One Wild Winter: Surviving Avalanches

Every winter, thousands of people head to the mountains

to experience them at their most magnificent.

In an age of mobile technology, many of these adventurers carry cameras.

We made it! Yeah!

Tales of triumph,

and of tragedy, are captured in the most

immediate and intimate way.

These are the Scottish mountains.

The winter of 2012-13 was one of the coldest,

longest and busiest on record in the Scottish mountains.

It was also one of the deadliest.

A major search operation is under way tonight for three climbers

after an avalanche near Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands.

Mountain Rescue teams say there are fatalities.

Police have confirmed tonight that a man and woman have died

following an avalanche in the Cairngorms.

And it is yet another reminder of just how dangerous

the Scottish mountains can be in winter.

14 lives were lost as extreme weather

and a series of lethal avalanches hit the Highlands.

Using footage recorded by people who live,

work and play in these environments...

Cold!

..this film will reveal what really happened on the mountains

and find out how a major meteorological phenomenon

taking place high up in the atmosphere

helped shape what was truly a unique winter.

The winter of 2012-13 began like any other.

Two of Scotland's ski centres have reported good custom

on the first day of the season.

Some runs have been open at the Lecht and Cairngorm Mountain,

where more than 500 skiers took to the slopes.

Woo-hoo! Hello!

-LAUGHING

-Where are we?

We're up a hill somewhere! I don't really know, but it's really pretty.

-SHE SINGS

-# Jingle bells, jingle bells

# Jingle all the way... #

Then, in January, a major cold spell struck

and brought with it some of the heaviest snowfall in years.

Time and time again, we saw the weather systems

bringing us snow on many occasions.

It seemed like groundhog day in our weather conditions.

The combination of high visitor numbers

and heavy snowfall would prove deadly.

On 19th January, tragedy struck.

Four climbers have been killed in an avalanche in Glencoe in Scotland.

The following week in Ben Nevis,

another young but experienced climber fell to his death.

In February, horrendous storms and more major avalanches

continued to stretch the Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Service.

This last winter was full-on for us.

We had a lot of big rescues that came on the back of each other.

We'd be out maybe three or four days in a row.

We weren't getting any sleep, couple of hours then back out.

But the winter that was fast becoming

one of Scotland's most tragic was in no hurry to leave.

The cold winter conditions lasted right up into early April.

As late as Easter, the lingering winter would take another life

when an experienced off-piste skier

was struck by an avalanche in Glencoe.

But how unique was this winter?

What can it tell us about winters to come?

And just how will the emergency services who protect us cope

when such a winter strikes again?

This footage is from the camera of Jonathan Hart.

As chairman of the Mountain Rescue Committee of Scotland,

he knows well the benefit and the cost of heavy snowfalls.

My experience this winter

is that the unusual event we had was a period of two to three months

of stable weather, high pressure, but bringing north-easterly

and north-westerly winds.

That produced an unusual volume of snow in a short period of time.

Coupled with large numbers of people coming to Scotland,

quite rightly, to enjoy the fantastic conditions,

it meant that we then had a series of incidents we had to deal with.

The last time that happened, that set of unusual circumstances,

was in the mid '50s.

The unusual conditions continued

to draw more and more people up into the Highlands,

eager to record and share their great adventures.

MUSIC: "Flowers In Your Hair" by The Lumineers

# When we were younger we thought

# Everyone was on our side

# Then we grew a little

# And romanticised

# The time I saw flowers in your hair

# It takes a boy to live

# It takes a man to pretend he was there... #

The size and quality of modern day cameras

allow people to capture extraordinary images

thousands of feet up.

They're also on hand to capture some of the dramatic rescues.

Such rescues are rare, as the overwhelming majority

of people return home without incident.

But, in winter, the potential for danger should never be forgotten.

If ever there was an illustration of the perils of walking in winter,

in Scotland, especially,

it's this stuff, here,

which just dislodged as I walked over it.

It's a whole section of a top layer of snow.

And all you need to do is step and that's it, it's off,

and you with it.

On a steep slope, that could be quite a problem.

Mark Diggins is the senior forecaster

at the Sport Scotland Avalanche Information Service.

Every day, Mark and his colleagues report online the avalanche risk

in the five most popular mountain areas of Scotland.

We're about 1,000-odd metres here now.

