'Not only were we starving, but we were freezing'

Beth Rodden is one of the world’s greatest free climbers. When she and three others were tackling a sheer face in Kyrgyzstan back in 2000 her pride was “swollen”.

Kyrgyzstan was an “alpine haven” for the kind of big wall, free climbing she loved to do at Yosemite Valley in her native California.

“I just remember having this swollen ego, this swollen pride in that somehow I was winning in life," Rodden told RNZ’s Nine to Noon,

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“Here I was, 20, I was taking time off university. And I thought about all my poor high school friends that were stuck in classrooms and fluorescent lights.

“And I felt like I'm doing right, doing life right here. And then the next morning that bubble burst, just being as scared as I'd ever been in life and not knowing what was going to happen next.”

Sleeping in porta ledges, hanging cots suspended from the sheer face, they awoke to loud bangs.

“As climbers, we initially obviously thought it was rockfall.

“That's one of the things that you prepare for. So, we all shot up in our sleeping bags and pressed our backs to the wall behind us thinking that if it happened again, that the rocks would miss us and go over us.”

It did happen again, but the noise was something else.

“We looked down because that's the direction that the sound was coming from. And we saw armed men shooting up at us.”

A group of rebels had seen them and took the group hostage.

“After we were first taken hostage, they marched us back to our camp and ordered us to grab our passports," Rodden recalls.

“And we all threw in some bars, which we ended up sharing. We were surviving on maybe a hundred calories a day each. And it was an alpine environment, so it was over 3000 meters and all we had on was a light jacket and pants. So not only were we starving, but we were freezing.”

They were marched around, seemingly aimlessly, for days, she says.

Eventually they were left with two captors guarding them, and the young men in the group started to talk about escape, she says.

“I always thought that was a terrible idea because, we had seen them take people's lives. And if something went wrong, I was absolutely convinced they would not hesitate at all to take ours.

“But by the end of the sixth night, we were all starving. we're all freezing.”

Subsequently, back at camp where they started, they were left with just one captor.

“We were supposed to meet our other captor at the top of this ridge.

“And he was going to walk back to our camp and get, more supplies, more food, more batteries for his radio, more clothes for everybody.”

Once they started climbing up the ridge, it became very apparent there were four professional rock climbers and one unsteady captor, she says.

“Our captor, who was not a climber, was like a deer walking on ice. And he would hand us his hand to ask for help, ask us to hold his foot while he climbed up a little bit.

“And it became very apparent that if there was going to be a time to escape, this would have been it.”

Communicating non-verbally, her boyfriend at the time, Tommy, indicated he was going to act.

“At the top of the ridge and Tommy ended up climbing up next to our captor, as we knew him Su, and he pulled him by his gun strap.

“I was on a ledge with John and Jason. And we saw Su kind of arc through the night sky and hit a ledge and then bounce out of sight.”

At that moment she felt a surge of adrenaline.

“We had spent six days and only consumed 600 calories each. We were freezing and we were pretty much dragging physically.

“But at that moment, all of a sudden, all of us just sprinted up to the top of the ridge to greet Tommy, who had broken down crying, thinking that he had just killed somebody.”

This allowed them to escape. But Rodden, once back in the US, was plagued with nightmares, she says.

The climbing community celebrates bravado and survival stories, she says.

“I didn't feel like there was room, or I had no tools, to tell people about that.

"And so, while I did go to therapy within the first couple months to try and help me with a constant recurring nightmare, after that, I just felt ashamed that I wasn't stronger, that I wasn't able to move on and get right back to climbing immediately.”

It took her a year and a half to resume the sport she loved, she says.

“Tommy was thriving, my boyfriend, the other guys seemed to be doing fine, just throwing themselves back into their lives.

“And so, I felt like, if I want to survive this in any semblance of a whole person, that I just need to bury this and I just need to dive right back into climbing.”

In her memoir A Light Through The Cracks Rodden tells the story of that harrowing event and her long recovery from the trauma of it.

She has gone on to advocate for better mental health support for climbers who often experience the deaths of close friends in the sport.

She is in New Zealand this week speaking to high school students in Wanaka as well as giving talks at the NZ Mountain Film and Book Festival.