The Incredible Story Of James Scott
The Sun Herald
Sunday February 23, 1992
ON the night of December 21, 1991, a light snow fell on the harsh landscape around Phedi, high in the foothills of the Nepalese Himalayas.
As James Scott and Mark Fulton emerged on December 22 from the lodge at Phedi, where trekkers on this trail stop, they registered the dusting of snow
They checked with the lodgekeeper, who promised them it would not snow again that day, though it was bitterly cold. They set off for the steep and treacherous Laurebinayak Pass.
Scott, a 22-year-old medical student from Brisbane, had come to Nepal to work in local hospitals as part of his studies. While waiting for a place, he and a fellow student, Tim Hooper, had gone trekking. Hooper had strained his thigh further down the trail and turned back, but James had continued with Fulton, another Australian they had met on the trail.
Hooper and Scott had originally planned to take the easier Helambu trail to the east.
But they were tempted by the Gosainkund route, which leads over the pass and back towards Kathmandu in a westerly loop. This trail is less popular than most - and involves a difficult crossing of the lower slopes of the mountains- but there are regular lodges where trekkers can shelter and eat along the way.
About mid-morning, the trail to the pass became unclear, and the pair guessed that it followed a creek to the left. But after a kilometre struggling over slippery rocks, they encountered a sheer cliff and turned back.
It was about 11am when the snow began to shawl over the mountains.
Scott was worried about altitude sickness and was desperate to get back to Kathmandu to phone his fiancee on Christmas Day. He was wearing a padded jacket, a favourite straw hat, tracksuit trousers and tennis shoes rather than boots.
Fulton decided to press on, but James said he would go back. They separated. James Scott was not to be seen again for 42 days.
TIM Hooper arrived in Kathmandu expecting to meet James on December 25. By the 27th he was worried and contacted the Australian Embassy.
Two days later he faxed James's father, Professor Ken Scott, a leading plant biochemist in Brisbane. He said James was missing and that the last sighting had been of James walking back to Ghopte, further down than Phedi.
The odds seemed reasonable: James was young and strong, a black belt in karate. But the fire-lighting equipment and good maps had been in Tim Hooper's rucksack. In his own rucksack James Scott had spare tracksuit trousers, pants and socks, a sweatshirt, a sleeping bag and two chocolate bars.
ON December 29 Joanne Robertson, James's elder sister, was attending to some washing at her home in the Brisbane suburb of Annerley.
With her husband Calum she had just returned from a weekend at the coast. Both had good careers as veterinarians and Joanne had been turning over in her mind the idea of applying to do post-graduate research on diabetes in cats.
She was blissfully unaware of the obligation stalking her. Upstairs, the telephone rang.
Calum answered it. He came downstairs and announced simply: "We've got a problem."
Joanne went upstairs and her father told her he had some bad news. He read out Tim Hooper's fax, but said he thought James was probably just snowed in.
For Joanne, it was a message from another world. She had no concept of what Nepal was like; it was, she says, the last place on earth she wanted to go to. Nor did she appreciate the sheer scale of the mountains' treachery: the Himalayas are mostly over 8,000 metres high, and Laurebinayak Pass is about the same height as the summit of Mont Blanc. 1
Her first instinct was that someone from the family should go to Nepal. There was never much doubt that she would be the one.
But a call to the Foreign Affairs Department in Canberra deterred her; they thought James would probably be snowed in and advised sitting tight.
Meanwhile in Nepal, the full financial import of what had to happen was becoming clear.
This is the Third World, where looking for a lost tourist would be a severe drain on local resources. An Army helicopter costs around $US700 an hour, and a man on foot $US30 a day. By the time the search was finished, Ken Scott estimates they had spent $A50,000.
Tim Hooper had had to sign a form - along with the Australian second secretary Graeme Fay - guaranteeing payment for searches by foot or helicopter.
The embassy contacted David Schlim, president of the Himalayan Rescue Association. He recommended that Carl Harrison, who lived in Kathmandu and led mountaineering expeditions, be hired to lead the search.
On December 30 the first search party went out, led by Harrison and Ingo Schnabel of the Himalayan Rescue Dog Training Centre.
JOANNE Robertson knew about the search party, and expected a message by January 2 (11 days after James was last seen) that he was in a hut in Ghopte, snowed in. But news never came.
During the day she carried on working, but at night the vision of James lying on a high ledge, perhaps with a broken leg, was insistent.
She rang the Australian Embassy in Kathmandu to find out more about the search party, and was told a helicopter had gone up. It came back having contacted the search party, who had reported a 99 per cent definite sighting: some French Canadian walkers were sure they had seen him.
Joanne rang her parents and told them she had wonderful news, and that the Foreign Affairs Department would be in touch as soon as James was precisely located.
But James was not found, and the call never came. On January 3, she went and arranged visas for Nepal.
