At this time Lees was twenty-four and had been climbing for three years. He climbed every weekend and on all his leaves. While stationed in the south of England he kept fit on the sandstone outcrops of Kent and Sussex. This - and the gritstone of his native Yorkshire - develops strength in the fingers, but because of the paucity of holds on rounds grit and sandstone, some devotees tend to climb too fast when they graduate to the big cliffs in the mountains. You run up sandstone because you cannot afford to stop. There is nothing to rest on. If you come off, there isn't very far to fall; in any event most sandstone outcrop climbs are done first on a top rope. Only when the climber knows the route and the sequence of holds, does he lead it clean. On big cliffs you lead clean all the time, and because there are more and better holds, and because you may be badly injured in a fall, climbing should be deliberate and slow. This deliberation, this thinking on climbs, is something many outcrop-climbers have to learn. Lees didn't. He always climbed slowly, deliberately, cautiously. You never felt, watching him, that he was going to come off. He would never reach that stage; he would retreat first. He was completely reliable. One of the tests of the reliability of a climber is to picture a great route at your limit or above it, and imagine how many people you would follow up it. If Lees said that I could second him up the north wall of the Eiger, if he told me I could take over the lead even there in an emergency, I would do it. But not with anyone else.

But in 1951 I was working in a Brighton theatre and Lees was a vague name connected with 'the London crowd' - for we had mutual friends in mountaineering circles. Of R.A.F. mountain rescue I knew nothing - except, as all girls knew, it was glamorous and tough and exciting, and so the men must be too.

He took over as N.C.O. in charge at Valley some time after Mike Mason left and a few days after the Aer Lingus Dakota crashed in a bog on Moel Siabod. The aircraft hit the top of a ridge and all twenty-three occupants, including children, were killed. Recovering these bodies was his introduction to the work that was to monopolise his life for the next nine years.

Between Mason's departure and Lees' arrival there had occurred one of those bad patches which was liable to overtake any team. At the briefing for his first exercise he discovered that many of the more recently-joined men were unable to abseil, and that only two or three members had any experience of snow and ice. (It would be nearly a year since the last winter conditions, and the teams changed so extensively and so quickly that scarcely any of the men present would be the same ones who had become competent under Mason in winter a year ago.)

Snowdonia was now plastered with snow and more was forecast. Continue to page 2