His first call-out (apart from recovering the victims of the Dakota crash on Moel Siabod) came a fortnight after his arrival at Valley.

At 10.30 a.m. on January 27th a party of students from Liverpool University Mountaineering Club started to traverse some of the Snowdon peaks. Then the weather was good but there was a considerable amount of snow on the ground. By 2.30 p.m. conditions had so deteriorated that two men decided to go down. They were then between Crib Goch and Crib y Ddisgl. There is an easy descent (grass in summer and easy-angled) from the col between these two peaks to Llyn Llydaw, but they must have missed it, or perhaps they were on rocks too far to the west. They got into difficulties, fell ninety feet, but picked themselves up apparently uninjured.

A blizzard overtook them but they kept moving down, searching for the PYG track which would lead them back to safety - or which they could cross to join the Miners' Track several hundred feet lower. Both paths would lead them back to Pen y Pass Hotel if found in time. But they were tired and for some time they sheltered among the rocks. When they started again the leader complained of pain in his leg (afterwards his companion said that an earlier slip had aggravated an old war wound). He fell into a snowdrift and was pulled out by his second. They reached the shore of Llyn Llydaw, and knew that they had crossed the PYG track. They must have been only a short distance from the Miners' Track but were too exhausted to look for it. Again they sheltered, but this time the leader couldn't go on. He died about 3.30 a.m.

The search party found the survivor at 11.30 a.m. on the same morning.

The two men carried axes and a rope and, according to the police, were suitably dressed. Yet neither had any knowledge of Snowdonia and for the survivor it was his first experience of such conditions. This accident, coming so soon after Lees' training exercise on Crib y Ddisgl under similar conditions (they too had descended in the face of deteriorating weather), confirmed his instruction that to climb safely in winter, one should have previous knowledge of the ground under summer conditions, more particularly if one is comparatively inexperienced.

I met Lees - and made my first acquaintance with mountain rescue - at Easter 1952, when I came to run a mountain youth hostel in his area. I was initiated very quickly into this new world and fortunately I learnt the hard part first. This is the waiting. I would have been a lot happier in the years to come had he been a criminal or a sailor or a test pilot. In the next eighteen months I was to spend a great deal of time waiting - for a man to come down off the mountain, often hours late, and sometimes not coming at all. I wasn't on the telephone. I never accustomed myself to this life, even when I became a guide. The only time I didn't worry was when I was out there too. But in the early days I wasn't free to go; I had a small daughter to look after and my living to make running the hostel. One might have thought our relationship couldn't survive this strain. It survived firstly because I was used to being torn by my emotions (fear was a new one, but I learnt to take that too), and, secondly, because he saw nothing strange nor harmful in my reactions. These were what all women felt in my position.

In him I lived again my mountaineering youth (for however young a woman is, she is old as soon as she has a child. This is not to do with physique but responsibility). I spent the evenings listening to his complaints and his tirades and his wild enthusiasms. Everything he did Continue to Page 4