rescuers.
A team of runners, including Silverton Medical Rescue director Tyler George and a paramedic, arrived in less than two hours.
Gerry’s injuries made a nighttime extrication too risky. After another team delivered overnight equipment, the party hunkered down. Gerry spent the night on a flat rock in a bivy sack, kept warm by one of the rescuers.
At 6:15 a.m. Thursday, Gerry was hoisted into a Black Hawk helicopter requested from the National Guard High Altitude Training Center then transferred to a Flight For Life chopper and flown to Durango.
In more than six decades of climbing, Gerry said he has only spent two or three unplanned nights in the backcountry.
“I was freezing,” he said of that night.
Roach hopes to be discharged from the hospital on Friday. He is recovering from a concussion, numerous contusions, a head laceration, a punctured lung and between five and seven broken ribs.
Roach has accrued a mountain of accolades since he began climbing in the 1950s.
He wrote the definitive guidebooks about climbing all of Colorado’s 13,000-foot and 14,000-foot peaks; he was the first person to climb the highest 10 peaks in North America. Roach has also climbed numerous high peaks all over the world – in 1997, he climbed Gasherbrum II, an 8,000-meter peak in the Karakoram range, without supplemental oxygen.
In all his years of climbing, the famed mountaineer has never had an injury like this.
“It’s embarrassing,” he said.
Although he recognizes that nature might be forcing him to slow down, Roach says his climbing career is certainly not over. The incident showed him that it is getting older, more than mountaineering, that demands strength and determination.
“Sixty is the new 50, 70 is the new 60, but 80 is still 80,” he said. “ … You’ve got to be tough to get older.”
Once his ribs have healed, Roach joked that he intends to climb K2 – by which he meant he will find a “little bump with a rounded summit,” cover it in snow, and plant a flag. Between the moments of facetious banter, Roach says he is determined to keep climbing.
“It’s what I’ve done my whole life,” he said. “I’ve just got to be more careful.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
