The end of climbing in Yosemite?

[cj001f]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-terbush22aug22,0,4319818,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

 

Another Peril for Climbers

A $10-million lawsuit by the grieving parents of a man who died in a Yosemite rock fall could result in fundamental changes in the sport.

By Eric Bailey

Times Staff Writer

 

6:24 PM PDT, August 21, 2005

 

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — The rumble began high on the sheer cliff wall, like faraway thunder before a storm.

 

A slab of granite as big as a railroad boxcar had let loose 1,300 feet up Glacier Point's age-worn face. The million-pound rock cartwheeled and shattered, tracing a plume of dust downward toward Peter Terbush.

 

In his last earthbound moments, Terbush turned to a long-ago climbing lesson taught by his dad. As a little boy first astride a mountain, he learned to always protect a partner at the end of the rope. Never let go.

 

The broad-shouldered 21-year-old held fast to the nylon lifeline lashed to a friend 60 feet up. Another buddy on the ground scrambled for cover as the boulders hit Earth, exploding like bombs.

 

Fate let his two friends escape with lacerations. They found Terbush's body crumpled in a ball, his hands still gripping the rope.

 

Six years after the rock slide, his parents suspect that mankind's handprint atop Glacier Point — most notably a bathroom water system prone to overflow — lubricated the cliff face, provoking a flurry of rock falls, including the June 1999 tragedy that claimed Terbush.

 

His parents have poured their grief and suspicions and search for answers into a $10-million wrongful death lawsuit against the National Park Service. "My son understood the risks of climbing," said Jim Terbush, himself a climber. "But he didn't know the conditions on Glacier Point had been fundamentally changed."

 

The legal battle, set for a first hearing Tuesday, has sent reverberations around Yosemite and the climbing community beyond.

 

Park officials have a ready argument — and an admonition: No one can know when a rock fall is going to happen. And a ruling against the park, they warn, could all but kill climbing in the Yosemite Valley.

 

Climbers contend their sport is the ultimate test of personal responsibility. The lawsuit goes beyond geology and public policy. To climbers, it challenges a basic tenet.

 

"We're at risk every time we go up," Sean Kovatch, 20, said recently during his first Yosemite climbing trip. "And sometimes people don't come off the mountain."

 

Skinny but Strong

 

Peter Terbush seemed destined to stand beside a cliff face.

 

Born into the third generation of a Colorado climbing family, he nearly didn't make it into diapers. Arriving unexpectedly 14 weeks premature on a snowy night at home in Castle Rock, Terbush survived a harrowing drive to the emergency room.

 

He was all of 1 pound, 14 ounces, and the doctor wrapped him in tin foil to keep him warm for transport to a bigger hospital. He looked, his father recalled, like a little baked potato.

 

Pete grew up skinny but strong, a ball of positive energy with a floppy mop of curly auburn hair topping it all.

 

He took up the family avocation, learning to climb with his dad at age 9. With his owlish glasses and sideways smile, he looked like a Harry Potter of the hillside. He even launched his own climbing club in elementary school, proving precociously adventurous. One after-school climb ended with his being rescued by his dad and the Castle Rock Fire Department.

 

Jim Terbush was a physician for the U.S. Navy and at American embassies from London to Singapore. As the family journeyed to the corners of the world, Peter Terbush was always in the mountains. He climbed in the Himalayas, the Dolomites, the French Alps.

 

Back in the United States, Terbush attended Western State College in Gunnison, Colo., where he majored in geology and built an inseparable cadre of friends who thought nothing of driving 10 hours to Zion National Park for a weekend of climbing, returning exhausted just in time for Monday classes. In winter they'd go skiing, Pete dressed in old leather boots and wool knickers, using old-school poles and singing the whole time.

 

"He would bounce when he walked," remembered Laura Chase, a close friend. "His hair would bounce. All this electricity would bounce through his hair."

 

By 21, he had lost that little boy look. He grew a beard and developed the lean muscularity intrinsic to climbing, sometimes grabbing the narrow crest of a doorframe and practicing pull-ups, more to strengthen fingertips than to build biceps.

 

He taught climbing classes, earning a reputation for skill and safety. "Good skills!" he'd yell to climbers displaying a nice bit of technique. He talked endlessly of becoming a climbing guide. But he knew something was missing — a trip to Yosemite, one of the climbing world's crucibles.

 

A Late Climb

 

His last few days of life were spent mostly on flat terra firma.

 

He and a few college buddies tried scaling El Capitan, but an equipment failure prompted a retreat. Instead, Terbush and Joe Kewin hiked in the ethereal beauty of the Yosemite high country. They basked in the lavish green meadows hugged by salt-and-pepper granite hills, took in the saw-tooth fusion of rock and sky.

