#238 - Peter Panagore Freezes to Death Ice Climbing - Pt. 1

0:00 Welcome to Round Trip Death. This week in the United States we're celebrating our Thanksgiving holiday. So before we get to today's near-death experience, and it's a good one, I'd like to thank all of our listeners. We've had the show going for just a few months now, but the response has been amazing. We have listeners all over North America, on six continents, and in 54 foreign countries. And a special thank you to our dozens of guests who have been willing to open up and share their inspiring personal experiences. Thank you so very much. Oh yeah, and if you haven't heard an experience of someone who is frozen to death, keep listening to this episode.

0:46 All right, we have with us today Peter Panagor. And Peter is smiling big and he forgot that we don't have a camera, so that's okay. I'm happy to see you and everybody else is happy to listen to you this morning. But Peter, we're going to get into your story momentarily. I just want to give our listeners a little heads up. Quite often the NDE itself is the star of the show in these stories. But what led up to your NDE and how you guys self-rescued is really an amazing story. So we're going to be talking a lot about that today too.

1:28 Anyway, good morning. Good morning, Eric. And for people all over the world, good evening, afternoon, whatever time of day you have. Yeah, hello everybody. Anyway, Peter, would you tell us a little bit of your background just so we can get to know you a little bit? Eric, I grew up outside of Boston, went to Catholic high school, was raised Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, the two warring churches didn't like each other much. I am a near-death experiencer. I died ice climbing in 1981. I got ordained in a denomination, United Church of Christ. I was talked into this by the Dean of Students when I went off to Yale to study mysticism. They don't teach mysticism at Yale, not really. They have classes and professors and my Dean of Students allowed me a three-year independence study. And I went off and kind of hid in the church as a non-believing mystic. I worked in religion, but I am not religious as a result of my NDE. I worked in television for 15 years. I had a TV spot with 30 million views a year on two NBC stations here in Maine. And I died a second time in 2015.

2:42 And rumor has it you're a bestselling author. Is that true? I'm an international bestselling author. I am. And I'm as surprised as anyone. And when the, when my book came out, I was personally more nervous about my writing than I was about my NDE. By that point, some people around me knew my NDE and I was kind of comfortable with it, but I was scared to be a writer in public. Yeah. I mean, everybody's reading your work for good or bad. It must be good. It worked out okay. I was an English major as an undergraduate. I was dyslexic. Here's another thing. I was dyslexic and didn't really learn to read until seventh grade. And then I took to story and storytelling and was an English major and writing has been a major part of my life since I was an undergrad. I love the persnickety aspect of the detail of the structure of language.

3:44 Wow. Okay. I'll ruminate on exactly what that means. You're allowed to give a shameless plug for your book. Oh, shameless. It's been acquired for a film. I've been working for two years with some major producers in Hollywood. I just came back from Malibu a couple of weeks ago, meeting with them for the first time. I've been working with them for two years. It's kind of been made into a movie and we're pretty far along in the process for the pre process. What's the book called? Heaven is Beautiful and it is available worldwide. Heaven is Beautiful. How Dying taught me that death was just the beginning. It's full of metaphor and simile.

4:29 Can't wait to read it. All right. Let's go back to 1981. You like ice climbing and I assume other mountaineering kind of stuff. What exactly happened on that day? So I'd never been an ice climber up to that point. I'd been a mountaineer. I climbed lots of large mountains in the United States all over the Northwest and in New England for many, many years and had spent a lot of time in the winter outdoor camping. So this was in my element and I'd climbed rock, but I'd never climbed ice. So I was in Alberta, Canada, north of Banff in March of 1980. There was about 10 feet of snow on the ground. We're on the Icefields Parkway. It's a most spectacularly beautiful place. If you ever headed out that way, it's worth seeing. It's also very, very remote compared to especially where I live.

5:29 And it was a world famous climb. There's a wall called Weeping Wall and Weeping Wall is at the bottom of Cirrus Mountain north of Banff, south of Jasper. And we went to have an adventure. I wasn't trained on ice. My partner was. He was a certified lead climber. His name was Tim. When we got to the bottom of the climb that day, he was instructing me what to do and telling me how to do stuff. I knew enough about ropes and carabiners and that sort of stuff, but I hadn't planted an axe in ice ever. And one of the things about ice climbing is that you need two axes. I only had one axe and a hammer and the hammer is significantly shorter. And because it was so short, it delayed my climb all day long.