There will be places where the snow is drifting,

and there will be an avalanche hazard.

Mark works in the Cairngorms National Park.

In the winter of 2012-13, the Cairngorms was hit

by an unusually high volume of snow.

'This winter's been pretty different to other winters,

'because of where the weather's been coming from.

'A lot of really Arctic weather.'

Here in the Cairngorms, snow can build up to 20 feet deep.

With every snowfall, a new layer is added to the snow pack.

Within these layers, the snow crystals

begin to change in form and size.

It's these changes which determine how well the crystals bond together

and whether the layer will be strong or weak.

This snow pit will reveal the condition of the most recent layers.

Obviously, we've got this very distinct layer, there,

and then another one here.

By measuring the temperature at intervals,

we can begin to understand how the snow is behaving.

If the temperature changes more

than around 1 degree centigrade per 10 centimetres,

the snow can transform into the weak, sugary crystals

which cause the majority of avalanches.

I'm just going to clean the face.

Cutting out a column of these snow layers

allows for a shock test that is both simple and safe.

You see a fail, there.

Usually, the temperature between layers fluctuates

with the changing weather, allowing the crystals to transform

back into rounded, well-bonded grains.

Give it a tap and you see...

..it's a layer that's presenting a weakness.

But, in January 2013, the weather stayed persistently cold

and the crystals failed to bond.

This winter, the weak layer was in there for about a month.

Which is quite unusual in Scotland, because often it's so mild

and we get warm weather and rain affecting the snow pack

so a lot of those weak layers disappear.

But this winter it was quite different,

because those weak layers didn't disappear at all.

And, also, we've had real extreme events of wind.

A lot of times it's been over 100mph.

Massive amounts of snow are being transported.

It pushes the snow on top of these weak layers,

and it's just really on a hairline trigger.

The reports that Mark and his colleagues create

are published online every day, and are essential reading

before venturing into snow-covered mountains.

There's been quite a period where people have really not experienced

proper winters, or real Scottish winters.

So maybe they don't quite realise how prepared you need to be.

It can change so quickly from being a lovely day

to being really violent and full-on.

Scientists are only now beginning to understand

the complex metamorphosis that occurs within a snow pack.

We used to think that the snow pack was like a sort of sandwich,

but, actually, it's much more complex than that.

The snow builds up. Over time, snow moves,

crystals and grains, from one place to another.

So there might be little areas

where it's weaker than other areas.

That then gets disguised, it gets covered by subsequent snowfalls,

and, so, really, it could almost be a bit like a minefield.

To learn more about the lethal potential of snow,

we must go to a place where understanding its behaviour

is critical to just about every aspect

of human endeavour and existence.

In the Alps, whole towns and villages are built

in the shadow of huge, snow-covered mountains.

Roads and railways weave their way through narrow passes.

On average, 100 lives are lost to avalanches each year.

In Davos, Switzerland,

scientists at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research

conduct experiments to analyse the complex life of a snowflake.

Their experiments range from growing their own, ultra-consistent snow...

..to the triggering of full-scale avalanches

whose spectacular power can be seductive.

They are extremely mysterious.

They are so complex and so beautiful

there is always something new to study, to see, to learn.

They have a kind of

primitive attraction for this beautiful, natural phenomenon.

On these mountains, scientists are able to start

and monitor their own avalanches.

We try to release, and we do it artificially from a helicopter,

large avalanches.

And the aim of these experiments is to measure

all dynamical parameters that characterise the flow.

What we are interested in is being able to reproduce the movement

of these very large avalanches that can reach down to the villages,

and it's able to tell us how far an avalanche can come.

And how much pressure and velocity she will exert along the path.

These measurements are critical to making decisions

about infrastructure and housing in mountainous areas.

But it's at the microscopic level where avalanches begin.

To understand more about snow involved in avalanches,

researchers collect samples from recent avalanche sites.

From a geological point of view,

snow is a high-temperature material.

And that sounds very strange for most people,

because snow is almost a symbol for cold.

But, because snow is always very close to the melting point,

it behaves as a high-temperature material.

It's like a metal at several hundred,

or even thousand degrees.

And that makes it very fast changing.

It's one of the fastest changing natural materials we see at all.

Changing and making new crystals means to change the structure.

Working in temperatures of minus 20 degrees,

scientists can analyse these changing structures

in ways that have only recently become possible.

