05 | Remember Me | Mt Bowen

It was supposed to be a hiking adventure, but it ended in an unforeseeable accident that would change Warren and Geert's futures forever. When he was sitting around a campfire on a remote island in Far North Queensland, Warren Macdonald made a life-changing decision. He’d sparked up a conversation with a Dutch hiker named Geert van Keulen, and he decided to follow Geert up a mountain the following morning. It was supposed to be a hiking adventure, but it ended in an unforeseeable accident that would change both their lives forever.

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  ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

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  Hello, Hilary Harper with you. And in ABC Rewind, we bring you a selection of episodes from the documentary show Earshot, showcasing first-person storytelling at its best.

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  If someone says to you, "Hey, come, follow me", do you follow? What makes us forget everything we've learned and blindly take a risk by following a charlatan? The wrong path? Your instincts? I'm Iyikyokiranta and welcome to Follow Me. Over the next seven episodes of Earshot, we're telling stories of following. A cult? Online groomers? Love into the wrestling ring? And this time, up a mountain. Literally. Warren McDonald was 32 and working as a house painter in the Whitsunday Islands in North Queensland, when he went hiking on Hinchinbrook Island. He met a 39-year-old backpacker from the Netherlands

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  and decided to follow him. And what happened the next night would change both of their lives forever.

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  And I remember saying that, "Look, I reckon I can last another night, but I'm not sure that I can do a second night."

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  And all the time I'm thinking, "I've got to get him out. I've got to, I've got to make it. I've got to get there. I've got to get there."

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  Sophie Castiven tells the story of Warren and Gert and climbing Mount Bowen.

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  When I was nine years old, living in Cairns, I remember this man coming over for dinner. He came up the front path in his wheelchair with a big smile on his face, and he managed to pull himself up onto the deck without any help. My dad was a rescue helicopter pilot at the time, and he was a bit in awe of Warren McDonald. Warren looked like he'd just climbed a mountain. And in fact, he just had. But this story starts at the bottom of another mountain on a remote part of Hinchinbrook Island, which is where my dad first met him.

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  Manamudanemi, or Hingam Brook, is a wild and rugged island off the coast of Far North Queensland. When Warren got off the ferry there, he hiked to the remote Little Ramsay Bay, which is where he met Geert van Keulen, who was sitting on the beach, sketching the ocean. Behind them loomed Manamudanemi's tallest peak, the rugged Mount Bowen. And Geert asked Warren if he wanted to follow him up to the summit the next morning.

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  Warren said, "Give me half an hour to think about it." And then, within five or 10 minutes, he came to me and said, "Yeah, you're on, I believe, 6:30 tomorrow morning."

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  I'd been thinking about it. Well, it'd be pretty cool to climb that, but it wasn't something that I was going to go and do on my own. I'd kind of come from doing a lot of hiking in Tassie and in pretty rugged places. So, in terms of being intimidated by it, not so much. I just thought it was going to be a great adventure.

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  At dawn, they began following each other along a creek bed towards the summit of Mount Bowen. They thought it would take somewhere between eight to 10 hours.

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  There's no path as such. It's just scrambling over rocks. And mainly, it's very steep up. And I simply couldn't keep up with Warren, who seemed to have longer legs. And he just hopped from one rock onto the other one, much more fluent than me. I really struggled. Got very, very tired.

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  After hiking for eight and a half hours and not meeting anyone else on the track, they realised they were lost and they wouldn't reach the summit that night. So they decided to set up camp on a narrow rock ledge under Warren's blue tarp and get to know each other a bit better.

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  So he was telling me all these stories. We talked about leeches in Tasmania and the brutality of the trekking there, but also the beauty and the stunning, stunning nature. And we have to fight to protect all that as well.

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  And then later that night...

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  I needed to take a leak. And, you know, if you spend a lot of time in the outdoors, especially bushwalking, the rule is that when you're going to do that, you need to move away from your water source, you know, 100 feet or so.

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  The bush behind him was too thick to walk through. So Warren crossed the creek to relieve himself and started climbing up a rock wall. Navigating the wall, he found a crack to help leverage himself up.

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  And as I pulled up to make my way up and over, I just heard this almighty crack. It's basically a refrigerator-sized piece of rock broke loose out of that wall and then just literally slammed me back down into the creek bed, and I mean slammed.

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  Warren heard two cracks. One was the boulder, the other was his pelvis. The rock had landed on his legs, pinning him to the creek bed.