6:25 I was slower on each. When you put the axe in the ice and you put the other, for me, hammer in the ice, you can swing the axe pretty far, but you can only swing the hammer a third of that distance because of its length. And so my climb was shorter in every single planting of the axe. And it was longer because I was exhausted because I was holding onto this hammer with all my might. The axe you can set in the ice and dangle from it. You can support yourself with it with a strap that's around your wrist, but the hammer has the strap off the bottom. And when you plant it in the ice, you have to hold on. So all of this combined to me being much slower than every other person on the ice that day. And there were other teams, maybe six. I don't really know. I don't remember how many teams there were a bunch of people on the ice that day.

7:17 And it sounds like you were pretty exhausted as well. By the time I got even halfway up the climb. So yes, my exhaustion set in early because I was expending all this energy that no one else was because nobody else had to cling like I did. So I was I was burning out my muscle. So I wasn't I wasn't completely physically exhausted, but my forearms were totally burned. And so that meant I had a lot of resting periods when I just couldn't I couldn't swing that axe that hammer one more time at the weight. And I would guess that especially if you haven't done this, you haven't really built up those muscles and that muscle memory. Now, I'm trying to I'm picturing this whole thing in my mind.

8:00 How high is this climb? It's about 500 feet, five or 600 feet. It's at the bottom of maybe a 10,000 foot mountain. It's a wall of ice with rock around it. That's that's high. 500 plus feet. Tell me about the hammer. I know what the ice axe looks like. What does the hammer look like? The hammer is maybe eight inches long. It has someone had drilled a hole in the bottom of it and taken a nylon piece of tubing and attached to the bottom with this with a screw a well set screw. The axe was looks like a pardon me the hammer looks like the axe okay it's got the same bird beak on it with the charade edge like a sawzall blade right but thicker and stronger but it doesn't have it doesn't have any length to it. And it doesn't have a blade on the back of it. A lot of ice axes have a blade on the back where you can chip with it. This didn't have a blade on the back of it. It was a flat flat side. And so when I set this thing in the ice it it's still held at the physics was the same for the large axe and the hammer as you set the axe into the ice and you tip the bottom in on the pin is a pin on the bottom like a little sharp end and that whole thing sets in place.

9:16 And the physics are that you can release your hand with this hypotenuse and this right angle you can dangle on this thing and it holds you to the mountain but the hammer if I plant the hammer it didn't have a pick on the bottom that's the first thing and so instead of picking into the ice it rested against the ice and I could not ever let go of it because if I tried to release my hand and the hammer would just pull away from the ice. I had to keep myself like strongly in position. So and usually the hammer is used for chipping holes so you chip the hole and you put the ice screw in and then you put the hammer on the top of the ice screw like an Archimedes screw and you use this lever use the hammer as a lever to wind this thing and my job was to take the hammer and remove the screws. So I was using this tool not only to climb but every time I stopped to remove a screw that my partner Tim had set in the ice because we we were collecting our screws as we went I didn't want to leave them there so I unscrewed these things that also worked my this arm my right arm primarily and sometimes my left because I was trying to distribute the exercise but you are completely right. I had not done these motions with my muscles ever basically and I was not built muscularly for this. I'd been skiing all season had been on the National Ski Patrol and so I had some muscle mass in my legs and my upper body was somewhat trained from cross-country and downhill skiing so I had I had some strength it's just that that

10:49 those particular motions were not included in my workouts. Well sure I mean that's just not something you do every day and there may not even be anything at the gym to replicate that so I get it. So okay the day goes on do the other teams get done before you so it's just you and Tim left on the ice? The other teams got done before us we were at the top of the climb and it was sunset and the temperature dropped about 30 degrees even before we got to that place most of the teams had left and as we sit as the sun went down we watched the last team leave they turned and they looked at us and they waved at us or they raised their arms they were little tiny specks they were 500 feet below us so we waved back and I had this distinct impression because I was very emotional about this I knew the circumstance we were in I knew we were in a deadly place and so I had all this like this fear that had been building throughout the whole end of the second half of the climb knowing that we were going to be so late because of me so they left and I don't know whether they were like what are you doing man up there you know with their hands raised or all I did was wave to them and I had this despondency that set into me as I watched them walk out.