Snow is a very elusive material.

That made it very hard

to really get a complete picture of the snow.

And that was the state until about ten years ago,

when we started with tomography.

When we could really visualise snow in 3-D.

Then we started to see snow in a very different way than before.

Tomography provides a microscopic X-ray view

of how snow samples change over time.

First I thought that must be great for everybody,

because now people can understand snow.

But it doesn't look like the nice, hexagonal,

perfectly symmetric snowflakes.

It looks, simply, strange.

These new ways of looking at snow have enabled scientists

to build large 3-D models of microscopic structures

from real snow samples.

So, this sample is from an avalanche site.

This block is only 4mm wide.

We see in this block the essential features.

This big blob is refrozen snow,

so it got warm, but only a little bit.

It created this huge crystal,

and that's the interface, you could say,

between the hard upper layer and the weak layer.

And the avalanche forms now somewhere in this weak layer.

The avalanche forecaster needs to understand

under which conditions does nature form such a weak layer.

By knowing more about the process,

then the avalanche forecasters are able to improve their methods,

and, hopefully, forecast avalanches more precisely.

Avalanches rarely happen by themselves,

so precise forecasting provides essential information

for anyone venturing into snow-covered mountains.

For an avalanche to occur,

you need a trigger.

With avalanches that involve people,

90% of the time they will have triggered the avalanche themselves.

It's not a case of an avalanche just engulfing people.

Two years ago on a winter's day in the Cairngorms,

climber Barry Middleton became such a trigger.

He was returning home with a friend from a day's climbing

on Feith Buidhe, near the summit of Hell's Lum.

This photograph was taken soon after his lucky escape from the avalanche.

Does it feel a bit strange coming back and looking at the place?

It's interesting just to see all those craggy bits

and think that I probably could have gone tumbling over some of that.

It doesn't bear thinking about.

I'd certainly think more when I'm out in a winter environment,

that's for sure, but I'm glad to be able to stand here

and enjoy it.

-It is a beautiful place, isn't it?

-It is.

But, you know, the mountains, they're not out to get you,

they're just here.

On one hand you've got the beauty,

on the other hand you got this risk and danger juxtaposed together.

I'd always associate an avalanche with being under snow.

But this was unusual because I was actually sitting on top

of a boulder field, it was actually moving.

You're thinking, "Oh, my God, it's an avalanche."

Next thought is, "This can't be good."

It quickly became apparent that I was reaching the edge of a void.

There was no snow just before the edge, just an icy slab,

and I knew that if I hit that icy slab

I couldn't stop myself, I'd go flying over the edge.

And, in a way, being out of control made it easier to be

accepting of what was about to happen,

because there was nothing I could do about it.

And then, just as I was about to hit this icy slab,

it all just very quickly slowed, and then it just stopped,

and I must have stopped from here to that rock.

Very lucky.

-And then you came to see me.

-That's it.

We thought, "Should we do the right thing and report it?"

And you were quite white, the both of you. I do recall that.

And it's hard to understand how two little people can actually

create such a massive avalanche like that.

Go to an alpine environment

and its big slopes and you think, "Avalanche."

You come here and there are smaller slopes, quite localised

and you think, "No, it's not that bad."

There were whole patches of grass in certain places,

there didn't seem to be that much snow.

And that is something that we have to take on board in Scotland.

The situation with yourselves was that we had this weak layer

and above that, we had this...it'd been windy,

and it had this hard slab put on the top,

so it feels really solid, but it's really just like an eggshell.

It had been getting milder and milder,

but it hadn't got rid of that weakness and so, really,

everything seems OK, but bang!

That situation is very similar to what we had

in the winds that we've just had now,

in that we had persistent layers.

In the winter of 2012 to '13,

Mark recorded 18 human-triggered avalanches like Barry's -

fewer than the previous year, but tragically,

two of these avalanches caused multiple fatalities

igniting media interest which would last the duration of the winter.

Avalanches actually are quite rare events.

You may think that with the news of this winter that we've just had,

that they happen frequently, but that is just not the case,

they are rare events.

But nonetheless, the impact of an avalanche is catastrophic.

This is Christopher Bell,

a 24-year-old PhD student and experienced mountaineer.

His ideal weekend would be to run, cycle,

a bit of a walk on the top of a mountain

-and watch the sun come up.