Now possessed by a fierce determination to know what had happened, she decided she must go. Andrew Ross - James's best friend and fellow karate student, who had turned up on December 30 at James' parents house with $1,000 collected to help pay for the search - agreed he would go with her.
On Tuesday January 7 they took a Thai Airlines flight from Brisbane to Kathmandu. By then James had been missing for 16 days.
IN Kathmandu, Joanne Robert son soon observed the poverty, the pungent smog rising above the settlements, and the faint remnants of hippydom.
At the airport she struck up a casual conversation with a girl who advised her to consult a Buddhist lama, because they saw the things that were hidden.
Joanne filed the idea away, though it sat uncomfortably with her own brisk sensibilities. The family had worked out a principle by which the search was to continue: in 10 years' time, when they asked themselves if they had done everything they possibly could, the answer had to be 'Yes'.
She and Andrew booked room 427 at the Hotel Kathmandu, sharing it to keep the cost down. Even here, at 2,000 metres, it was icy cold; 45 kilometres to the north, where James had been trekking, the land climbs to more than 4,000m, then on to the precipices of the high Himalayas.
They soon discovered flaws in the apparent sighting of James.
Carl Harrison's first search party had been heading for Ghopte, but shortly before they reached it they encountered a party of French Canadians, who were sure they had passed James on a gentler trail to the south east, in the Helambu area. Harrison had therefore turned his search party south-east.
Joanne sought out the Canadians in Kathmandu who said they were certain they had seen James.
But one woman had doubts. She thought she remembered hailing the man and that he had said he came from Germany - but she wasn't sure, and the rest were.
One of the search leaders had received a note from a German called Mathias. He had heard about the search, and wanted to let them know that he had been trekking alone in the Helambu area. It seemed likely that Mathias was the man the Canadians had seen. But the only way to be sure was to find him.
Irritated that the search had been diverted by suspect information, Joanne demanded to know why Harrison had changed his route. He told her that, if James was in the Helambu region, he would probably still be alive. But if he had stayed north of Ghopte - in penetrating temperatures and sudden snow - he would almost certainly be dead.
It was now 21 days since James had disappeared. Without food - even in normal conditions - humans cannot usually last longer than 50.
THE administrative engine of the search was swiftly estab lished. The Australian Embassy officials told Joanne that tourists were not allowed to use the phone and fax - and, since the ambassador was away, no-one had the authority to make an exception.
Instead they directed her to a local architect, Tom Crees, from whose fax Joanne began to send regular bulletins to her parents in Brisbane.
Advertisements had been placed on Nepalese television and radio. Hundreds of posters of James had been made, offering a reward of 20,000 rupees ($A630)if he was found alive, 10,000 if dead.
But the difficulties involved in knowing where to send search parties were horrific. A trekking map of Nepal is a scribbled web of contour lines; the land heaves in complex creeks, gullies and ridges. Many of the trails are poorly marked, and place names vary.
The best information they had was Tim Hooper's assumption that James had been heading back to Ghopte.
Some hard decisions had to be made to narrow the search. They assumed James could have tried to cross the treacherous Laurebinayak Pass, or turned back.
But whether he had continued over the pass towards Dhunche, or gone back towards Ghopte, there was no telling how far he had got. By now he could be almost anywhere.
It seemed unlikely, though, that he would have turned south-west towards Talu, where there was doubt about whether there was any sort of trail at all. And there remained the spectre of foul play: there had been reports of solo trekkers being attacked and robbed.
The search area was over 50km in diameter.
AT the Hotel Kathmandu, Joanne was taking pills to enable her to sleep. And both she and Andrew Ross had succumbed to stomach problems.
"We have to accept that, as time goes by, the chances of finding James alive are less and less," she wrote in one of her faxes to her parents.
"However, I refuse to give up all hope and we will pursue every possibility, no matter how remote."
She met a guide who told her he once found a trail down to Talu. She asked the heads of the Trekking Agents' Association and the Nepalese Mountaineering Association about it. No, they replied firmly, it was not possible to go down by a south-westerly route.
ON January 11 Joanne travel led to Bodha, just north-east of Kathmandu, to pursue one of the more remote possibilities.
She remembered the conversation at the airport. She did not consider herself a spiritual person, but the principle that everything must be done obliged her to seek an audience with one of the rinpoche lamas at Bodha.
She and Andrew Ross entered his brightly coloured gompa with some nervousness. Tradition demanded a gift, wrapped in a white scarf. They had been unable to find a scarf, but left some bank notes on the table.
The lama, sitting down in saffron robes, worked a set of beads through his hands as Joanne explained the story. The lama agreed he would make a prayer on the matter, and then moved to the map which Joanne had laid out.
"You must look here," he said, and placed his finger in the triangle between Phedi, Ghopte and Talu. It was a route which would have required James to turn south-west, along a trail which experts said didn't exist.