 

Back in the valley, a night before they were to leave, Terbush joined Kewin and Kerry Pyle for dinner at a Curry Village pizza joint. Some daylight was left, so they decided to climb a lower section of Apron Jam, a route below Glacier Point. They played rock-paper-scissors to decide who went first. Pyle won. The rock face was still warm from the day's sun.

 

Suddenly they were on the edge of nature's artillery range, boulders cascading like howitzer shells. Pyle tried to lash himself to a couple of bolts in the rock but got hit by shattered fragments and decided to just hang on. Terbush locked in the belay rope.

 

In nearby Curry Village, visitors screamed and ran as a dust cloud rose over the valley's southeast edge. Rock shrapnel punched holes through tent-cabins. Powdery residue settled like snow.

 

When the cliff finally stopped falling, Pyle still clung to the face. He heard Kewin shouting below.

 

Pete's dead! Pete's dead!

 

The rock that struck him in the head was the size of a basketball, Jim Terbush said. His son died instantly, mercifully.

 

Kewin, who had scampered to a safe spot hugging the cliff side, pried the rope from his friend's rigid hands to lower the dazed Pyle to the ground.

 

Park officials declared Peter Terbush a hero, citing how he had hung on to his friend in a selfless act of bravery.

 

He was cremated with a climbing sling over his shoulder, bandoleer style, and his climbing boots. At the behest of Jim Terbush, his ashes were spread by a captain in the Argentine Army's climbing corps at more than 22,000 feet on Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas.

 

Provocative Theory

 

Not long after his son's death, Jim Terbush heard about geologist Skip Watts and his provocative theory about Glacier Point.

 

Watts, a Radford University professor, had come to Yosemite in 1997 to help a graduate student investigate the aftermath of a huge rock slide a year earlier that had killed one man on the ground and injured 14 others. That slide occurred at Happy Isles, around a bend from the rock fall that killed Terbush.

 

Preparing to rappel off the cliff face, Watts was surprised by the smell of sewage wafting from leaking pipes at the old bathrooms atop Glacier Point. He theorized that the errant effluent helped trigger the 1996 rock fall.

 

His curiosity grew as rock falls occurred in November 1998 and May 1999. Then in June 1999, the slide that killed Terbush let loose in the same area.

 

Studying a photograph, Watts traced the fractures on Glacier Point's rock face. Arching upward, the cracks continued to the bluff top, where Watts discovered what he considers the culprit: Water overflowing from a 300,000-gallon storage tank.

 

That leaking water, he concluded, pooled in fractures and put pressure on the rock, acting like a lever to start a slide.

 

The geologist eventually obtained Park Service records he contends correlate water overflows in 1998, 1999 and 2000 with subsequent rock falls. When the tank wasn't overflowing, Watts said, the slopes were relatively quiet.

 

"The situation at Glacier Point is very unnatural," said Watts, who believes the Park Service should reconsider the danger to crowded Curry Village, in the shadow of Glacier Point. By the time Terbush was killed, "it would have been reasonable to have warning signs."

 

Jim Terbush, already pursuing an exhaustive records request of any Parks Service information dealing with Glacier Point, embraced the theory.

 

He moved toward a lawsuit, the father said, after the agency redacted a dozen key documents he hoped would answer questions about what happened. Lawyers told him the only way to see the contents was to file a claim. The legal battle began in June 2001.

 

"My No. 1 reason is to find the truth," Jim Terbush said. "What caused the death of my son?"

 

'Out in Left Field'

 

Yosemite Valley exists because of glaciers and geology and the endless process of rock sloughing off the sides of vertical granite walls. Park administrators consistently wrangle over posting warning placards, which can do more to mar the scenery than prevent casualties.

 

It is not a simple debate.

 

So when Watts laid out his theory about the Glacier Point slides, Yosemite officials took swift offense. A park spokesman said in November 1999 that other geologists believed Watts was "out in left field on this."

 

Federal officials have attacked Watts' credentials, contending that the Virginia-based geologist simply doesn't understand fluid dynamics and the vagaries of Western granite.

 

Gerry Wieczorek of the U.S. Geological Survey, a onetime collaborator of Watts now on the opposite side of the Terbush case, is politer.

 

He simply doesn't believe Watts' theory can be proved or disproved without far more sophisticated experimentation (a fact Watts finds ironic, given that he's failed to receive permission for further tests).

 

Wieczorek has documented more than 500 slides in the park since 1850, and the common demonstrable factors are the effect of the freeze-thaw cycle, heavy rainfall and earthquakes. Although water can trigger slides, he said, natural drainage into the soil from abundant snowfall dwarfs any overflowing bathroom water.

