Hamish MacInnes, a lanky Scot of sizable Derring-Do who climbed dangerous mountain peaks around the world, invented life-saving equipment for climbers, and wrote the definitive book on mountain rescue conduct, died on November 22nd at his home in Glencoe, United States scottish highlands. He was 90 years old.
British news reported the cause was cancer.
Mr. MacInnes has led or participated in 20 major expeditions, including four to Mount Everest. There he almost died in an avalanche in 1975 when he was assistant director of one of the most difficult and spectacular climbs in climbing history: a hike up the southwest face of Everest, led by British climber Chris Bonington.
In his many decades in the mountains, Mr. MacInnes was believed to be lost or dead at least six times, sometimes in attempts to save other people. This is not the time he was pushed by a rock fall with a broken skull on the Bonatti Pillar of the Dru in the French Alps.
Mr. MacInnes’ Spider-Man-like ability to climb steep cliffs and goat-like ability to negotiate rocky terrain prompted Clint Eastwood, as well as the Monty Python troop, to hire him as a consultant for their films. He worked as a stunt coordinator on “The Eiger Sanction”, a 1975 espionage thriller directed by Mr. Eastwood that enabled Mr. Eastwood to film and perform his own stunts on the terrifying north face of the Eiger in Switzerland. In “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975), Mr. MacInnes helped build a rope bridge in Glencoe, his hometown, which became the Bridge of Death in the film.
He also worked with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons on “The Mission” (1986) about a missionary in South America and with Sean Connery on “Five Days One Summer” (1982), the story of a love triangle in the Alps in which a climbing guide is included dies suspicious circumstances. (During the shoot, the body of a real-life guide who had been missing for more than 30 years emerged from the ice.)
Despite all his sure-footedness in dangerous circumstances, Mr. MacInnes was faced with an internal challenge.
When he was 84 years old, he was found unconscious outside his home. He was taken to a mental hospital where he was classified as demented and detained against his will for 15 months. During this time, he was sedated and placed in a straitjacket, his weight dropped, and his memory disappeared. He made several attempts to escape; At some point he scaled the outside wall of the hospital and landed on the roof with nowhere to go.
Doctors eventually discovered that he had a chronic urinary tract infection that was causing dementia-like symptoms.
They told him he was lucky enough to have written several books and appeared in dozens of documentaries because they could help him improve his memory. He delved into his library and film archive and was able to reconstruct his past and eventually restore most of his memory. The episode is narrated in a 2018 documentary “Final Ascent: The Legend of Hamish MacInnes”.
Mr. MacInnes often said that the experience was more traumatic than anything he had experienced on a mountain.
He was born on July 7, 1930 in Gatehouse of Fleet, a town in southwest Scotland, to Duncan and Katie (MacDonald) McInnes as Hamish McInnes. (He later adopted the more striking Scottish spelling of his surname.) His father, who had served with the Chinese police in Shanghai during World War I and later with the British army, owned a general store.
The family soon moved to Greenock on the River Clyde in the western central lowlands of Scotland. There Hamish was introduced to climbing by a neighbor, Bill Hargreaves. Not only was he an experienced climber, but he was strict about safety, which made a deep impression on Hamish.
Hamish was the first to complete several of Scotland’s most treacherous winter ascents, and at the age of 16 he successfully attacked the Matterhorn.
In 1953, when he was 23, he and a climbing buddy, John Cunningham, decided more or less a lark to try to become the first to climb Everest. They had little money, little provisions and no permission from the Nepalese government to climb the highest peak in the world. Her plan was to live on rations that a Swiss climbing team had given up the year before.
After evading the police checkpoints, they reached the base camp, where they learned that Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay had already reached the summit. Instead, the young men turned their attention to a nearby peak, Pumori, which no one had yet conquered. But when they were almost up, they decided that the danger of avalanches was too great and turned back.
As inventive as he was adventurous, Mr. MacInnes built a car from scratch when he was 17. He later used radar to search for bodies in the snow and in 1961 founded the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team. He also trained dogs to help find avalanche victims. His friends called him “the fox of Glencoe” for his trick to find lost climbers.
Perhaps his most famous invention was the first all-steel ice ax. It was a significant improvement on the wooden handle ax that snapped under pressure.
He also developed a foldable lightweight mountain rescue stretcher, which is in use to this day, and an avalanche information service. His International Mountain Rescue Handbook (1972) became the handbook for rescue teams around the world.
Overall, his inventions and services saved countless lives.
“Nobody has done more to put in place the network of emergency measures to protect climbers from harm,” the Scottish newspaper wrote after Mr MacInnes’ death.
He lived alone in Glencoe, in a house he had built by hand, and leaves no immediate survivors. He’d been married in 1960 to a woman he’d met while climbing in the Alps, but the marriage broke up a decade later.
In addition to his many other activities, Mr. MacInnes was an accomplished photographer (he appreciated a shot he took in action while filming Mr. Eastwood’s “The Eiger Sanction”) and author of around 40 books. Most of them were about climbing and rescuing, but he also wrote crime novels. He said he could put so much into his day because he only slept four hours a night.
One of his lasting joys was the friendship he developed with Michael Palin of Monty Python while filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail. At one point his job was to throw bogus bodies into the canyon of eternal danger.
As viewers stared at the bizarre scene of a man who appeared to be throwing bodies into the ravine, Mr Palin remembered the BBC and told them, “Don’t worry, he’s the head of mountain rescue.”
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