-Yeah.

Chris, we used to ask him, you know,

when he was nine, ten, "What do you want to be when you grow up?

"What you want to do when you grow up?" And he ALWAYS replied,

"I want to ride my bike and count the stars."

And that's what he did.

On 19th January,

Chris set out on a climbing expedition in Glencoe.

He was accompanied by junior doctor, Una Finnegan,

and four other friends, including a couple -

hospital doctor Rachel Majumdar

and PhD student Tom Chesters.

I knew that Tom was planning a trip up there

when he was down visiting us for Christmas.

He was looking for places to stay,

looking for walks to go on and suchlike.

Yeah, they were getting quite excited about it.

They were really looking forward to a trip up there.

Good evening. Cold and wintry

and, yes, we are already seeing some snow.

The Met Office have already issued an amber, be-prepared warning

for some really quite heavy and frequent snow showers.

These showers are being driven in

by a strong easterly wind

so it will feel bitterly cold, too.

I think Tom loved the fact that he could get into these wild,

open spaces and, if he wanted to,

really push the boundaries a little bit.

The six friends had spent the day climbing and had already

begun their descent down the north face of Bidean Nam Bian.

He always aimed to get outside as often as he could

and as high up, because he always said,

"To get the best views, you've got to climb the highest mountains."

I won't have anybody saying that he was irresponsible

going up those mountains.

He was... Christopher didn't have an irresponsible bone in his body.

Christopher had done avalanche training.

But if it all boils down to being at the wrong place at the wrong time,

there's nothing anybody can do about that.

I came in for the usual late afternoon Saturday activity,

which is watching the football scores and then the BBC news.

A major search operation is under way tonight for three climbers

after an avalanche near Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands.

Mountain rescue teams say there are fatalities.

Immediately I heard that,

there was a kind of...chill, of fear went down my spine.

I straight away got on the phone to text him,

but, of course, there was no response.

This is thought to be one of Scotland's worst climbing accidents.

We know that it was a party of six,

that they had been climbing a peak known as Bidean Nam Bian.

They were making their way down the summit

and it seems that a slab of snow simply gave way.

They had fallen 1,000 feet

before being buried in up to six feet of snow.

About midnight, there were two doors slam outside,

two car doors, they were two policemen.

I just opened the door and said,

"I know what you're here for."

Definitely, the worst day of our lives, I guess.

Rescue workers found that one of the fallen climbers had survived,

but with very serious injuries.

Chris and Una, and Tom and Rachel

had all been pronounced dead at the scene.

I think I just sat in shock for a few days

and then you have to pull yourself together

and...get on with arrangements.

You can't believe that you're getting home with those arrangements,

but you just have to and...

it's still very strange.

I've now sort of had that scary thought

a few days after the accident

of being an only child now. And that's quite a scary,

worrying, surreal thought in many ways.

Cos, obviously, you think you're going to grow up

alongside your brother for many, many years

and, all of a sudden, it's just you.

I've still got and will always keep

the last Christmas present that Tom gave me,

which by sheer coincidence and fate was a jigsaw puzzle

of a Harvey's map of Fort William and Glencoe,

which has the actual mountain that killed Tom on it,

so that's something that I'll always, always keep hold of.

UKELELE MUSIC

So this is Christopher playing the ukelele or New Year's Eve.

And...this is him playing the background music to this video.

It's all his friends enjoying themselves.

It is sad, but...

..you know, they're enjoying it.

It's lovely.

Happy New Year.

It was fantastic.

I often used to go up

and wish I could do all the things that he could do, you know.

An amazing life up there, he had.

I struggle because he was such a good son.

And I have to be strong for Alison and Edward and it's hard.

It's difficult sometimes.

But we get through it and we keep strong and hopefully, you know,

he lives on in other people.

Nice lad.

Sad.

The Glencoe avalanche was the first major incident of the winter

and a tragic reminder that, no matter how experienced you are,

accidents can happen on snow-covered mountains.

But snow itself is not the only danger.

How we behave on the mountains

and the decisions we make there can also cause problems.

If someone has looked at a guide book and they've seen a climb

or a ski run or a particular walk that they want to do,

then, once they fix that, it's very, very hard for people

to divert from that plan.

The commitment to something

is probably one of the most common reasons

for people to ignore signs and to carry on regardless,

with sometimes serious consequences.