12:12 Yeah and you guys are still there is the idea that once you get to the top you can just repel down so it's pretty easy to get down or is it a reverse motion the whole way down compared to what you came up doing? Well it's a lot easier to go down than to go up because it is it was a three pitch climb so there were three repels and I've done a lot of repelling in my life up to that point and repelling is pretty easy and that wasn't what happened to us so we the repelling itself was simple but all of the things that happened in between the repels those caused us further problems and we that we made mistakes and it was always dangerous because we're traversing in the dark so there was starlight we could see but it's still in the dark there's still dark shadow and there's a 500 foot drop to your to my left and we were on ice or rock in in hypothermia steals your your cognitive capacity it takes away your ability to think and make rational decisions and this is this is seen often in the end of a hypothermic situation and happened to me to an extent is a lot of sometimes people are found naked I unzipped my coat at the end I knew I knew better okay national ski patrol trained in wilderness understood exactly what was going on but I really just didn't care so the repelling could have been simple and actually when we were on the lines it was but in between all

13:44 sorts of terrible things okay so when did you realize everything had gone bad did you get stuck somewhere oh and by the way did you have headlamps and extra clothing were you prepared for this nobody was prepared for a night climb as far as we knew nobody carried up extra clothes or extra food or extra water and so no I mean I've done a during day climbing you know if I go rock climbing I don't bring up a extra clothes I bring up a you know I bring up a little extra warmth right you know it's like backpacking but no we didn't plan on being there after dark and no one else had so we were we were out of food out of water skinny as a church mouse and because we were in our 20s no extra body fat and we were wet from the sweat and the ice because the ice was falling down my neck all day I'm wearing wool because I don't have any eye tech here because it doesn't really exist at this point there's all this all the fancy stuff didn't come out till after and we we knew I knew about two-thirds of the way up that our situation was deadly and you can't just descend on an ice climb you can't like just go down the way you came up you have to go to the top and you have to go to the repel spaces and it's not like a written rule you have to do this it's like you it's not possible to do it the other way okay that helps because some people would say well why didn't you just go down when it started getting dark okay that makes sense now okay what happened next so we were at the top of this climb legs

15:17 dangling over on this little ledge sun goes down temperature drops about 30 degrees we get violent shivers all of my muscles micro muscles and massive muscles were independently pulsating from each other it was like this this chaotic expansion and contraction of every individual muscle in my body each one doing its own thing and so I had this massive shiver going on shaking uncontrollably clattering jaw Tim had the same thing and he hauled up the line and the line got tangled first big mistake of the night and so then that took a long time for me to untangle that in the dark as we discussed our deadly situation knowing that that this where we were was going to kill us and that we were 500 feet up and that we had three repels to go in the dark the that our chances of survival were pretty low from our point of view but we knew that if we tried to stay there in the wilderness you're supposed to stay where you are when you have an emergency so the people can find you but that wasn't an option for us we talked about snuggling into each other to try to stay warm against each other against the face of the mountain but neither of us were warm so there was no chance that that was going to work so we make this first repel pardon me traverse we get to the to the first repel the next mistake was that I should say this is the third because I made the first one with the axe and the hammer so the there was this we took a piece of nylon webbing tied in a square knot that you wrap around this

16:49 little tiny tree and then you put your rope through it so that when you're down below you can slide your rope to the webbing but when we saw this we're like we don't want to waste that webbing Tim's like this cost this is this is my webbing it's cost me money and I don't want I'm a college student and I'm not going to do that and I'm like all right that's a good idea to me and five bucks come on right and although that's what you're supposed to do we knew what we were supposed to do so we threw the rope around we descend and when I tried Tim was went first and when I pulled on the rope the rope had stuck to the tree had frozen to the tree and so now and at the bottom of this repel so it was a bouncy bounce off the rock as you go rock and ice and then we get to this place where there's a bit of an inverted overhang maybe I don't know 30 degrees or 45 degrees or whatever it is but it's it's a little bit of a distance and so there's where there's this space we slid down in midair so I'm pulling on the rope and the ropes frozen I can't get it loose and I called Tim hey Tim I need help with the rope he comes over we're both hanging our weight on this thing lifting ourselves up and the thing just won't move and now you know meanwhile hypothermia is advancing rapidly so now we're we've lost coordination I'm falling in the snow I live in snowland Tim's Tim was from Iowa there's snow there you know how to walk in the snow couldn't hardly do it just tripping over my own feet falling we fell down a bunch of times now lips were becoming so cold that speaking articulation was very