Joanne then asked him if her brother was alive.
"You will meet your brother again," replied the lama.
NEVERTHELESS, the grim news continued as each search party - there were to be 16 in all, some taking over two weeks - returned.
Carl Harrison had set out again for the area north of Ghopte, hoping to reach Phedi. This time he would be checking the sheer drops, caves and huts for a body.
But there had been two or three significant snowfalls; Joanne wanted to know how they would find him. Harrison told her they would look for the footprints of the rodents and jackals which attended corpses.
However as the search parties slowly ticked off every ledge and fissure, the possibilities of what might have happened seemed to multiply.
Now there seemed to be more questions to answer than when they had started: Ingo Schnabel was not sure that some lodgekeepers were telling the truth when they said they had not seen James return; they still needed to track down Mark Fulton; and the local people were not very forthcoming, fearing that they may be implicated in the disappearance.
Tom Crees advised putting the reward up to 100,000 rupees (more than$A3,000) - but the 10,000 for the discovery of James's body remained the same
Meanwhile the rinpoche lama's was not the only prediction that was weighed in the night hours in room 427 of the Hotel Kathmandu.
Lotte Weisse, a friend of Tom Crees's, had spoken to a Chinese psychic, who insisted that James was being held against his will in a hut at Gosainkund. It sounded ludicrous, yet they were flailing in the realms of the unknown.
Joanne contented herself with the knowledge that a search party was, in any case, trying to get to Gosainkund from Dhunche in the west.
A chinia lama - more a political than a religious leader - offered his help, and was flown north by helicopter, where he persuaded villagers to join the search at 50 rupees a day.
Lotte Weisse was ringing every day with the latest from the Chinese psychic, but there was no real news.
Joanne accepts now that she was subconsciously blocking the possibility of James being dead, but occasionally she would turn tearful and shaky.
She tried not to be on her own when the grief descended, and did not ring her husband the whole time she was over there. Had she done so, she would simply have broken down.
JOANNE had promised her father she would not go up in the helicopter. But she was tempted when she met Colonel Pun, probably the best pilot in Nepal, who agreed to do all he could. Many training flights were subsequently diverted to the search area.
But she never did fly; there was too much to do on the ground.
She searched the dusty ledgers of the trekking office at Nepalese Immigration, which issues permits and records passport numbers, names and addresses.
Starting at November, she checked each page for Germans with first names beginning with M. Eventually she found a Mathias Weigelt, and got a number for him in Germany.
He confirmed he had been trekking in Nepal, and remembered encountering the French Canadians.
She was bothered too that they still had not managed to track down Mark Fulton, who had been the last person to see James.
They knew he had flown out to Bangkok, and that he had an air ticket which would get him back to Australia between January 16 and 21. A message was left at the airport for him to contact urgently the Australian Embassy in Bangkok.
On January 15 he called. And when Joanne spoke to him, he offered one striking revelation: that he and James got as far as Phedi - further on than Ghopte - and stayed the night there, and then separated the next day.
Mark Fulton had carried on over the Laurebinayak Pass, and with immense good fortune, reached a village on the other side.
It was decided that Carl Harrison's group should search the area between Phedi and the pass; but, he warned, the weather could intervene.
"We'll check everywhere," he said. "But there are many creeks and gullies. It's very difficult."
Carl Harrison's party found nothing, and was snowed in. He told Joanne later that, traversing slowly through the snow, he had used his shovel to check the depth. Once he prodded the snow and the shovel disappeared.
On January 27 (36 days after James's ordeal began) they arrived back in Kathmandu. That was as much as they could do, he said. In the spring they would have to go up and look for James's body.
YET a detail of the final search party nagged at Joanne Rob ertson. Carl Harrison's party had been snowed in at Phedi on January 23. But the next day there had been a slight thaw and they had tried to get down the path to Talu, to the southwest - the same path whose existence had been doubted by experienced mountaineers back in Kathmandu.
That path, if there, would skirt the treacherous area the lama in Bodha had fingered on the map.
Carl Harrison had found the path with difficulty but, he reported, it did not make sense - you would never think it went where it did.
Instead of going downwards, it climbed higher, then veered away from the river. The logical route down was by the river, but the river led to an icy gully of forest, prehistoric boulders and deep water pools.
Harrison himself had lost the path and had been about to head off in the wrong direction. He was stopped only because he was spotted by Ingo Schnabel and a sherpa. Schnabel was lost too, but his dog was following the scent of the path.
Nevertheless, Carl Harrison had searched the path. But he had not searched the gully, which was within the triangle the lama had pointed to.
Joanne had been shading the searched areas on a map. Now she took it out, and it was a mass of blue pencil. She circled three remaining unshaded areas; one of them enclosing the lama's triangle.
