Word: mcnear
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...years of climbing, the club has seen only two fatalities, both of them in the last two years. In 1947 Charles Shiverick '50 was killed in a Canadian avalanche; this summer Graham McNear '50 fell 1500 feet to his death near Mt. Blane...
...McNear was climbing in France with Irving L. Fisk '50, James Sprek of Chicago, and a Dartmouth man. According to mountaineering practice, McNear and Sprek were tied together by a long rope, and only one man would climb at a time...
...party reached a shallow ledge on the almost-vertical face of Dent du Geant. While the other three waited below, McNear continued up the face and hammered a thin piton--a metal spike commonly used by mountain-climbers for support--into a crack in the granite rock. Then he fastened his rope to the piton and continued up the wall...
Suddenly he lost his balance. The force of the fall pulled the piton out of the crack. A vertical razor of rock, jutting up from the ledge, cut McNear's rope and he continued down...
...split second later he hit Sprek on the ledge and threw him 120 feet into the valley. McNear's own body cleared the rocks and hurtled another 1400 feet. He fell through space more than 10 seconds before landing...