3#02 David “Heavy” Whalley: the Search and Rescue legend
“There’s no greater feeling than finding people alive in the mountains.”
00:00 - Introduction
02:50 - Welcome, Heavy: “I was told to go away and put some weight on”, 5’4” but still able to handle himself.
05:35 - A lifetime in RAF search and rescue as an air crash expert. Losing aircraft crews training in the mountains. Handling nearly 70 aircraft crashes.
09:54 - “You can have the best team in the world, but if you’re searching in the wrong place you’re wasting your time”.
10:20 - “We’re working in conditions when other people don’t go out”... and avalanche warnings only started in the late 1980s. The benefits and challenges of technology.
14:20 - Working on the Lockerbie bombing, no knowledge of post-traumatic stress disorder and at the time, “It took me 25 years… and I’ve never got over it”.
18:37 - Mountain rescue “is an amazing system, that we should all be proud of. But it’s a dangerous game”.
19:03 - Plenty of individual awards, but “unfortunately I don’t believe in these things. In the military you don’t have an option. They should be team awards”. Losing friends.
21:15 - Why did you turn to this career? The son of a Scottish Minister, but “I was a wild child… and it was join the air force or get into trouble”.
22:44 - “There’s no greater feeling than finding people alive in the mountains. It’s unique and it’s wonderful. The joy of it is phenomenal”.
24:40 - Celebrating the rise of women in the outdoors.
26:10 - “Sandals, shorts and t-shirts on the top of Goat Fell”.
28:27 - Joining the RAF at 17: “I was a wee, skinny laddie, but I was very fit”.
31:17 - “Thrown in at the deep end” with mountain rescues, three climbing deaths on Ben Nevis.
35:20 - “People would always ask me how I’ve stayed in the military so long, because I would always question everything… which a lot of people didn’t like”.
36:15 - Mountain kit. Working with military issue, and slowly improving it, “we were in plastic bivvies freezing all night… the Americans couldn’t believe what we did… nothing fitted a wee boy, my trousers were huge!”.
40:37 - Using the Munros for training: “the best way to get the guys fit is to blast them around these hills”
41:50 - Being one of the first groups to go ice-climbing in Canada, “it was phenomenal, you’ve never seen ice like this… ice screws that worked!”.
44:07 - The 2001 Everest North Ridge expedition… with a garden shed. Put two on the summit and were involved in three rescues…. “You can get yaks to 21,000ft, that’s the height of McKinley”, “on any big mountain the objective dangers are huge, a serac can fall”.
49:10 - Greatest Mountain Memory: advanced base camp on Everest, filling 50 bags of rubbish with the Sherpa team, and paying for it themselves. Plus, back in Fort William, seeing the younger generation find as much joy in rescue.
54:25 - “Mountaineering is very selfish, so all we can do is make it as safe as we can… you can’t explain it to people that don’t do it”. Recovering from trauma and the loss of friends in the hills. Plans for writing a book, and meeting rescued walkers and climbers at lectures.
58:05 - All the time, money, freedom… where do you go and what do you do? “I’d like to go and trek through the Himalays with my granddaughters, to show them the mountains I’ve been on. That would be wonderful. It would give me a big buzz. We’re very lucky with what we’ve got, we’ve just got to fight to keep it”.
(below) Portrait photography by David Lintern.