Hood’S Frozen Fury Mother Writes Personal Diary About Routine School Outing That Turned Deadly

On May 12, 1986, despite predictions of foul weather, three adults and 10 students from the Oregon Episcopal School in Portland attempted a climb of 11,235-foot Mount Hood.

In the aftermath of a storm that was perhaps more violent than the climbers could have imagined, one adult and one student slogged out to safety.

Days later, two of the adults and nine students were found in or near a snow cave that had become an icy tomb.

Only two of the bodies piled in that tiny cave had vital signs when exhausted rescuers finally dug them out just a mile from Timberline Lodge.

The story has been told in various ways. Only recently, however, has an unheard voice stepped from the shadows of one of the worst tragedies in Northwest mountaineering history.

It’s the story from a mom who stood virtually helpless at the sidelines as her son’s life teetered on the edge.

“The Mountain Never Cries,” by Ann Holaday (BookPartners, $14.95) is a mother’s personal diary of tragedy and soul-searching that took her from a nightmare to her childhood and back.

Holaday, 56, is an immigrant from England and the mother of Giles Thompson, who survived the ordeal in the cave. The other surviving teenager was Brinton Clark, although hers and a few other names are for some reason changed in the book.

“In 1996, I was asked to give a memorial speech at the school on the 10th anniversary of the accident,” Holaday said in a recent interview. “Digging out the clippings brought it all back. I had held so much inside me, the idea of writing a book seemed therapeutic.”

The book begins in the mother’s voice.

She relives the ordeal at the hospital bedside of a son who may or may not be able to hear her words.

The climb was to have been another routine graduation outing in the school’s outdoor program for sophomores.

The first of several bad decisions involved setting out on the climb despite the forecast of a bad storm.

Another was continuing with only one shovel, which was all they had to dig a snow cave for 11 people when the storm bared its fangs.

Horrendous winds and chill factors of minus 60 degrees combined with virtually no visibility, a smothering four feet of snowfall and enormous drifts.

Hypothermia probably fuzzed the reasoning of the leader, Father Thomas Gorman.

Three students were found dead outside the cave.

No repeated attempts were made to mark the entrance of the shelter for rescuers.

Thompson was found unconscious on top of a heap of bodies in the cave, his lower legs and arms encased in ice.

Clark was sandwiched between Thompson and the other bodies that provided a macabre insulation from death. Even though her body core temperature was just 72 degrees, she suffered little permanent damage after her intensive care hospital treatment.

Doctors said wool clothing and a shell of rain gear were the measure that saved Thompson.

But they agree with his mother that the teenager had a built-in determination that seemed to keep his body functioning through an unfathomable medical ordeal.

“He was the coldest person ever revived,” Holaday said. “But it wasn’t nearly as simple as just warming him up.”

In the 32 days he spent in the hospital’s critical care unit, Giles had 20 doctors, 400 units of blood and 24 hours in surgery.

“All of his body functions were affected,” Holaday said.

And his mom was there for every halting step.

The book reveals a mother’s anxiety over matters of which she knew so little, ranging from climbing to the state of the art medical treatments.

She admits to being less than a perfect mom. Once divorced and somewhat detached from her three children, she second-guesses herself over and over, but never uses the book to second-guess the school, the search and rescue teams or the doctors.

Instead she has deep affection for the strong men who wept at their inability to find the young climbers sooner.

“Since then, some of those men have died as they tried to rescue other people,” she said in the interview.

“The school could have been ruined by lawsuits, but it wasn’t,” she said. “This was the 33rd climb Father Tom himself had been on. We can’t question him now. He’s dead.”

She recalled that she never thought twice when her son said he was climbing Mount Hood.

“I didn’t think of it so much as a climb as a day outing,” she said. “In our community, climbing Mount Hood isn’t considered much of a feat at all.”

From the day she arrived at Timberline Lodge to wait out the search and rescue, her business for the next year or more narrowed to the task of finding out what was going on.

Her story tells of a disjointed family that pulls together during Thompson’s lengthy recovery and rehabilitation.

The title “The Mountain Never Cries,” comes from an interview Thompson’s brother, Ross, gave to the media after the rescue.

The cover is a painting Giles Thompson created as a high school senior two years after the accident. The scene shows a curly-headed boy with his right leg amputated above the knee, the left leg removed below the knee, and a withered right arm where frozen muscle was removed to save the limb.

The boy is gesturing to the mountain as if to say, “Why me?”

Why did this accident happen? Why was I one of the two survivors?

Today Giles Thompson, 29, is a stage designer living in Seattle with his wife and two boys.

The Oregon Episcopal School still has an outdoor program, but the students no longer climb Mount Hood.

ANN HOLADAY Reading Ann Holaday will read from her book “The Mountain Never Cries,” Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., at Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main, and 7 p.m. on Thursday at Barnes & Noble Bookstore near the Valley Mall.