18:27 difficult and we decided that all communications needed to be minimalized along with all of our motions to be minimalized because every single word we said every motion that we made drained our limited energy so I felt like I had this gas tank or a watt meter I don't know how many how many electrons in my battery I left you know you see that and every time I spoke that energy level I watched it decline and decline and decline what that meant was that we had we had time was against us or the cold was against us our energy levels were against us and all of these things were in combination to try to be as efficient as possible to save our own lives so we're both actually fully terrified I am I am I have this is the most in my life I after I died I'm not afraid of death I have zero fear of death but I've been in harrowing situations in my life and none of them compared to this in terms of terror for fear of death okay so my fear of death was removed by this I was in fear of my life and I knew that I was dying and I'm 21 years old and we're trapped on this mountain the density of the population I remember this because I looked it up was 1.7 people per square mile so this is like nobody there and the whole province and well and there's no cell phones no sat phones it's not like you can call search and rescue to

20:01 bring a helicopter and lift you off you you are on your own you and Tim we were on our own in the wilderness and I should say we had spent the previous eight days on our own in British Columbia right across the border backcountry skiing and snow caving into Mount Descente Boyne and so we learned in that week to trust each other and neither of us there were some exciting events that happened on that ski but neither of us ever lost our head and during this entire trip both of us knew that fear of if fear produces panic panic is going to kill you that panic kills people in the wilderness that's one of the things and so we both were operating part of our mental energy was operating to repress our fear so I'm in this big huge repression of my fear I'm trying to think things through with a muddled mind communicate with frozen face eyeballs are beginning to freeze my eyeballs are cold my eyeballs my eyeballs still get cold I'm wearing half audience you can't see but I'm wearing half gloves right now because when the temperature goes below 55 degrees I my hands I have I have cold hands I just have cold hands my whole my whole thermal system got wrecked by this so we're in this situation the rope is above us we can't get it loose by pulling on it with both our weights Tim decides that he can re-ascend the rope

21:35 itself no protection no just re-ascend the rope itself as if he was free climbing on a rope and to do that he took out this took out this line this very thin climbing line and formed two large loops that he used a particular kind of hitch on both sides of the line called a persic hitch he put one on the right side one on the left side with these like four foot loops and he put was right foot into the right loop and his left foot into the left loop and this particular hitch is like all hitches they have a high frequency high level of friction that's applied when you pull in the line and when the lines not being pulled it can slide and it's loose so the idea is this is a climbing hitch that's used for this purpose and this is of course in the days before they had these things called the senders which attached the rope and you can pull yourself up on them same idea but it's with a hitch so I took the rope and I wrapped it around my waist and I laid down in the snow and I tried to make the vertical line as tight as possible as taut so that Tim could ascend to this and he and it's not it's not like wrapped around at both lines are wrapped around to my belly it's like I had to wrap one around my stomach and one around my chest to give him room enough to be in between them and so he had some a better position so I wrapped this up and he's going up because he's responsible he feels responsible because he is he was the lead climber he's the certified guy he's like the only way we're

23:06 out of this situation is if I do this we talked about this this is dangerous scary thing he's doing and so I look I wind the line in a line in the snow and he begins the ascent and I can't really see him I can't see him I'm like half my face is in the snow and I can see with one eye over over to the mountain range that's to the west of us and which isn't that far away the mountain range over there and I suddenly the rope is jerking as he's going up one arm and one leg and one arm and suddenly I hear him say falling and I'm like oh my god and so he comes falling down I try to roll out of the way as quickly as I can but I'm in the snow and I can't do this very well because I don't have much coordination and calf lands on me and his foot got entangled in the loop that he was of this hitch that he was climbing ascending with and it must have jerked the rope free and the rope came tumbling down on us this is hours later so this is I tell it in like minutes but that's not it was it was not minutes right so the good news is the rope is free there's some bad news coming out of feeling there's more bad news but there was a moment of good news so the good news was is that we had signed into the wilderness log saying where we're going in where we're going what time we're going in and when we're coming out and we didn't sign out and the warden came looking for us so at this point maybe it must be before midnight at this point some it's some hours before midnight and suddenly down the highway

