Survival story (1)

In which Herbert Bruckmüller gets himself into a hole in the Austrian Alps.

Dolines perforate the limestone karst regions of the Alps. They are sinkholes with roofs that have partly or completely collapsed. In summer, trees and bushes may cover the smaller holes, hiding the danger. In winter, when their mouths are snow-covered, dolines can be as lethal as a glacier’s crevasses – the only difference being that skiers usually rope up on a snowy glacier, whereas in sinkhole terrain, they usually go unroped. 

Snow-covered doline on the Schrattenfluh, Switzerland.
Image courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure. 

And dolines can lurk anywhere in the karst country. Few places are more riddled with them than the Feuertal valley in Austria’s Totes Gebirge (Dead Mountains), where seventy sinkholes have been counted in an area of ​​just over eight square kilometres. And was here that Herbert Bruckmüller, an experienced mountaineer from Altmünster in Austria's Salzkammergut region, got himself into a trap.

A lengthy period of good weather came to an end in October 1996. Over a long weekend Bruckmüller planned a solo traverse of the Totes Gebirge mountain range from the Almsee to the Tauplitzalm. Having arranged with his partner that she would pick him up by car at his end point, he went up to the Pühringer Hut. In the evening, the first clouds arrived from the west; the weather was forecast to worsen over the weekend.

Next morning it was raining. Since Bruckmüller had already done this route three times, and didn't mind a little rain, he left the hut as planned. He carried food for five days and five litres of drinks, as well as spare clothing, a bivvy sack, two headtorches, a compass, and all the other kit needed for a high-mountain traverse.

With a backpack weighing 15 or so kilos, progress was slow. There is no distinct trail up on the plateau, only marker poles that are not always easy to follow in summer. About halfway across, darkness fell. Walking onwards in this rugged terrain didn’t seem advisable. So Bruckmüller looked for a place to bivvy. In a hollow, he put down his backpack to get out his headtorch. When he picked up the pack again, its weight swung him around – and he tumbled backwards into the mouth of a sinkhole.

Cave formation in the Feuertal, Totes Gebirge.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

After falling five metres, Bruckmüller landed abruptly on a ledge. Fortunately, his backpack had taken the impact, while his rolled-up sleeping mat protected his head. Only his back hurt a bit. Compared with what might have happened, he’d got off lightly. Bruckmüller then crawled into his bivouac sack and fell asleep. Three hours later, the cold woke him. He wanted to look around, but realised that he had lost his headtorch in the fall. He took his spare lamp out of his backpack, switched it on, and saw a room-sized space, about four metres high, with a hole in the ceiling about one and a half metres wide and two and a half metres long, overgrown with mountain pines. It looked as if he’d broken through the cave’s roof.

Next to the four metre-wide terrace onto which he had fallen was a deeper shaft, at the end of which was a hole leading even further down. That's where his headtorch had disappeared. He climbed down into the shaft and sealed it with two boulders and spare clothes to prevent more of his possessions from falling down it. Next he started to think how he could get out of the dungeon. He tied the rope that he always carried to a stone and threw it upwards out of the hole, hoping that the stone would catch on something. But this just didn’t work. Whenever he pulled the rope in, the stone just fell back into the cave, time and time again.

To lengthen the rope and give himself a better chance, he used the scissors on his pocketknife to cut his anorak into a three centimetre-wide strip. But, no matter how many times he tried hurling the stone upwards, it wouldn’t catch.

Next he thought of filling his bivvy bag with stones to use as a platform from which he could reach the hole. But there weren't that many stones in his prison. So he couldn’t build his stone platform pyramid high enough. Climbing back down into the deep shaft, he then levered out more stones with his pocketknife, carrying them in his backpack up to the terrace. To save his headtorch battery, he did this work more or less in the dark.

Still he kept failing in his attempts to reach the cave’s mouth by jumping from the stone pyramid. Since he had to build a rather narrow pyramid due to the lack of stones, it kept collapsing when he jumped, or just as he was trying to clamber up it. Then, if any stones had rolled back down into the shaft, he had to retrieve them. To avoid a nasty plummet when he fell back from a jump, he always made his jumps facing away from the deep shaft, but the handholds were worse in this direction.

Meanwhile, Bruckmüller’s partner had phoned the police when he’d failed to call. So the search began that very night. Bruckmüller kept tirelessly rebuilding his stone pyramid after each unsuccessful try. To stave off hypothermia, he stayed awake the entire following night, the second in his dungeon. He started rationing his provisions, reckoning that he could hold out for ten days if need be. At the same time, doubts started to creep in as to whether he could free himself by then.

On the third day after his fall into the doline, a cold front moved in. Clouds shrouded the mountains. Now dozens of mountain rescuers and police officers, with helicopter support, were searching all possible routes. Without success. No one passed Bruckmüller's doline. And if they had, no one would have noticed the small opening.

Bruckmüller kept rebuilding his stone pyramid after each failed leap. Whenever he heard a helicopter pass over, he threw stones through the hole, a move he soon regretted. The stones hadn't been seen, and he would need more of them for his pyramid. He was a kilometre west of the nearest marker, and nobody knew he was there. Worse, since another mountaineer had reported seeing him on the ascent to the Rotgschirr, the search was shifted to the northern edge of the plateau. Searchers also flew to the Rotgschirr’s summit to check the summit register to see if Bruckmüller might have signed it. He had not, but the searchers did find a sock – which had nothing to do with Bruckmüller. Now the search continued with dogs from the place where the sock had been found – needless to say, without success.

Some of Bruckmüller's mountain friends then decided to make their own search. Before they set out, they consulted three clairvoyants. One "saw" nothing at all. The second "saw" him huddled up. At least. The third "saw" him at the Ofenloch, hence on the plateau and not at its edge (which was indeed the case, though not exactly). Bruckmüller's family and friends gained new hope.

The next day, his fourth day in the sinkhole, clouds hid the peaks and snow was falling above 2,000 metres. His friends searched the area around ​​the Ofenloch, but in vain, because Bruckmüller's doline was more than two kilometres away.

For his part, Bruckmüller kept rebuilding his stone pyramid, futile though this seemed. Yet still he would not give up. Fortunately, he could not know that, this same evening, the searchers had called off their operations because "there was virtually no hope left of finding the missing man alive." When Bruckmüller's friends arrived at the Pühringer Hut after their unsuccessful search and found it locked because the innkeeper had already gone down into the valley, their very last hope vanished….

(To be continued)