She asked Carl Harrison where he thought James was, and he pointed to the same area. But, he said, they could not go back now until there were 15 days without snow; it would have to be in the spring, and then they would go and look for James's body.
THE realisation that her brother must be dead hard ened in Joanne's mind. She had her ticket back to Australia and was due to leave the following Monday. Andrew Ross had already gone back, and told James's father that James must be dead.
But Joanne remembered the principle: in 10 years' time, when we ask ourselves whether we did everything we possibly could, are we going to be able to say 'Yes'?
She wanted also to be able to give her parents some kind of next step, so that at least this wasn't the end.
So she suggested Harrison take a helicopter over the triangle, in preparation for a search in the spring. He agreed. The helicopter took off on February 2 from Tokha, which was less susceptible to fog than the Kathmandu valley.
On board were: Tom Crees with his video camera; Colonel Pun; his co-pilot Captain Koirella; Carl Harrison; an army major who also had a video; and Carl's head guide.
Joanne took Tom Crees's four-wheel-drive back to the airport at Kathmandu, where the helicopter was due to land. By this time she was well-known in the radio room of the helicopter base. She waited for news out on the second storey veranda, where she could pace up and down, watching the monkeys which inhabit the nearby trees.
This time she was more relaxed than usual, expecting nothing, and had brought a book, an Irving Wallace novel. After 20 or 30 minutes, she heard the radio crackle.
Colonel Pun asked for Joanne, and when she came said: "Joanne, this is Colonel Pun." As usual, this amused her - who else would it be? 3 She replied: "Come in, Colonel Pun."
He then announced: "Joanne, we have spotted a person who is alive | I repeat, he is alive | He is above Talu. We think it could be James |"
LOOKING back, Joanne cannot sort out the jumble of over whelming emotions. Her first thought - how wonderful, could it possibly be? - was chased away by her second - don't get your hopes up, it could be somebody else.
Colonel Pun said they would return in 10 minutes. Joanne ran out and stood by the landing pad. She heard the thap-thap of the blades before she saw the helicopter.
Carl Harrison jumped out and said they had seen someone in an incredible place - on the side of a steep slope, beneath an overhanging rock - where it would be impossible to go up or down.
He had a blue sleeping bag. Joanne could not remember what colour James's was.
They had used the video on full magnification to try to see his face, but it wasn't close enough.
There was still doubt, but in a sense that did not matter: whoever it was, he must be rescued.
If it was James, Joanne told Carl Harrison, and he died during the night before they got to him, she would never forgive herself.
Harrison agreed to rappel down to the rock from the helicopter - a manoeuvre which, he later admitted, he had never attempted before.
The party went off to get supplies and mountaineering gear.
But when they reached Carl Harrison's house, Joanne broke down and sobbed. For the first time since she had come to Kathmandu, she didn't know what to say or what to do.
She kept asking Carl: "Is it him?"
In his careful, neutral way, Carl replied: "It is possible. Yes, I think it is him."
In the end they packed matches, some basic first aid, food, and some injectible Demerol painkiller.
Colonel Pun had got a rope and, for some reason, a box of pastries.
Carl's father had come, and friends from the embassy arrived with sandwiches. They came in a Landcruiser with a fold-down seat, which would serve as an ambulance.
The helicopter took off and flew to Talu. But the cloud descended, making it impossible to take off again.
Colonel Pun radioed back that they would wait for a couple of hours in case it broke. But the cloud sat there, and eventually a search party was formed, led by Carl Harrison, to walk in.
It was a long night. Joanne and the others went back to Tom Crees's house, and returned to the airport about 6.30am. The morning was overcast, and Joanne was convinced it would be snowing heavily on the higher ground.
The helicopter was not transmitting; maybe the battery had gone flat. Then Colonel Pun came through.
He told her the search party had found James, and said twice that he was alive. He explained that they were going to lift him on a cable to Talu, then get him inside the helicopter and fly him to Kathmandu.
Joanne was sobbing, and tried to get the radio operator to take over the transmission. But he couldn't, so she had to pull herself together.
In the hour that followed, she wondered what James would look like, what condition he would be in, and whether they would need to airlift him to Bangkok for amputations necessitated by frostbite.
She was scared, and shaking.
The first person to get out of the helicopter was Tom Crees. Then the blades slowed and Joanne walked towards the door.
She saw James, and he looked like an old man. He was filthy, with a beard. But he was able to walk out of the helicopter to her. It was the last time he would walk for a long time.
They embraced - she cannot remember for how long. He said: "Thank you so much. I can't believe you're here."
"Don't," she said. "Don't."
She couldn't help thinking how marginal the decision to send the helicopter had been. And how, if they had found his emaciated body in the spring, they would have known how close they had been.
At the hospital, she phoned her parents with wonderful news.
© 1992 The Sun Herald