Мадина Федосова – The White Storm Rescue on Mont Blanc (страница 1)
The White Storm Rescue on Mont Blanc
Madina Fedosova
© Madina Fedosova, 2025
ISBN 978-5-0068-0668-9
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
Author’s Preface
When I first read the story of the two climbers who survived for seven days in a snow trap on the slopes of Mont Blanc, it wasn’t the drama of their situation that struck me most, but the dialogues they held, recorded on a crackling dictaphone. In those recordings, fragmented and interrupted by the howling wind, there was something more than just a survival log. It was a confession. A confession of two people standing on the border between life and eternity.
For a long time, I hesitated to touch this story. Their conversation seemed too sacred, too personal. But the more I pored over those few preserved lines, the clearer I understood: this story must be told. Not as a dry report, but as a parable about man facing the infinite.
“Whiteout” is not a documentary reconstruction of events. It is an attempt to hear what was left beyond the frame of official reports. I changed the names, added fictional episodes, allowed myself to imagine what the blizzard had forever carried away. But the essence remains untouched – two people, trapped in an icy cave, holding the last dialogue of their lives.
Why do we go to the mountains? What do we seek on these dangerous slopes? Perhaps the answer is simple: we seek ourselves. And when we find it – it turns out this “self” is not at all what we imagined down below, in the world of hot coffee and warm blankets.
This book is about the truths revealed to a person when only white darkness remains around. About how all values change when your only interlocutor becomes your own death. About what it means to forgive. Yourself. Others. Even this merciless mountain.
I do not know what those two ultimately experienced in their snowy grave. But working on this book, I felt as if I had been there myself – in that kingdom of silence, where every breath echoes and thoughts become as pure and sharp as alpine ice.
May “Whiteout” be for you not just a reading, but an experience. An experience of ultimate sincerity. For it is only in the face of death that we finally dare to say what truly matters.
– Madina Fedosova
Winter 2023
Somewhere between memory and fiction
P.S. If after reading you feel the urge to step outside and breathe the frosty air deep into your lungs – then I have managed to convey at least a fraction of that sensation of life that opens to a person when they stare death in the eye.
Prologue
Cold
It came unexpectedly, like a thief, creeping through layers of clothing, through thermal underwear and down jackets, through skin and muscle, straight to the bones. Alejandro Gutiérrez felt it even before dawn, as he checked his gear by the tent. His fingers, usually so deft, struggled with the carabiners. His breath turned into white plumes that froze instantly in the air, sprinkling fine crystals onto his gloves.
“Minus twenty-five,” he muttered, glancing at the thermometer. “And that’s before sunrise.”
The sound of a tent unzipping came from behind him. Eivind Larsen stuck his head out; his fair hair stuck out in all directions, the marks of a sleeping bag imprinted on his cheeks.
“My calculations said it shouldn’t be colder than minus eighteen today,” he said, squinting at the thermometer.
“Your calculations can go to hell,” grumbled Alejandro, pulling his ice axe from the backpack.
The ice axe, old and trusted, with the engraving “María, 2005”, suddenly cracked in his hands. A sharp sound, like a gunshot, echoed through the gorge, bouncing off the cliffs. Alejandro froze, examining the break. The steel had snapped clean in the middle, as if sliced neatly by a knife.
“Damn it,” he whispered.
Eivind stepped closer, his breath quickening from the cold.
“That’s… a bad omen,” he said, picking up the broken piece.
“Omens are for superstitious old women,” Alejandro snapped, but uncertainty tinged his voice. He remembered how, ten years ago in the Pyrenees, his wife María’s ice axe had broken a day before the avalanche hit.
“According to data from the Polar Research Institute,” Eivind began in his usual lecturing tone, “83% of mountaineering fatalities occur due to ignoring minor equipment malfunctions.”
“Shut up,” Alejandro said sharply. “Just shut up.”
He threw the broken piece of the ice axe into the snow, where it instantly vanished as if it had never been.
Eivind sighed, pulling a GPS from his pocket.
“The wind is picking up. There will be a blizzard here in two hours.”
Alejandro looked at the sky. Clouds, low and heavy, crawled along the horizon like a herd of frightened sheep.
“When the wind blows from the west, and the clouds crawl like crabs – expect trouble,” he quoted the words of his first guide, an old Basque who had taught him to read the mountains like a book.
Eivind smirked:
“My grandfather, a fisherman from the Lofoten Islands, said: ‘Signs are what those who cannot read a barometer believe in.’”
They stood facing each other, two men, two worldviews, divided not only by nationality but by all their experience. Alejandro, who grew up in the shadow of the Pyrenees, knew from childhood that mountains are not just rocks and snow. They are living beings, capricious and dangerous. Eivind, raised among fjords and glaciers, believed only in numbers, charts, and scientific forecasts.
“Alright,” Alejandro said finally. “Let’s check your barometer.”
They continued their ascent, not knowing that in three hours an avalanche would engulf them with a roar heard for kilometers.
The Avalanche
It came without warning.
First, a faint whisper – a barely perceptible sound, like the rustle of wings. Then a rumble, growing like thunder, turning into a roar. Alejandro only had time to turn around before a white wall of snow crashed down upon them.
He only remembered the sensation of falling, the impact against rocks, snow filling his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Then – darkness.
The first thing he felt upon regaining consciousness was pain. Sharp, piercing, emanating from deep within his body. The second – silence. Not the peaceful silence of the mountains, but a thick, oppressive silence, as if his ears were stuffed with cotton.
“Larsen?” His voice came back as an echo from the icy walls.
A groan answered him. In the flashlight’s beam, Eivind lay pinned against the cave wall, his face pale, almost translucent with pain. He clutched his side, blood seeping through his torn jacket.
“Break?” Alejandro asked, automatically reaching for the first aid kit, remembering how his partner in the Andes ten years ago had died from a similar impact against a rock.
“Ribs…” Eivind grimaced. “But the main thing is this.”
He held up the dictaphone. The tape was still spinning.
“The recording has been going for…” he glanced at his watch, “forty minutes. I started when you were unconscious.”
Alejandro took the device. His own hoarse breathing came from the speaker.
“17:34. This is… Eivind Larsen. If you can hear this – we are under an avalanche on the north slope…”
The Norwegian’s voice on the tape sounded strangely calm, as if he were giving a lecture to students.
“You were recording this while I was dying?” Alejandro felt a surge of rage.
“I was recording the truth,” Eivind corrected him. “In 1963, in the Dolomites, two climbers left a diary – they kept it for nine days until they froze. Read it – and you’ll understand that in the end, everyone writes the same thing.”
Alejandro turned off the recording.
“Then let’s write not like everyone else.”
Outside, the wind howled, but here, in the icy cocoon, a silence fell – the kind that comes before a confession.
Conversation in the Dark
“Do you believe in God?” Eivind asked unexpectedly.
Alejandro, busy bandaging his wound, stopped.
“Why?”
“Just curious. In situations like these, people usually start to believe.”
“I believe in mountains,” said Alejandro. “They are closer to God than any church.”