 

In its first century as a national park, Yosemite has seen 15 people killed by rock falls. Given the more than 3 million visitors each year to the valley, the park has a good safety record, said Kristi Kapetan, the assistant U.S. attorney defending the park in the Terbush suit.

 

If the Terbush family prevails, it could prompt park officials to prohibit rock climbing and other dangerous sports, she said.

 

"I feel bad for the parents," Kapetan said. "But this would be like blaming Mother Nature. Like suing for an earthquake. We didn't do anything to cause a spontaneous rock fall."

 

'Inherently Dangerous'

 

Many of Yosemite's climbing regulars, often at odds with rangers, find common ground with park officials on the Terbush case.

 

Injury and death in climbing rarely prompt lawsuits. What happens on the big wall stays on the big wall. Terbush assumed the risk, they say, simply by strapping on his belay harness and grabbing that rope.

 

Over at Camp 4, the simple collection of fire rings and picnic tables that serves as the crossroads of the valley's climbing community, a few climbers recently shared such sentiments.

 

Like Terbush, they are young and exude endless energy. Lean as greyhounds, they look as if they could conquer anything.

 

"Everyone knows the sport is just inherently dangerous," said Miles Stewart, 25, of Reno as he prepared a string of nuts and cams for an afternoon climb.

 

"Americans are sue-happy," added his buddy, Laine Christmas, 24. "If it's equipment failure, manufacturing negligence, then fine. But not a rock fall. It's part of the sport. Wind and water take their toll."

 

Diego Avelar, visiting Yosemite from Jalisco, Mexico, said climbers rejoice in the sense of freedom on the rock, the power to make what they want of life.

 

"If they decide to take that risk, it should be without looking back," said Avelar, 21. "A climber's father should know that."

 

"It's a shame for the kid who died, " added his friend, 22-year-old Roberto Larios. "But it's wrong to find someone to blame. Otherwise you're suing nature."

 

Concerned With Safety

 

Jim Terbush has heard such comments, has seen them on climber's websites. The father winces a bit but offers a counterpoint.

 

He considers Yosemite a temple. He's not out to kill climbing in the valley. He doesn't want money. He simply wants to make climbing safer.

 

The family has tried to do that in many ways, including sponsoring a weeklong climbing seminar in Gunnison for prospective mountain guides that teaches the principles of leadership and service in a dangerous sport.

 

Given previous rock slides below Glacier Point, Jim Terbush questions, why not post a flier on Camp 4 so newcomers knew? Geologists can rate the stability of cliffs above roads. Why not climbing routes in Yosemite?

 

He and his wife may not win in court, Jim Terbush realizes. In fact, the legal odds seem stacked against them. But it will close a chapter in their lives.

 

"There was still this outstanding question," Jim Terbush said. "I felt if I didn't chase it to the ground, for the rest of my life I'd be wondering."

 

Because their son will forever be up there on the mountain. And they'll never let go.

 

Times staff writer Scott Doggett contributed to this report.

[ivan]

what to say? other than i feel for the kid's folks but they should surely shut the fuck up w/ their lawsuit, unless they can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the park knew this water tank was causing serious rockfall but didn't want to do anything about it...

[Alex]

I am still waiting for the (inevitable) lawsuit against God.

[Hanger]

I read about this a while back.

 

Seems to me that the father's guilt is eating at him. He needs to be spending less time in court and more time in therapy.

 

As far as the climbers' choice of places to go...yes, it would have been nice for Yos Auth to have posted a sign at the trail-head saying "shit's been known to fall from the sky here"...but quite honestly, I don't think it would have kept them from heading to the exact same spot.

 

I know the updated guidebook has a photo of a massive rockfall on the GA...and where did my partner and I go?...exactly

 

Here's hoping that his family finds peace.

[EWolfe]

In a litiginous society, it seems this is inevitable.

Unfortunately, peoples emotional response supercedes the impact of their actions.

 

What ever happened to personal responsibility?

[JoshK]

THIS KIDS DAD SHOULD BE FUCKING ASHAMED OF HIMSELF. It is beyond selfish to risk ruining climbing for thousands of people over his grief/anger about his son's death in a sport that he introduced him to.

 

I wish there was a way to get a hold of him. I would offer my condolences then tell him what a piece of shit he is acting like. I can imagine his son is rolling in his grave thinking of the legacy his father is now leaving on his name. Jackass.

 

 

Geologists can rate the stability of cliffs above roads.

 

BULLSHIT. They can to *some* extent. If they reall could I-70 and US6 wouldn't have both been buried by giant rockslides in the past few months causing massive traffic problems west of Denver.

