Dramatic details emerge after the climber survives a 400 -foot drop that killed 3 friends in Washington State

A rock climber who fell to hundreds of feet going down a sting ravine killed his three companionsHas hiking in his car in the dark, then went to a salary phone to call for help, the authorities announced on Tuesday.

The surviving climber, Anton Tselykh, 38, got out of a tangle of strings, helmets and other equipment after Saturday evening. Despite the internal suffering and the head trauma, TSELYKH finally, on at least a dozen hours, hiking towards the paid phone, said the Subherical of Okanogan, Dave Yarnell.

The climbers who were killed were Vishnu Irigireddy, 48, Tim Nguyen, 63, Oleksander Martynenko, 36, said the Coroner of Okanogan County, Dave Rodriguez. Irigireddy and Nguyen were from Renton and Martynenko was from Bellevue, officials said.

Tselykh was listed in a satisfactory state at the Seattle Harborview Medical Center, the CBS Kiro-TV affiliate reported on Tuesday. The authorities have not yet been able to interview him, said Rodriguez, so he is still unknown to the fall and his trip.

Falls like this leading to three deaths are extremely rare, said Cristina Woodworth, who heads the Sheriff’s research and rescue team. Seven years ago, two climbers were killed during a fall on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in California.

The group of four escalated the first arrows of the winters, serrated peaks divided by a popular slit with climbers of the northern waterfall chain, about 160 miles northeast of Seattle.

The group of four met a disaster that evening when the anchor used to secure their strings was torn from the rock while they went down, said Rodriguez. The anchor they used, a metal tip called a piton, seemed to have been placed there by previous climbers, he said.

They dropped on about 200 feet in an inclined gluant, then plummeted another 200 feet before resting, Yarnell said. The authorities think that the group had shown itself, but turned around when they saw a storm approaching.

A research and rescue team of three people reached the Fall Sunday site, Woodworth said. The team used coordinates from a device that the climbers had transported, which had been shared by a friend of men.

Once they found the site, they called a helicopter to remove the bodies one at a time due to the rugged terrain, Woodworth said.

The flight of the helicopter through 16 miles of accidental and mountainous land took more time than usual – about an hour – due to hard time, Kiro -TV reported. The video of the aerial recovery shared by Kiro showed the helicopter sailing winds and boastful fog while he was heading for climbers.

The stakeholders paid on the recovered equipment on Monday trying to decipher what caused the fall, Woodworth said. They found a piton – essentially a small point of metal which is driven in cracks or ice and used as anchors by climbers – which was always cut in the ropes of the climbers.

“There is no other reason for which it would be hung on the rope unless it is withdrawn from the rock,” said Rodriguez, the coroner, noting that the peaks are generally stuck in the rock. Rodriguez added that during the recall, the four men would not be suspended from that of Piton at the same time, but in turn moving in the mountains.

Pitons are often left within the walls. They can be there for years, even decades, and they can become less safe over time.

“He looked old and altered, and the rest of their equipment looked more recent, so we hypothesize that it was an old piton,” said Woodworth.

The climbers are fixed by strings to anchors, such as pitons or other climbing equipment. The strings are intended to stop their fall if they were to slide, and generally climbers use rescue anchors, said Joshua Cole, guide and co -owner of North Cascades Mountain Guides, which has climbed in the region for about 20 years.

Generally, it would be unusual to recall a single piton, said Cole, adding that he is still unknown exactly what happened on the wall that night.

“We finally educate, if possible, get more information from the surviving party,” said Woodworth.

Arrows are a popular climbing place. The route that the climbers took, said Cole, was of moderate difficulty and required to move between ice, snow and rock.

But the conditions, the quantity of ice against rock for example, can change quickly with the weather, he said, even from week to week or by day, changing the risks of the route.

Woodworth told Kiro-TV that it is important that climbers “do not take any of your equipment for granted and that always still aware of your environment.”