The other is the effect of other people doing things around you.

You know, when people are around you, you tend to think

that, "Oh, it must be OK. There, there."

You know, if I just go over here, it'll be the same.

You know, it might only be a few degrees of difference, but actually,

it might be significant in terms of avalanche hazard.

And this is not just for beginners, it's everybody.

There is evidence to show that, no matter how experienced you are,

how many times you've been in the mountains,

you're still susceptible to these human factors.

This is footage taken from the head cam of Thomas Scheuner,

a back-country skier who knows well

how these human factors can lead us into danger.

Despite having over 20 years of experience

going off-piste in the Swiss Alps,

Thomas made a near fatal mistake on the day this footage was taken.

Thomas and his friend were on a ski touring trip

through the Engelberg mountain range.

This was their last chance to get in some fresh powder runs

before heading home.

Some people say the worst car accidents happen

on the streets that you drive every day.

And it's a little bit the same thing

when you think that you really know the signs.

Thomas already had some indication of instability in the snow.

In previous runs, he'd seen cracks appear setting off small slides.

I stood there, on top of this face,

and I looked down and I saw it's really steep,

it's wind-affected, it's not stable.

Then, you wear this safety equipment,

like the airbag, like the beacon,

you feel better, you think you're invincible.

I tricked my mind, I tricked all that I knew

and I thought, "It IS very unstable, it IS very dangerous,

"but it's not happening to me."

But, of course, it happened to me.

I remember the moment I landed,

the whole face started to move.

I knew that it will be bad.

The snow on that day was very fresh,

very light. It's like a dust storm.

You don't see anything, you don't know if you're upside down.

It's...it's a horrible feeling.

Some people say, "Yeah, you have to spin on top of the avalanche."

You know, these forces are so strong

and it's like...a piece of dust in the wind, you don't,

you're not capable of doing anything,

you just wait for things to happen.

I knew on the bottom there will be a band of cliffs

and the cliffs are really high.

This amateur photograph

shows just how high.

But the fall was not his only concern,

there was also the possibility of being buried alive.

I just knew that I want to see light.

I don't want to be covered up,

this is the worst thing.

So I was always shovelling away

the snow that was trying to cover me up.

HE GROANS

And after a while, the slide stopped

and I saw light and then, I realised that I'm not breathing.

HE GROANS

My whole mouth was full of snow.

So first, get the snow out,

then start to breathe.

The red line shows how far

Thomas had been carried.

I heard my friend's voice and I was really...happy.

He dug up my legs and my body

and then, I really realised that something is not good with my spine.

Thomas had been very lucky

suffering only a single broken vertebra.

Following eight weeks wearing an aluminium support,

his spine completely recovered.

The first ski patrols came

and they looked up the steep face

and looked at me and they asked,

"Why are you alive?

"You know the day today? You have to celebrate a birthday from now on."

Back in Scotland,

off-piste skiing is thriving thanks to the recent heavy snowfalls.

But how do its attractions and its dangers compare with the Alps?

Because there are so few ski areas in Scotland

when you compare it to the Alps,

most of the good ski touring terrain needs a long approach,

be it on a bike, be it walking,

be it getting on your skis.

For me, that's a complete adventure where you go to the end of the road

and then the road runs out and then you follow a narrow track

and the track runs out and you keep going.

Blair Aitken is a ski instructor

who has worked in both the Alps and Scotland.

I sometimes feel that a lot of the off-piste skiing

that's done in the Alps,

and in particular the French Alps, where the lift system is so amazing.

It becomes a little bit like theme-park skiing

in that you can hop off a lift,

ski quite a steep dangerous slope relatively quickly.

For me, that side of skiing is far more dangerous

than what happens in Scotland.

In Scotland, there tends to be more preparation.

Because there has to be,

cos you don't know what you're going to encounter.

For me, it feels a bit rougher, a little bit rawer,

a little bit more natural out here.

And that makes it exciting.

Of course, when you're skiing in the Highlands, there are going

to be situations where if it all goes wrong, if a slope avalanches,

you're above something exposed, it drags you over a rock,

there's things that could go terribly wrong.

But you don't want to be on a mountain when it's going to do that.

You try your best to avoid those sort of situations.

I would say the risk of injury in Scotland is high.

The terrain that we ski, it tends to be coarse,

there tends to be gullies.

