The Kahiltna crevasse rescue trapped Martin Takac in ice for fourteen hours in June 2017. Follow the effort to free the critically injured Denali climber.
The guides could establish that Martin Takac was alive and responding. They could not simply pull him out.
On the night of June 4–5, 2017, the thirty-eight-year-old Slovak climber fell approximately forty feet into a crevasse on Denali’s West Buttress route. The fall left his body and equipment wedged into a narrow space in the ice.
The Kahiltna crevasse rescue would take roughly fourteen hours. Knowing where he was proved to be only the beginning.
Kahiltna crevasse rescue: A rope could not solve the whole problem
Mountain guides witnessed the fall and reported it to National Park Service rangers around 1:30 a.m. They reached the point of confirming that Takac was alive, then attempted an extraction.
The confined position defeated a straightforward removal. There was little room around him in which to work. The rescuers had to free him while avoiding movements that could worsen his injuries.
At about 4 a.m., a helicopter brought mountaineering rangers from Talkeetna to the accident site at roughly 7,800 feet. More personnel were shuttled in from base camp.
The team began taking turns inside the crevasse, chipping ice away in an effort to secure and release the climber. Above them, a separate medical evacuation was also being managed. For a time, bad weather grounded the helicopter.
The emergency therefore involved several different limits at once: the dimensions of the opening, the patient’s injuries, the endurance of people working below the glacier’s surface and the weather required to move support by air.
A tool borrowed from the fire department
When flying conditions improved in the afternoon, a relief team arrived with power tools. Among them was a pneumatic hammer-chisel borrowed from the Talkeetna Volunteer Fire Department.
At approximately 3:30 p.m., rescuers finally freed Takac and raised him to the surface. He was severely hypothermic and critically injured. A helicopter took him to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital.
Takac had been traveling unroped when he fell. Fourteen hours later, getting him back above the glacier had required guides, rangers, repeated flights and tools brought from a fire department.
He had been found close enough to reach but held by the shape of the ice. The rescue team had contact, equipment and a precise location, yet still had to create the space through which a human body could return.
Sources and reporting
Researched reporting: an original narrative based on the published records linked below.