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  I was just in this immediate world of pain and I just wanted this weight, weight off me.

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  I must have been deeply, very, very tired because I was in a deep sleep and suddenly I hear a yelling.

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  I yelled out, "Fuck!"

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  "Get a torch, get a torch!" really loud. And I had my torch actually hung above me. And I walked around and shun into the creek and found him sitting or lying under a rock.

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  When he turned up in front of me, I mean, obviously, yeah, he was, he was pretty freaked out. It, it was like it flipped a switch in my mind and I basically had to take control of the situation. If, if you know what I mean, like I had to, I had to, I had to try and keep myself calm. I knew that freaking out was not an option, that it wasn't going to help.

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  His calmness has settled me down. And then he straight away started to guide me to collect logs and tried to, to lever him out.

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  Get, get a branch and then, you know, that would snap. And then he went back in and basically dug up a small tree using Swiss Army knife.

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  They tried a few branches and small trees, but they all snapped.

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  I kinda just had this sinking feeling of, right, this is... I'm in trouble with a capital T now. And I think it was around about that time that it started to rain.

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  It rained exceptionally hard, so I was very scared that the water would drown him.

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  When I noticed that the creek was rising, that was a moment of just sheer terror. Gear started stacking rocks, trying to build a dam. I'm starting to think, is there something I can use as a snorkel? It was at that point that I started thinking that he was gonna have to hike out.

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  This was 1997. Hardly anyone had a mobile phone or e-pub. So to avoid another accident from happening, they decided that it was best for Gear to wait for daylight before heading down the mountain for help.

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  Now, I looked at him with first daylight and he looked paler than a sheet of paper. He was exceptionally white and scared. But he did, he still kept calm. And he guided me to his pack and I got bags out, hung a cord around his neck with a cup and one with food and one with his diary and one with his toothbrush. And just trying to tell him to maybe try meditating and then... I could look around and I looked down into where I was supposed to go and straight away there's a steep drop actually from the point where we were. And it was all water and clouds and foam and it was mad.

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  What I said to him is just to make sure that he takes it easy and that the last thing that you wanna do is get hurt, you've gotta get out. And I remember saying that, "Look, I reckon I can last another night, but I'm not sure that I can do a second night."

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  We hugged, we hugged. And then I left and straight away I slept, slept and fell. So I thought, "Oh my God, what is he gonna think now? Because he has to rely on me."

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  I think it's probably the loneliest that I've ever felt is watching him walk away because...

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  Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty good at being on my own, but this was a little bit of a whole, uh, whole new ballgame and, and I knew I was gonna be there for at least, at least 24 hours. And, uh, and that if he didn't make it out, then, you know, then I was, I wasn't gonna, I wasn't gonna get, get through this if he didn't make it out in time.

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  I had adrenaline raging through my body and I had, I had, I had a purpose. I really had to get down as quick as I could. So I would come to sections of bush that I simply couldn't get through. It was way too dense. And then I jumped into the pools, uh, blind. And all the time I'm thinking, I've gotta get him out. I've gotta, I've gotta make it. I gotta get there. I gotta get there.

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  I had times when, uh, when I would kind of sink down with thoughts of, you know, you're basically, you're done. This is, uh, they're gonna find you here in a couple of days. And that's it. And then I would have other times where I just really have to psych myself up to, you know, you can do this. You've, you've, you've been through some hard things in the past and, um, you're gonna hang in there and you're gonna get through this. I think one of the most confronting pieces was that I'd kind of, I'd almost, I'd always sought out the, I, the outdoors, um, for this feeling of connection. I remember at one time being confronted with this thought of, you know, hey, is this what you've been looking for? Is this connected enough for you? And just that, you know, that, that

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  idea that the very thing that I'd been chasing was, uh, was now gonna take me out.

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  After 11 hours of bush bashing in the rain, Geert made it to Little Ramsay Bay, but he didn't come out unscathed.

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  I was bleeding in my ears. My glasses had cracked.

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  And I had more tears in my clothing. So I took everything off, there was no one there, so I took everything off. Walked into the water of the ocean and washed the wounds, so to speak, and came back and pitched my tent, thinking, I'm going to rest here, because I knew that I could make the ferry to the start point in one day, but I couldn't sleep.

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  Back up on the mountain, Warren was about to face his next challenge. And this time, it wasn't rising water.