24:42 comes this headlights and they've only been one vehicle all night long since since the last climber left nobody drove by so this vehicle pulls into the parking lot right across the street across the parkway from us and flashes its lights and we jump up and down and he flashes his lights so we were like it's got to be the warden and he sees us so now we're we're like buoyed and our we know somebody knows that we're here and so that was very helpful to us emotionally and psychologically so now we put the rope together and what rope up with each other again and we make this traverse off but now we're completely off the ice we're only on rock with with crampons on so it's clickety-clack-clack as we walk across and plus we get all these I have all these ice screws dangling like it like a like a bell system off my hip clunk and clunk and clunk and so it's it's and and and they're bumping up against me and I'm trying to focus every single motion that I make and as I'm walking to this third second repel I I'm driving myself forward with this willpower that I didn't know that I had I and I'm driving my fear down but this fear is also propelling my willpower towards survival and then I had like this transition moment when I went from only just my mental drive when I felt like I had applied so much pressure to myself for this survivability that that somehow I drilled down inside this deeper stem of my mind and

26:14 my of my brain and tapped into this place that I that it's like in my animal space my original animal nature the hundreds of thousands of years old developed for the survival of myself and my species I went into this space where where all of this new strength came from and so I wasn't I was having this intuitive experience of my animal nature combined with my my reasoning capacity that I was harnessing to drive myself forward in my will for survival and and meanwhile while this is going on inside of me buoyed by the vision of the warden down below I have this pressure of the fire of the cold burning all of me my hands are on fire my face is on fire my feet are on fire my every motion that I take I feel my energy being depleted Tim and I are not talking at all literally only few words as necessary and every motion that I would make every step I would take I would stop I would look for the next footstep I deliberately place it in the right spot and again and again and again with continued mental focus so all of this also takes all of this singular paying attention to exactly what you're doing in the now because if you don't you die and so we traverse over to this place and we get to the third repel second repel second repel

27:46 and there's a an iron pin epoxied in the mountain like a ring with a ring attached to it and Tim puts the line through it and he descends this easy repel so we easily repel down the space on these rocks and and I follow down him when he calls up to me and I come down the line and I turn the corner there's a bit of a corner to go around onto this ledge and there are safety harnesses epoxied into the mountain and so he attached himself to the safety harness I attached myself and now for the first time all night we're not going to fall so at this point we turn we wave to the ward and we're like we made it and he flashes his lights after a minute or two and drives away because now we're in this position of one more repel and he's going to bed and so it's pretty easy spot it's the it's the practice place where people climb up and then repel down from it's the easiest spot on the whole climb so I took my I took the line the rope and the tied attached one into my my waist harness that was my nylon support and I took the other end of this rope and I tossed it out around the side around out to my right around this this corner where I had rounded it to come off the repel to stand on this ledge and I gave the rope a yank and I gave it a good pull and as soon as I pulled it I pulled it maybe four or six inches maybe that much and it it it jammed and and the more I pulled it the deeper it set into whatever

29:23 crag it was caught and I told him you know the rope is jammed and he said well flip the line and so I started you know try to flip the line like like a make a wave for a minute but the rope was laying against the rock itself and the wave form couldn't bypass that corner so I couldn't snap the line out of the jam and so now I only have one end of the rope or 100 150 feet up and the that's now wardens gone and we are in deep trouble again so he can't get past either right you're below him you're stuck no no we're side we're side by side well let me explain I guess I didn't do a good enough job so he's standing to my left we're on a ledge the ledge is maybe six maybe eight feet long and maybe two and a half three feet deep against the rock face and then the rock face in front of each of us are iron pins epoxied in with rings with carabiners and nylon I got it I didn't realize there were two of those okay sorry I should have been clearer in my explanation no you're good keep going so he's to my left and I'm to his right and when I tied when I tied the rope to my harness I had to take my mittens off and I was wearing rag wool mittens with leather chaps covered with mink oil right and this was it was adequate for the day but not for the night plus I'm all I'm dressed I was wearing a surplus army wool pants that

