McArtney James

(Bearbeiten)

Biografie:
James McArtney (1944-70).
An athletic, ruddy-faced lad, as large as life and twice as natural, radiating enthusiasm like an open furnace. That was McArtney-at the age of twenty-five a man with as many friends as the rest of us collect in a lifetime. Life was one long hearty laugh and everyone laughed with him. You do not often meet folk like that.
He graduated from the hard school of Cairngorm bothy mongers, serving his apprenticeship with Pyper and Reid, walking enormous distances to remote Cairngorm corries every weekend. Between them they cleared up the best the area could offer, and might have achieved even more, if Jim had been in the least competitive-McArtney was too big a man to seek out the bubble glory.
On his first Alpine season he was caught in the disastrous Mont Blanc blizzard of 1965, which cost the lives of several others. Struggling through waist-deep, blinding snow for three days he managed to drag himself and two of his companions, Richie McHardy and 'Mo' Antoine, back to safety. Eventually he took up an instructor post at Glenmore Lodge, which was the sort of opening he had been looking for. This led to his highly successful partnership with Hamish MacInnes at the Glencoe School of Winter Mountaineering. As a climbing instructor he was probably the best we have ever had in Scotland, and if he had a special gift, it was that he could get through to people and also share their enthusiasm.
In the Himalaya, dogged by his usual bad luck, a previously well-tested snowbridge chose to collapse under him, leaving him wedged 60 ft down a narrow crevasse with several fractured ribs. With his usual tenacity he fought his own way out of this, and in order not to prejudice the expedition's success on Ali Ratni Tibba made his own way down the valley to hospital (p 11 above).
One might have expected that fate would have been more kind, but this last time, in the avalanche accident on Tower Ridge, Ben Nevis in January 1970, he was given no chance. Most of us still find the whole thing difficult to accept.
He was the most accomplished winter mountaineer of his generation and his horizons were only beginning to open.
Tom Patey
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 75, 1970, Seite 346


Geboren am:
1944
Gestorben am:
01.1970