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  I felt like I was in a David Lynch movie. It's like, this is just, this is just getting weirder and weirder. You couldn't make this up. People have often asked me, you know, are you scared of snakes and crocodiles and all the rest of it? And it's like, well, not really. But what I didn't see coming is at one point I noticed a, a, a pool of, of, uh, of red, or just a kind of a swirl of red around my right foot. And I was like, shit, you know, what's, what's going on there? And so I kept an eye on it and eventually spotted this yabby that had decided to have a go at my foot. And I just absolutely couldn't believe it. It's like, what a mongrel. Who does that?

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  And so I'd spent a fair bit of time trying to take that guy out with a stick. And at one point, a bit later on from that, I had this horrible kind of stinging in my groin and, and up, you know, up around my stomach and, and noticed that, um, again, to my kind of horror, that I was covered in ants. And one thing I knew for sure is that whatever was happening under the rock, there was absolutely nothing that I could do about that.

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  Because he couldn't sleep, Geert started the long walk towards the ferry wall in the dark at 3:00 AM.

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  A bit later, about 12:01, the ferry came in with new hikers. And they're all looking at me, sort of looking over the shoulder and looking at me and thinking, wow, I must, I must look like a real mess. Then the ferry guy, his name was Goody, that was on his tag. He wanted to get a mayday out to the mainland, but his radio could not cover that distance. So he had to go out into the mangroves. And he found an old crabby fisherman. He looked like Ernest Hemingway in his nineties. And he had a big radio on board and that's how we got to Mayday out.

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  And that's where my dad, Tim Kesteven, comes into the story. He was the rescue helicopter pilot in Cairns who picked up the emergency phone call that day.

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  Initially, the thought was to get going as quickly as possible because it was getting late in the afternoon. And we knew light could be a problem if it involved a winch rescue.

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  One of the rescue crewmen, Danny Portiffay, knew they'd need heavy hydraulic lifting equipment to remove the boulder. So he called the airport fireys.

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  And I just asked them if I could borrow some equipment at first and they, obviously they laughed and they said, "We wouldn't expect you to lend us your helicopters, so why should we lend you our equipment?" And I just said, "Listen, as long as one of you can come with it, we just need someone to come with some lifting gear as soon as possible. We're getting airborne in 15 minutes, can you get here in 12 please?" And they responded extremely quickly.

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  After, after a few hours waiting, a small fly came on the edge of the mountain towards me, landed in front of me and that was the rescue helicopter.

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  They were having trouble finding Warren in the rugged landscape and they needed Gert to show them where he was trapped.

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  And they put me in the front, the co-pilot seat on the left-hand side. Danny, on the right-hand side, suddenly said, "I can see him, he's waving his arm."

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  I was pretty sure that they had seen me by the way they circled around. But then it's like, well, now what happens?

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  The first time we saw him, he was waving a bit of a blue tap, which was good because we also knew he was, he was alive.

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  I felt incredibly elated and a big sigh of relief.

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  I had to fly back to the beach to let Gert off, to leave room on the helicopter for everyone else, so that we could complete the rescue.

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  As the helicopter returned back up the mountain, Danny, the airport fireman, and the emergency medicine specialist, Chip Jaffers, were winched down.

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  I don't think I've ever been so happy to see another human being in my life as to see Chip.

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  He was alive at first and I think once he realised we were there, he roused and really he put forth a heroic effort to get himself out of there with our help.

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  Chip was very concerned about the very low blood pressure that Warren had. And the most urgent thing to do was to give him fluids. At that stage is when Warren went in and out of consciousness. And that's when the real potential was for him not to survive the rescue.

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  What came next was the most critical point in the rescue. While he'd been pinned under the rock for more than 40 hours, toxins had formed in his legs. The crew knew that as the rock was lifted off Warren, these toxins would enter the rest of his body. So to keep his heart beating, Chip gave him a shot of adrenaline and it worked.

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  When I first saw Warren's legs after we removed the rock, it was devastating. It was actually a shocking sight. They were grey and bloated and full of scratches. And you could see where all the ants and other insects had been biting it. But once I finally got him off the rock and we placed him in the stretcher, then there was a sense of relief because at that stage he was still conscious. We just put a space blanket on him in blankets and strapped him safely onto the stretcher.

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  The next thing Warren remembers is being wheeled into the Cairns Base Hospital later that night and having a conversation with surgeon Bill Clark.