[Dechristo]

I wish there was a way to get a hold of him.

You've got his name and that he's from Castle Rock. Look in the phone book; you're only 40 miles away.

[JosephH]

A simple dye test would have solved the science long ago but the Park has steadfastly refused to allow one.

 

Guilt is another thing entirely...

[Kraken]

"yeah it sucks our son died, but hey, we're getting $10 million out of it so I'm sure we'll feel better and be able to replace hime with a new yacht."

 

Bullshit. Your son is dead, mourn his death, don't look for a culprit. How ridiculous.

[Drederek]

Until you lose a child you don't know how you will handle it. And I doubt Park personnel were any nicer to them than they are to any other climbers. I don't condone this suit but I can't blame the parents.

[kurthicks]

Born into the third generation of a Colorado climbing family...

 

It seems like the family might have known about rockfall if they've been climbing for 3 generations...

[foraker]

i feel for the kids parents but i had been climbing down there for a couple of years before this accident and even then there were signs and warnings up saying 'glacier point is known to be extremely unstable, climbing there is extremely risky, danger of rockfall is high, etc etc'. i never climbed there because of that. one thing i learned in climbing was pay attention to what the locals have to say....

[Kraken]

If the parents keep even one cent of the money they get from this lawsuit, they are no better than any thief in my book. Donating it to some charity or something, I can understand, but if they keep it for themselves and profit off of their own son's death, that's Effed man, Effed!

[j_b]

what a bad scene! i can't really blame the family for wanting to know whether changing water drainage had a role in the rockfall. Should we really expect an honest internal enquiry open to the public without external pressure? Shame on the park for playing the blackmail card with the climbing community: how often did they threaten to close the park to tourists when they have been previously sued by visitors (which they surely have).

[Winter]

Wow, the "end of climbing?" Come on. That's pretty reactionary. Defendants love to bitch and complain about all the bad things that can result from a plaintiffs' verdict. Its called a PR campaign, and apparently its working pretty well. You think 1 $10 million lawsuit is going to convince the park service to close Yos to climbing?Yeah right. What's the climbing business worth to the local economiy there?

 

Let the process play itself out before everyone starts passing judgments about a situation they know very little about. They've got a tough case to prove. Maybe win maybe lose, but crying about a speculative impact on the sport seems like an over reaction given the suffering that the family has gone through.

[archenemy]

Moral of the story:

Shit rolls down hill.

[Dru]

Pumping water/sewage into cracks in the rock is not going to make the cliff more stable. Basic science.

 

What about if someone trundles a boulder down onto you while you are climbing up? I recall an incident a few years ago in Montana? where 3 youths were charged with manslaughter after pushing a 10 ton boulder down a face 2 climbers were climbing from the ridge above. Some might argue that this is what the Park Service did by pumping water into those cracks.

[cj001f]

Pumping water/sewage into cracks in the rock is not going to make the cliff more stable. Basic science.

Fuck, there's now water flowing into cracks in Yosemite? The whole place is going to fall apart

[Dru]

"Pumping" and "flowing" are two different things.

[AlpineK]

I've listened to a couple talks on landslides and slope stability. One talk was given by an engineer who has worked on a number of projects around the coast hwy in OR.

 

His #1 priority in improving the stability of a steep slope was to get the water off the slope.

 

If the park service is adding an unnatural amount of water to the area above Glacier Point then they could be responsible for the rock fall.

 

I don't know about the merrits of the case, and I certainly don't want to see climbing shut down in the valley, but the Park service might be behind the rockfall.

[Cobra_Commander]

Moral of the story:

Shit rolls down hill.

 

And I live in a valley in Holland

[Dru]

Moral of the story:

Shit rolls down hill.

 

And I live in a valley in Holland

 

Are you sure it's not Death Valley or the Dead Sea?

[Cobra_Commander]

no beer in either of those low-lying locales.

[cj001f]

"Pumping" and "flowing" are two different things.

Indeed. The article made no mention of pumping, and I'm at a loss to why they would be pumping anything. The problem is supposedly an overflowing septic tank which then flows into cracks in the rock.

 

It's not like there haven't been other big rock slide recently in Yosemite. There was one in '82 that closed the road just past the entrance, the 1987 middle brother slide (600,000 m^3), or even the more recent middle cathedral slide. There have been several earlier rock falls in the Happy Isles area. Rocks fall in Yosemite, and correlation isn't causation.

[Cobra_Commander]

I too would be upset if my son's death was attributed to shit-induced mass wasting. Not the most dignified way to go (though better than enumclaw-related trauma)