After climber deaths, Oregon faces beacon question again

PORTLAND — When a rescue team came on Luke Gullberg's body at the top of a Mount Hood glacier and tried to figure out what had become of his climbing partners, they looked up at a forbidding rise of ice and snow.

They saw no sign of Katie Nolan and Anthony Vietti on the 1,500-foot Reid headwall, no gear in bright color standing out from the monochrome, no trail. And they heard no radio signal.

Had Nolan and Vietti rented a $5 locator beacon and had they been able to activate it after whatever misfortune ended their climb on Dec. 12, the searchers below might have been able to pinpoint their location. The two are presumed buried beneath several feet of snow and ice.

Gullberg, from Des Moines, was somehow separated from his climbing partners.

It's the second time in three years that a search-and-rescue operation on the 11,239-foot mountain has failed to turn up climbers who went up the mountain without signaling devices and got into deadly trouble.

So, politicians, rescue crews, mountaineers and others are debating once again whether to require such climbers to carry locator beacons.

The recent rescue mission has raised the question, "When are you going to stop the carnage on Mount Hood?" said Jim Bender, a commissioner in Clackamas County on the south side of the mountain.

"People are dying for no reason," said Bender, a longtime climber who said he has been up Mount Hood several times. "We need to find a way to protect them and we need to find a way to protect the people's resources."

A bill to require Mount Hood climbers to carry beacons on winter expeditions failed in the Oregon Legislature in 2007. Bender hopes the Legislature will revisit the question, or the state's congressional delegation will take an interest.

He said the county commission will take another stab at a requirement that climbers carry locator beacons. Commissioners have previously run into a restriction on the kind of agreements they could make with the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the mountain.

It's a mystery to many who don't venture above the timberline why the stiffest opposition to requiring beacons comes from the elite mountaineers who volunteer their time and put themselves at risk to get people off the mountain.

Beacons can be useful, but climbers should have the freedom to weigh the safety benefits of any piece of equipment against its weight or how it might impede their agility on a mountain that can rain down ice and rock at any moment, said Steve Rollins of Portland Mountain Rescue, a leader of Mount Hood search-and-rescue operations.

Mountaineers also warn that requiring the devices can lead some climbers to take undue risks — figuring on a rescue if they get into trouble — and that beacons aren't always going to lead to rescues.

Even as they found Gullberg's body, Rollins said, the snowpack beneath the feet of the mountain rescue team was "shooting cracks" and making a "whumping" sound.

It was, he said, Mother Nature screaming about avalanche danger. That only rose during the search.

"I do not believe that we could have gotten there even if we had a beacon," said Rollins.

One state official argues against such a requirement on grounds of personal liberty.

"The land is public, and I'm not a real big fan of mandating what people have to take with them when they want to go for a walk," said Georges Kleinbaum, search-and-rescue coordinator for the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.

Besides, he said, enforcement would be impossible. "It's a big mountain," he said. "Are you going to put a ring around it, or force everyone through an entry point?"

As many as 10,000 climbers attempt Mount Hood each year, based on the free permits for which they self-register.

"That argument that it infringes on their freedom, I just think that's baloney," said Sheriff Joe Wampler of Hood River County, on the north side of the mountain.

Wampler led the 2006 search and rescue that ended with one climber's body found in a snow cave. The bodies of the two others in that party have never been found.