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  And he said, you know, Warren, I think you realise your legs have been badly damaged. And I said, yeah, I do. And he said, you know, I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but we're going to have to amputate them. And really that one word "them" really just kind of ripped something out of my guts because it had crossed my mind that I could lose a foot and I had pushed that thought out. But the idea of losing both legs, it really just took something out of me. And I just said, you know, how high are we talking here? And he said, above the knees. And yeah, at that point I just said, I'm out, I'm out. Don't want to know about it, cried myself to sleep.

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  That same night, they operated on Warren's legs.

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  And yeah, woke up the following day into a whole new world. Mum and dad had taken an overnight flight from Melbourne and yeah, there were a lot of tears and there was, at the same time, there was a lot of,

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  I don't know if I would call it anger, but I already had this thing in me. I just remember, because we couldn't really communicate. I still had this, I still had this, this tube down my throat. And I remember writing down on a piece of paper, "No fucking rock is gonna beat me."

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  Geert went to Townsville to stay with a friend after the accident. But he called the hospital the next day and was put straight through to Warren.

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  He was laughing, he seemed quite happy and he was, but obviously he was, he was morphine induced. And said, "Oh, look, thank you, Geert, the wild man from Borneo, he called me." And he said, "Thank you very much. I didn't think that you, you were gonna make it, but you did." And I said, "Yeah, great. So look, I'm coming up in the next days. I'm seeing if I can see you." And at the end of the conversation, he said, "Look, bud, I lost my legs, mate." And my world changed as well. Yeah.

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  And he said that.

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  It's this stunned silence in that moment. And just thinking about it afterwards, I was kind of blown away that, that, that he didn't know, that nobody had told him.

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  I felt guilty, badly guilty, that I had, if it wasn't for me, he would have never gone up that mountain.

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  I visited Warren a few days after and I'm walking into the door, the doors go open and I walk into his ward, to his room. And I see two women running to me. And I was convinced that there was family and I was convinced they were gonna murder me. That's how stressed and how nervous I was. And in fact, it was mum and one of the Warren sisters and they hugged me and they thanked me. And I felt wrong. I felt like, you know, that guilt was there.

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  Warren spent 10 days in intensive care and he had five more operations because of an infection in his bones.

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  And then I went into the room and went to his bed. And I'm looking at a whole bunch of computer monitors and graphs and alarms. And he'd be either smiling and laughing or he'd be dying. He was fighting his death.

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  Almost a month later, Warren flew home to Melbourne to start rehabilitation. Geert stayed in touch.

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  I visited him in Melbourne, maybe it was in one of these visits. And we talked about him being without legs for the rest of his life. And he said, when he signed, he signed for the amputation in the hospital. He said, I had two choices. One was to sit with a remote control in my hand for the rest of my life. And the other one is to make a life. And he chose the second option.

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  Well, getting out of a wheelchair and sitting down on the floor is, in the beginning, was really difficult. And so it's like, how can I make this easier? And so it became about figuring out how to do all these things. And the more of those, you know, those hard things that you can put behind your life, just things do get easier. It took a long time, you know, it took months and months, that process, you know, in some ways for a couple of years.

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  During his rehabilitation, Warren focused on getting stronger. And he proved his strength by doing the peer-to-pub swim in lawn in an even faster time than what he'd done a decade earlier when he had two legs.

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  It's just, it continues to blow my mind what we can do when we put our mind to it and that. You know, how's that even possible that a guy loses both legs, goes and swims in a race that he swam 10 years before and swims it faster than he than he did that that first time. To me, just shows how important mindset is and and purpose. By the time I had found the Peter Pub, I had already had this idea that, or a question, if you like, you know, hey, can a guy with no legs climb a mountain, really? And it's just a very random idea that pops into a guy's mind.

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  Just 10 months after Warren had his operation, he reached the summit of Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, using just a modified wheelchair and the seat of his pants.

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  We had some climbing gear and actually did end up having to go on a rope to climb that last section. You know, it's only 10 foot high, but I mean, when you're cruising around at 3 foot 11 with no legs, I mean, the last thing you want to do is fall 10 feet. What did I see when I reached the summit? Not much for a while, through the tears, that's for sure. I had a pair of sunnies on and I wasn't taking them off because, you know, being a guy, we're not supposed to be, you know, on top of a mountain, bawling our eyes out. But no, it was pretty heavy duty. I mean, what I saw was, you know, the whole way back from where I'd come from. And what I was looking out over was a pretty wild place. And I think I mentioned earlier about this feeling of connection that I'd

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  always been chasing. And for a while, after Hinchinbrook, I actually thought that I had that that was something that was gone, that I was never really going to be able to feel that that spiritual connection that I get from being outside, that that was something that was just going to be lost forever. And just sitting on top of Cradle there, I mean, the feeling was so strong. I mean, it's almost like being electrocuted. It felt like I had reclaimed a huge part of my life that I thought I'd lost forever.