Personally, I walk away from things more often than I ski them.

Because I feel they're not in condition.

I don't step over that line

and, for sure, you're going to have risk takers,

but you're going to have risk takers in everything.

You don't conquer a mountain.

It's not a battle.

It's never a battle.

You're working with the mountain.

But people have been back-country skiing in Scotland for decades.

Some have been filming, too.

# Over the ground lies a mantle of white

# A heaven of diamonds shine down through the night

# Two hearts are thrillin' in spite of the chill in

# The weather... #

Chic Baxter is the 89-year-old grandfather

of famous Scottish skier Alain Baxter.

The first time I skied?

Oh, that was hilarious.

That was in the Sidlaw Hills, close to Dundee.

With no fancy gear, just slacks and a jerkin

and a pair of walking boots

and off we went.

But we got the bug.

We would go around Morlich or over by Ryvoan,

we would have a lunch with us

and a wee bottle of wine.

There were years we skied all year round.

We've had some heavy times with snowfalls.

We did have to get a helicopter to bring food into Aviemore.

There's one bit of film where you can see the army trucks

coming down the ski road and the snow is higher than the trucks.

I can remember having as much as 18 inches in a night here.

Chic's films are from a time, which many call

the Golden Age of Scottish Skiing,

when winters were long and snow was in abundance.

Ski resorts like Aviemore became hugely popular

through the '60s and '70s

attracting some of the best international instructors

as well as big-name skiers.

However, through the 1980s and '90s, the winters became milder.

Snowfall was sporadic and unpredictable.

Cheap flights to guaranteed snow

led many overseas for their winter sports.

The total demise of the Scottish ski scene was predicted.

But, in recent years, there's been a succession of colder winters,

including the Big Freeze of 2009 to '10

when a blanket of snow engulfed the entire country.

Transport was disrupted, schools were closed,

power lines failed and temperatures hit as low as minus 20 degrees.

It was the coldest winter for 30 years.

The following December was the coldest in 100 years.

But could this really herald a return to the harsher winters

seen in Chic Baxter's home movies in the midst of global warming?

Whilst we think that in the very longer term,

by the, say, 2080s, for example, we'll all have warmer winters

as climate change overwhelms natural climate variability,

in the next couple of decades,

there's still a lot of scope for our climate to vary naturally.

This could indeed lead us to have more intense

and more frequent cold winters,

more akin to how things were in the 1960s.

Scientists now know that our winters are shaped by many factors,

some beyond this world.

Changes on the surface of the sun, the melting of polar ice caps

and even storms as far afield as Indonesia can each play their part.

But to understand what happened in January 2013,

we must go high up into the stratosphere to a unique event,

which surprised even the Met Office.

There was an amazing stratospheric event

that went on in early January,

which changed everything for the rest of the winter.

So, the stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere

that resides above the one in which the weather happens.

What we normally have is a powerful vortex with winds

going around the North Pole in excess of 150mph.

However, the vortex split up in early January

and didn't recover for the rest of the winter.

Changes in the stratosphere have the potential to disrupt the flow

of warm air from the Gulf Stream drawing in cold air from Siberia.

What we can see from this satellite sequence

is that this easterly flow developed.

This made it colder.

Every time we saw the approach of some mild air

to relieve the cold, snowy conditions, it was just swept aside.

The cold air and snowy conditions persisted into February

and there is nowhere in the UK that can suffer those conditions

more fiercely than the Cairngorms.

The Gorms are a kind of specific environment.

We're not as close to the sea as the Ben, for example, Ben Nevis,

and we're high, and we've got a big, flat high area,

which is the plateau.

You get this combination of pretty ferocious Arctic-type winds

blasting across the tops of the Cairngorms

and certainly in the last few years, quite a bit of snow.

And that does some pretty strange things sometimes.

John Lyall is a mountain guide and mountain rescue volunteer

with over 20 years' experience of winter in the Cairngorms.

The Cairngorms are, you know,

within the British Isles, are unique.

This massive area of high ground that holds a lot of snow.

There are popular, accessible parts,

but there are parts where you can get a long way from people.

Not that I'm antisocial, but that experience in wilderness

that you can get in some of the remote corners

of the Cairngorms is fantastic.

Throughout the winter, John leads parties into the wilderness

on overnight trips.

