What timing:
Searchers try again to find New York climber's body on Mount Hood
July 10, 2007, 9:35 PM EDT
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) _ Seven months after three climbers died during a storm on Oregon's Mount Hood, rescue workers are making plans to search for the bodies of two of them, one of whom was from New York.
Kelly James, 48, of Dallas, died of hypothermia in a snow cave on the north side of the mountain, and his body was airlifted from just below the 11,239-foot summit last December.
But the bodies of Brian Hall, 37, also from Dallas, and Jerry "Nikko" Cooke, 36, of Brooklyn, were never found. It's believed they went to get help for James after the three reached the summit on Dec. 8 and something went amiss.
"We'd like to bring some closure to the families," said Chief Deputy Jerry Brown, of the Hood River County sheriff's department, which coordinated search efforts in December.
Search teams on July 21 will conduct a search at lower elevations, up to about 7,000 feet, on the chance that Hall and Cooke made it that far down and "ran out of gas at the end," Brown said.
On Sept. 8, Brown said, as a training session for the Oregon Mountain Rescue Council, about 100 searchers will head for the area where attention was focused most heavily in December: the Eliot Glacier, where the pair may have fallen or been swept by the wind, as much as 2,400 feet.
"That will be our priority search area," he said.
Brown said questions that went unanswered after the search was called off remain: What, for example, hampered James?
"It appears from everything that two individuals were helping one individual along," he said, and the assumption is that James was being helped. But an autopsy revealed no broken or dislocated bones to impede him.
A Dec. 10 phone call James placed to his family did not reveal exactly what had gone wrong, Brown said.
As for Hall and Cooke, the most important point is that they were in a hurry, Brown said.
"When they left up there, they had a high sense of urgency," he said. "They were trying to get Kelly some help."
Search and rescue personnel couldn't be sure of the route taken by Hall and Cooke, Brown said. They may have decided the north side was too dangerous, headed back up the mountain and tried to take an easier route down the south side.
Brown said members of the party had a history of stashing equipment along their climbing routes, jettisoning weight they could pick up later on the way back down. Searchers in September, he said, will try to find out whether they did so in December, in hopes that will provide clues to what happened.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