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  While Warren was moving on from the accident, Geert couldn't leave it behind. He returned home to his then-girlfriend in the Netherlands, but he was still struggling with PTSD and depression after what happened on the island.

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  Went back to the Netherlands, had a girlfriend, she had two young children. And now I came back and I was basically a fruitcake. The girlfriend relationship stopped because I couldn't be around young children, I couldn't go into a supermarket because the colours of the packaging and the advertising, which just drove me insane, and I had to vomit. I couldn't travel on trains, I couldn't do public transport, couldn't listen to music. And I just wanted to crawl away and die, really. And that was the real trauma part of the incredible stress I had up there on the mountain.

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  Geert, he had struggled with survivor guilt for a long time afterwards, and I think the big pieces of it was that he had asked me to go. And I had always kind of reassured him that, you know, sure, he might have asked me to go, but I mean, I went. I made the decision to go. And, you know, it's just shit happens and that's what happened. And we got, you know, we got through it. At the end of the day, I mean, he saved my life.

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  I felt incredibly isolated and lonely with my own people in the Netherlands, who love me, there's nothing wrong with that, they are great people, but they just simply couldn't deal with the tragedy and the trauma that I had possibly written all over my face. So I had to escape, I had to flee. And I fled back, flew back to Australia, that was my escape.

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  Geert's mental health began to improve when he returned to Australia seven years later. He pursued his art, teaching graphic design in Adelaide. He revelled in helping others. He had a new sense of purpose in life.

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  And then I had a great, great life, being a lecturer, having a lot of time to travel. Taking long service leave, those kind of amazing things that they have in this country and in the country itself. I love Adelaide, it's a great town to live.

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  Warren's rescue was memorable not just for Geert, but also for my dad and the rest of the crew. And so 20 years after the accident, helicopter rescue crewmen Danny Porter Faye and Greg Beer organised a reunion in Cairns.

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  You know, to have everybody in the room at the same time, you know, 20 years later, and we'd all been through this pretty intense experience, you know, I just wanted to, I wanted to thank everybody for what they'd done.

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  And there was one more conversation Warren wanted to have. For years, he'd been looking for the surgeon who amputated his legs, Bill Clark. Finally, he found him, and after the reunion, they caught up in Brisbane.

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  He said to me, "Doing your surgery was probably the worst day of my career, having to amputate your legs." And I remember I looked across at the table at him and I said, you know, "I wasn't sure exactly why I wanted to meet up with you, but now I get it and I just want to let you know that, that I'm living a great life and that it worked out."

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  And after all these years, Warren and Geert have still kept in touch. In fact, they even went camping again, this time in Arizona, when Geert was cycling across the States.

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  And so we set up a couple of tents and get a fire going. And we pulled a couple of, couple of beers out and did a cheers. And I said, "Mate, it's great to be camping with you again." And Geert just about spit out his beer because we realised that we actually hadn't camped together since that night on the side of Mount, Mount Bowen. And that here we were, all these years later, just, you know, just doing something normal.

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  After I first met Warren when I was just nine years old, he's gone on to achieve some pretty incredible things. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He's also an author and motivational speaker, and now lives in Canada with his partner Margot. They met at the BAM Film Festival when he was showcasing a documentary about climbing Tasmania's Federation Peak.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  She's an ice climber, and Margot's take was, "Well, you know, the film's not bad, but all you really did was hike up this, hike up the side of this mountain." And I'm like, "Hike up the side of a mountain? It took me 28 days." And she's like, "Yeah, but you know, I think you could do something way harder. I think you should come back to Canada and I'll teach you how to ice climb." And I'm like, "Okay, challenge accepted." And so I did, and she did, and I'm still here.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Well, what a tale. Follow Me Up: Mount Bowen was produced by Sophie Kesteven. Our sound engineer was Hamish Camilleri, and our supervising producer was Cardia Taranto. Next in our Follow Me season, we're stepping into the online world of teens as a mum tries to understand where exactly her daughter goes when she's gazing at her phone. A wake-up call sends her searching for a different approach that's less punitive to keep her daughter safe and sane, but still connected. I'm Iyuk Yoki-Ranta, and join me next time for the next in our brand-new season of Earshot.