In such windswept environments, a tent is of little use,

so their shelter must be dug from the snow.

I always think, in Scotland we have hills in summer,

but they become mountains, really,

in winter when they're covered with snow.

I sometimes think of the weather conditions as a bit of a foe.

But the mountain and the snow, in particular,

I see it as an aid to your journey.

If you treat it well, it'll treat you similarly, in a sense.

Iain Cornfoot is the head of the Cairngorm Ski Patrol

and also volunteers in the Mountain Rescue Team alongside John Lyall.

The winter of 2012 to '13 was their busiest for 30 years.

It can be a beautiful place at times,

but within a very short space of time,

it can go pretty ballistic.

On 10th February, the weather DID go ballistic.

There was a big storm coming through

and, so, we decided to close down the mountain slightly earlier.

And just as we were doing that, a call came through from the police.

A group of seven climbers were returning to the ski centre

to escape the developing storm when they saw one of their party fall

through a cornice and out of sight.

Unable to locate their friend,

the remaining six immediately called the rescue services

who were keen to ensure everyone's immediate return to base.

I spoke to the rest of this party and at that point,

we thought they were just outside the ski area

on their way home from the Cairngorm plateau

and for them to leave there,

it'd only have been about half an hour

for them to get back to the car park.

Amazingly, the fallen climber hadn't been injured

and managed to find his way back.

Meanwhile, his colleagues weren't faring so well.

They remained on top of the plateau in worsening conditions.

If you're up there, in something over 100, you're crawling.

And it feels like the air has been sucked out of you,

the wind sort of blasts by you, everything becomes much harder.

Your hands are freezing, you can't work a compass properly

and the weather is just getting worse and worse.

You're trying to get to a fixed point

where you can understand exactly where you are,

you know, there are cliffs around that you could get wrong.

It's scary.

It's a really quite, quite belittling place to be when it's like that.

I got a call to say the rest of the party

hadn't made it back to the car park and...

having known what the conditions were like when we left,

that was very concerning.

As the evening progressed,

certainly, myself and the colleagues in the team were getting

more and more concerned that we'd heard nothing from this party

and pretty much forced the issue that this needed to become more formal.

Al Gilmour led a team up into the storm.

If you were choosing to go out in that as a pastime on your day off,

then I think it would feel pretty horrendous.

But I think when you're not given an option in the sense that

there is a group of people, there's an individual,

you know he's suffering and you know time is not on their side

and if there is anything you can do to try and help that,

then some of those conditions never quite seem as harsh.

Despite their best efforts,

the mission was becoming more and more dangerous for the rescue team.

One of my big concerns wasn't just the party that were late,

but it was also we could have lost one of us.

Winds in excess of 70mph ensured a chill factor of minus 30.

But, after hours on the mountain,

the six climbers remained missing.

Is the plan to head back now?

Well, I think, I'm just going to double-check with control,

but it's going to take a pretty amazing suggestion

for us to decide to go to any other places tonight, I think.

'So do you think there's any sense'

in going on to spot 1099

in your position?

I don't, truthfully.

So, if we're good to go, gang, let's get going, eh?

It's chilly up here.

'That was difficult going home at five o'clock in the morning,

'trying to get a couple of hours' sleep,'

knowing that they hadn't been found

and you were the last person that spoke to them.

It was difficult.

I must admit, on the hill that night, the option in my head was

they've either managed to stay together as a group

or we're going to be faced with a terrible situation.

The next morning, after only a few hours' sleep,

the search was intensified.

The only way of searching the area in poor conditions

is with a large number of people.

I think it ended up about seven different mountain rescue teams,

it must have been about 150 people on the ground,

two different aircraft.

Flying rescue helicopters in these environments at low altitudes

requires the most experienced pilots.

The conditions in the mountains of Scotland

are probably the most extreme conditions you're likely to find

a search rescue helicopter in in the UK.

When it comes to winter, that weather just becomes more extreme.

Blizzards, icing clouds, subzero,

a lot of strong winds which can force the helicopter into the land.

There's always that respect there in the back of your mind

for what the mountains can do.

On the morning of February 11th, the RAF Search And Rescue Team set out

to help find the missing climbers who, if still alive,

had now suffered the poor weather conditions

throughout the entire night.

As midday approached, they received a crucial lead from a ground team

far from the original search area.

