Faces at Fourteen Thousand: Portraits from Denali
Loading ...
Neda
Neda Milosevic, 37
Lives in: Ruma, Serbia (born there)
Profession: Prosecutor
Your favorite part of work: Putting bad guys in jail.
Least favorite part of work: I don’t like that so many young people are criminals.
What do you do in your free time: You can see – this: mountaineering, hiking. And Painting.
If you could travel anywhere: Africa because I was in South America and the Himalayas. Now I want to see Africa.
If you could write a book: “Man Versus Nature” Not that the man is a fighter, but rather an explorer. He explores himself.
What was the last meal you ate: Dehydrated mac and cheese.
Religious: Orthodox Christian
Regret: No
Trick of the Trade: Every day is the most important. Almost every piece of gear is important up here.
—–
A few days before I met Neda at 14 Camp, as she was setting up her Serbian mountaineering club’s flag beside her tent, we met another Serbian. This other Serbian came to us from the sky, attached to the park service’s helicopter via a 150’ rope and a body harness called a “screamer suit.” The young Serbian man had been the first patient of what would be a three-patient rescue off the 19,000-foot “Football Field” below the summit.
We were in the park service communication tent at 14 Camp after dinner when the radio called in from 17 Camp. Tucker, the ranger at 17 at that time, had just summited with his patrol of four volunteers. They were crossing the Football Field when they noticed the Serbian man alone and stumbling like a drunk Michelin man in his big red puffy suit. They found him to be suffering from Acute Mountain Sickness due to the elevation. As they began treatment on him, a Japanese climbing team of three approached them on their descent from the summit. The front member of that group collapsed forty feet from Tucker’s crew and the Serbian. Patient number two had arrived on the scene.
Neda
We heard this from 14 Camp as Tucker’s radio calls came down for a helicopter evac. Soon a plan was in place to fly the patients, individually, from the Football Field via the screamer suit. They’d land at our camp at 14, be assessed by our paramedic, Dan, then repackaged inside the chopper for a deposit at Base Camp.
As the helicopter shuttling was under way, Tucker called down again and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but we have a third patient.” They’d come across another staggering, hypoxic climber in a private group. He couldn’t power himself down the Zebra Rocks section, and he definitely wouldn’t make it down the steep headwall below Denali Pass called “The Autobahn.”
Luckily, the weather was perfect and it doesn’t get dark in Alaska in mid June. So a rescue pluck from 19,000’ could take place at 11pm. The Helicopter became a sort of designated driver vehicle for the seemingly wasted climbers who had gotten themselves a little too high, too fast.
Neda told me she knew the Serbian man, that he was part of her larger group on Denali. She said he was not alone on the Football Field, that his partners were with him. Tucker found him alone, but who knows. Either way, he likely would have been a body recovery had he not happened to be there on the day when the park service patrol was coming off the summit. Or if it had been cloudy and unflyable. Instead, he and the other two patients walked out of the helicopter at the oxygen-rich 7,200’ Base camp feeling perfectly healthy, as if they were stepping out of a cab after a few drinks at a mountaineering-themed costume party.
