LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 46 ra Blanca in Peru. In 1962, he and two partners, Leif Patterson and Charles Sawyer, made the first ascent of 18,986-foot Tullparaju, then one of the few remain- ing mountaineering prizes in the Andes. His lengthy account in the AAJ attests to the technical difficulties of the climb and the hardship of surviving at high alti- tude battling cold, wind, and whiteouts. Bernays spent several nights in a snow cave above 18,000 feet and almost got frostbite. The article also evinces a flair for writing and a sense of humor, especially in his descrip- tion of tumbling into a bog with a pack horse: "I fished myself and the horse out of the mud and retreated to solid ground to remount. The horse had had enough at this point. Be tween the deceptive ground and the complete stranger on his back, he was thoroughly spooked. He stood stiff-legged as I re- mounted and after a moment's motionless but uneasy calm set out to throw me by any means possible. Our lonely rodeo was a tie until the horse made one un- fortunate mistake: he forgot where the bog was. His final leap carried us far out into its depths and in the ensuing commotion I wound up underneath him. This time it was more difficult to get back to solid ground. We finally straggled out, covered with mud and mis- cellaneous plant life, like monsters emerg ing from the primeval ooze!" Earlier that year, a large avalanche on Huasca- ran, Peru's highest peak, had destroyed the village of Ranrahirca and killed about 4,000 people. After their triumph on Tullparaju, Bernays and Sawyer, who was a graduate student in geophysics at MIT, spent three weeks on Huascaran conducting research. They de- tected instability in a major glacier and warned Peruvi- an authorities that its collapse could result in an even more deadly avalanche near the Andean community of Yungay, a village of roughly 4,500. A huge headline in Expreso, a paper in Lima, shouted the news: "Dante- sco Auld Amenaza Yungay," which translates as "Dan- tesque Avalanche Threatens Yungay." Far from grateful for this intelligence, the Pe- ruvian officials ordered the scientists to retract their claims or face imprisonment. Bernays and Sawyer fled the country. The authorities urged residents to stay put and place their faith in God. That fall, one official dismissed the two mountaineers' observations on Huascaran as unscientific. Eight years later, on May 31, 1970, an earth- quake off Peru's coast triggered a massive avalanche from the same glacier, sending snow, ice, rock, and mud hurtling downhill at up to 250 miles an hour, dev- astating several Andean villages and killing more than 15,000 people. Nearly all of Yungay's residents were buried. The Peruvian government later declared the village a national cemetery and forbade any excava- tion. Mateo Casaverde, an engineer, escaped the avalanche by climbing a hill in the local cemetery. He recalled seeing a 200 -foot-tall wave of gray mud hit the town. "The sky went dark. We looked around. Yun- gay and its many thousands of inhabitants had disap- peared," he told the Peruvian Times. Some 300 school children also survived. They had been attending a circus in a stadium, one of the few structures in town- -along with a giant statue of Christ- -to remain intact. Most of the children were now orphans with no home to return to. All told, the earthquake killed 70,000 people throughout Peru, making it one of the worst natural disasters of the 20th century. As for the avalanche, it is still the most deadly on record. "If the government had heeded the warning from Bernays and Sawyer ... tragedy may have been averted. Instead, Peruvian authorities dismissed the scientists' findings as alarmist," the scholar Mark Carey wrote in a scientific paper on the history of ava- lanches in Peru. Unexpectedly, Bernays died of a heart attack in 1980 at just 47 years old, leaving behind a wife and two children. He is buried in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Harry K. Eldridge, one of his childhood friends, authored an obituary that ran in the American Alpine Journal. In their youth, the two had hiked and climbed together in the Adirondacks. Bernays, he said, was "a climbing partner eager to try almost any challenge, from caving to cliff hanging, while at the same time patient enough to teach his skills to anyone who shared his enthu siasm." Eldridge noted that Bernays liked to tinker with mountaineering equipment. "His popular ice piton was in heavy use for many years and his snow picket is doubtless the best ever designed," he wrote. "Expeditions in the Himalaya and elsewhere have kept in close communication with his super-light radio which runs on tiny flashlight batteries." Eldridge concluded: "Dave was eager, respon- sive and a true friend to all who cared to share their world with him." Some people scoff at the Adirondacks, say- ing they're not "real mountains." As the life of Dave Bernays shows, however, they are an excellent train- ing ground for those who aspire to bigger summits. Though I won't be following in his footsteps through Alaska, the Canadian Rockies, or the Cordillera Blanca, I'm glad I struck Rickety Pinnacle off my bucket list. No longer is Dave Bernays just a name in a guide- book. t

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