A woman has told of how she had to be rescued by a helicopter and 12-strong mountain rescue team when she slipped while scattering her father’s ashes on one of Wales’s highest mountains.
Kitty Harrison had just given her father, Steve Parry, an emotional send-off on the summit of Tryfan in Snowdonia when she lost her footing. The 32-year-old trainee dental nurse had to cling to a tiny ledge where she balanced precariously above a 91-metre (300ft) drop for more than three hours.
“My foot slipped on the loose shingle and I slipped quite a way and I landed on a tiny ledge,” Harrison told the BBC’s SOS: Extreme Rescues programme. “If I hadn’t gone down that side, I’d have gone straight down the mountain and I’m not sure I’d be here today.”
The experienced climber was a third of the way down from the 917-metre summit, where she had said her final goodbye to her father. Volunteers located her using her mobile phone GPS and spotters from the coastguard helicopter. The rescue took seven hours in total.
“I was in such a state that I couldn’t have got out of there myself,” Harrison said. “They deserve so much credit and praise, they are heroes.”
But due to the rugged topography and wind speed, the helicopter could not get close to Harrison, who was perched in a gully. The only way for rescuers to retrieve her was to go above her and abseil down.
“You go from hope to proper doom, to fear that no one is going to find me,” Harrison said. “As time went on, I was shivering cold and damp and couldn’t move a muscle because of the exercise climbing up the mountain, my legs were tired and shaking. I thought I could fall off here before they find me.”
Robin Woodward of Ogwen mountain rescue, who dropped 30 metres down to rescue Harrison and carry her to safety, said: “She was quite distraught and in quite a scary place for some time.
“This was someone properly worrying for their own life. It wouldn’t have turned out well for her if she’d slipped further down.”
Ogwen mountain rescue is one of the UK’s busiest rescue agencies, working across the mountains, coasts and forests of Eryri and Snowdonia. Harrison’s was one of a record 178 incidents the team dealt with in 2022 – 40% of them on Tryfan.
“When the rescuers said there’s BBC cameras with us, part of me thought I don’t care who’s with you just get me off this mountain,” Harrison told the programme. “The other part thought: ‘That’s typical, I have one bad day and that’s the day the BBC decided to come and see me’.
“I’d also ripped my leggings when I fell and I was like: ‘Please don’t put my bum on the telly’ – my mum would’ve killed me.”
The 12-part series is available on BBC iPlayer and on Mondays at 7pm on BBC One.