30:56 I got at the surplus and I was wearing my my boots were these like 1967 or 64 leather ski boots that you know that lace up ski boots okay I remember what those look like and they were like high tops just above my ankles and I had I had they're the kind of ski boot that if you fell you'd definitely break your ankle break yeah and there's no Gore Tex back then there's none of that kind of stuff okay it's wool and leather it's wool and leather oh my god I never phrased it that way to myself but that's it huh so and I had a rag wool hat on under my helmet and so we're in this position I took off my rag wool gloves in order to tie this line to myself and the the dexterity of I'm a dexterous person I'm still a dexterous person I I'm but I but to move my fingers in a way to tie a simple knot took an immense amount of effort I couldn't feel my fingers I could only see them and plus I I was casting a shadow over my hands because the moon was behind so all of this effort to tie the rope in played into what happened next because we discussed do I untie the rope and Tim tried to grab the line with me and we pulled together but every time I pulled it it just set deeper and so we just we decided that if I if I tried to untie the rope there's

32:28 chances that I would drop it because my hands are so frozen or the Tim would drop it and so we decided that it was better not to do that so it was my responsibility to keep pulling on the rope but now the wardens gone my energy is depleting rapidly now so my my tank is is heading toward the very end of my of my ability to keep myself warm so all this energy in my body is being consumed trying to keep this the my my engine going so if you're a cell phone would with the little battery things say like three percent or something oh it was getting down there yeah it wasn't quite at three I would say it was more like at seven at this point okay because the there were a couple more steps to go through maybe even nine couple more hypothermic things that had to happen that's still the red area it's red it's in the red and so I'm I'm I'm trying to pull on the rope all have all this emotion going through me because now I know I'm going to die and so I say that I say that with such ease now I know I'm going to die but I was twenty one years old and I was terrified and I knew that there was no way out of this and that I I had made ill-informed decisions that led to my death and the the that was a how stupid could I be to have believed that I

34:00 could climb with an axe and a hammer which I did okay I did do that but doing that created this cascade of events that led to this moment where where that was going to be public knowledge and my parents my parents were going to lose me and my my sister had run away when I was a kid when I was fourteen she vanished from our lives it created deep wounds in my family this is the reason I was in Montana and not in Boston I was escaping these deep wounds I did not want to be in that presence because of the the when when someone becomes a strange you know it used to happen a lot in the in the in the olden days when someone would board a ship and never be seen again and there'd be this open wound and if they did this in the dead of night and they vanished and you believe that they went off in the ship it didn't stop this endless mourning for them so there was endless mourning in my house and endless grief in my house and so I my my parents were sorely wounded by this and I compounded this now not only did I not go back to visit them and on the spring break over which they had insisted that I did but I'm like f you I'm not going and so I'm here on this cliff and and and I'm desperate now I'm I'm I'm desperate I have this experience where suddenly a peace overflows me I'm thinking about my parents I'm thinking about the inevitability

35:34 of my death and it was like this switch flipped and when the switch flipped this piece overcame me because I knew I was not getting out of this I I I was watching the progression of my frostbite and my hypothermia I was educated in this I I knew I was going to die and when I finally knew that I was going to die death was waiting for me a piece in filled me I released all of my fear I released all of my not not not knowing what was going to happen but the drive of the fears power to drive me forward evaporated and I suggest something here sure maybe it wasn't that you just realized you were going to die but you had just finally accepted it because up until this point you were in denial you were in still and just as bad of a place and at this point you finally went okay I accept the inevitable here yeah you know all these years of being a pastor I never put that together myself my is maybe was too close to me that can bring that piece you're talking about I've seen it happen a hundred times by bedsides I just yeah I accepted my circumstance thank you again for listening to the first half of Peter's Adventure in part two coming out later this week we'll hear all about what

37:07 he experienced during his NDE and how they were rescued until then I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.