It was the Braemar Mountain Rescue guys,

they said they'd seen footprints heading up to a certain area

than had not been searched.

So we flew up to this area, and there were the missing walkers.

They'd travelled a huge distance overnight.

That was probably a good thing, just keeping moving.

When we picked them up, one of them just kept throwing his arms

around me, he just kept saying, "Thank you."

Another guy just couldn't speak.

So he was quite worrying,

we thought there might be something wrong with him,

but he was just so emotionally and physically drained,

he just couldn't speak.

Got them on board, go them warm and then took them off

to the mountain rescue base.

How are you feeling, all right? Nice and steady. Nice and steady.

When the guys come clattering in,

all covered in snow with some bedraggled individual

who thought that they were having a wee chat with the Grim Reaper

and now, all of a sudden, they're in a warm base,

realising they've got quite a bit more of a future

than they thought they had,

they're very happy teddies.

And, yeah, it's nice to be able to do that, isn't it?

The party that night were determined not to give up, I would imagine.

A huge battle with a very small amount of food.

They must have been cold, they must have been wet.

It's amazing what we can put up with if our brains let us,

and if we're determined enough.

And that wee party seemed to be determined enough.

The party had walked for over 26 hours

through some of the worst conditions imaginable.

But only five had been picked up.

One last member remained unaccounted for.

It was only at that point that we started to get some radio comms

that another member of the party who'd become separated

had also been found.

The gentleman that died

had become separated quite early on in the day,

just after I spoke to them.

I think they got confused

and didn't know quite where they were and...

..they were trying to make their way off the mountain

and he slipped and fell.

On a day-to-day basis,

certainly, I think the search and rescue force will see death

and serious injury,

and there is an element of professional detachment from that.

If we didn't do that, I think we wouldn't be very effective.

It doesn't mean that it doesn't touch the heart from time to time.

Certainly, the way I look at it

and the way the guys in the team look at it is that's not a body,

that's somebody's relative, somebody's loved one.

You bring them back to their family or to people that care about them

and that can be quite a good outcome as well.

You're bringing folk back for folk.

Graham Connell had been

the most experienced mountaineer in the party.

Since this happened,

me and the family have been quite a few times to Aviemore

and to the Cairngorms,

and we've obviously been to the site where he fell,

and we've walked and we've climbed the exact same route he did

and seeing the terrain and seeing how far he actually fell

and how sheer the cliff that he fell down was,

there's no way anybody could have gone after him at all.

They'd be putting their own life at risk and that has got to be the key,

they've got to survive themselves.

And, to be honest, they did well to survive.

He had a brilliant sense of humour.

He seemed to have an inordinate ability

to put up with suffering.

If it was a long day and his feet were hurting,

and he was wet and he was soaking cold,

and he'd still have a grin on his face at the end of the day.

I'm really going to miss that. He was just such a likeable chap.

I walked more miles with him than I've walked with anybody else.

There are people who are experienced who have mishaps.

There are people who are in their first-ever day out in the mountains

and the...you know, one is not worse than the other, I don't think.

I think it's just, you know, people have misfortune, things happen.

It's not just a person that dies in the hill,

there's family that's left behind.

Some relatives, friends maybe weren't mountaineers

and don't understand the passion that drove the person to do that

and that they were doing what they loved doing.

PIANO MUSIC

I wouldn't have wanted to change anything for him.

Because he was living, he truly was living in a place that he loved

and he died there with people that he loved.

But it's true, it's true, yeah.

If you'd have asked them,

would they do it all again, yeah, of course they would, you know.

If they'd just had a lucky escape,

they'd have been back on the mountain.

The Scottish Mountains are Britain's biggest playground,

and while the overwhelming majority of adventurers

return without mishap,

playing here does carry some risk, especially in winter.

We have to be alert to everything all the time.

The most important thing is gathering information

before you set out on your journey.

Each winter, lessons of survival can be learned as scientists

unravel the mechanics of avalanches on the mountainside

and demystify snow crystals under the microscope and scanner.

Scotland will face many more winters like the winter of 2012 to '13.

They will transform our mountains

into sites of immense beauty and wonder.

But to enjoy these mountains safely and the great rewards they offer,

we must learn to understand them.

That's it, finished.

Look at that!

It's wonderful.

WOMAN CHUCKLES

It just gets better and better.