Sergeant Borrill made contact with the civilians, and the team started to lower the stretchers down a very loose gully. No one was hit by the falling stones and, at 9.15 am, they reached the ledge where the injured men were lying.

From 9.0 am, the weather had deteriorated. More civilians came up to help and the two lowers started at 10.15am.

The descent was most difficult and frustrating. The ground was so steep that the stretchers had to be belayed practically all the way (in fact, for mountaineers unencumbered by stretchers, there are only two feasible lines of descent from the ridge, and neither was where these casualties were being evacuated). Since this mountainside is appallingly loose there was the constant danger, to both casualties and rescuers, of further accidents from falling rock. Crash helmets were not part of the issue in those days.

Both stretchers took five and a half hours to reach the road.
It would be facetious to say that people choose the most awkward places to fall into - those that don't fall all the way - but, certainly in Scotland, where cliffs are on the grand scale, rescues tend to be more difficult than those in Wales or the Lakes. In the latter districts, if a man falls on a cliff and ledges there, the rescue is comparatively straightforward, even if he has to be lowered by stretcher or carried on another man's back. The point is: he is seen on the cliff. In Scotland the faces are huge; even if you think a man is on a certain mountain, it may be extremely difficult to locate him.

A typical example of this was an accident on the Aonach Dubh in Glen Coe. There are three faces to this mountain: the east face which contains the fine East Wall; the north face, about two thousand feet high: a near-vertical descent of rock and extremely steep grass, of gullies and chimneys and walls where no one has ever climbed (nor perhaps, ever wanted to) - and, round the corner - the west face where six great gullies gash the mountain between seven buttresses and a whole amphitheatre is lost in the middle.

Glen Coe, during mountain rescue history, has been tossed backwards and forwards between the Leuchars team (based in Fife), and Kinloss. It was Leuchars' area in September 1960 when the Glencoe police asked for the team's assistance at a rescue on the Aonach Dubh.

Bill Brankin was then the NCO in charge at Leuchars and he sent Chief Technician John Hinde ahead with the Landrover and the most competent members of the team.

A civilian mountaineer called Hamish MacInnes lives halfway down Glen Coe with his wife, Catherine, who is a doctor. The advance party of RAF reached the glen at 2.0am and called at Hamish's cottage. Catherine told them her husband was on the hill with a police constable and two others, and that some youth hostellers had taken a stretcher up and returned.

The injured man was called Powell. He had fallen while climbing a gully, and the survivor had managed to get down alone but he was so shocked that he was unable to return with the rescuers nor even to identify the gully which they had been climbing. All that the search parties knew was that the accident had occurred on the Aonach Dubh, probably on either the east or north face. Continue to Page 8