The man who saved two strangers’ lives on a mountain

Cris says the first stretch of his Mont Blanc adventure was "magical." (Mandalin Cristea via CNN Newsource)

For Madalin “Cris” Cristea, the danger unfolded in slow motion.

Cris and two fellow hikers were descending Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in the Alps.

The wind was howling, the snow was driving hard, but they were making steady progress toward safety.

Then, through the blur of white, Cris saw one of the other hikers — a British man named James — slip.

“He disappeared in front of me,” Cris tells CNN Travel today. “The image I have of him is he’s on his stomach, literally sliding. Your whole spine lights up with fear.”

A realization hit instantly: James was roped to his adult son, Matt. Both were in peril. If the father went over the edge, the son would almost certainly be dragged down with him.

For a moment, Cris froze. Visibility was bad. The wind drowned out their voices. And the three men were high on Mont Blanc, without a guide and with no one else in sight.

“I was in a state of shock,” Cris says. “I just had this feeling that he was going to die.”

Journey to the Alps

Cris’ journey to this moment began eight months earlier — because of a watch.

On New Year’s Eve 2015, the Romanian-born Londoner was on vacation in Barcelona, Spain with his girlfriend, Viv. The couple were strolling around the streets hand-in-hand, wandering in and out of stores.

“We walked past this Montblanc shop, you know, the one that sells watches and pens, stuff like that,” Cris says.

He peered in the window and saw the watches with their blue faces and shining silver straps. They were beautiful, but way out of his budget.

Half joking, he turned to Viv and said: “Do you reckon if I went and climbed Mont Blanc, they’d give me a discount?”

She laughed and wrapped an arm around him. “Probably not,” she said.

The couple didn’t go inside the store. But back home in London, the conversation kept playing inside Cris’ head. He loved Viv and their life together, but he was feeling lost in the city.

“I come from a very small place, my town is 8,000 to 9,000 people. And moving into London was a bit of a change,” Cris says.

He was in his twenties at the time, working as a lifeguard at a central London gym, but felt unfulfilled and in a rut.

“Maybe I was depressed,” he reflects today. “It was a very low point in my life.”

It didn’t help that it was January in Britain. The weather was miserable. Everything felt grey, uncertain, unhappy.

One cold, wet day on the way to work, Chris thought back to Barcelona. To the Montblanc store. To the conversation with Viv.

An idea suddenly formed: “I’m going to climb Mont Blanc. And I’m going to climb Mont Blanc this year.”

Mission to the mountain

The idea wasn’t entirely out of the blue. That Christmas, Cris’ brother had given him Bear Grylls’ autobiography, “Mud, Sweat and Tears,” and he’d spent the holidays poring over the explorer’s stories of climbing Mount Everest.

But while he had dreamed of climbing big peaks, he had little experience.

“I didn’t have any skills in mountaineering,” he says. “I had only done one mountain before, and that was the highest mountain in Greece.”

Climbing Mount Olympus is impressive, but Cris still felt ill prepared for Mont Blanc.

“The reason I felt inexperienced for Mont Blanc was that I was lacking certain experience elements that I didn’t get on Mount Olympus, which are experience with using crampons, an ice axe and experience with high altitude,” he says.

“I climbed Mount Olympus in summer, so there’s no snow on the mountain, and since the summit is at 2,918m, you’re not there enough to really feel the altitude. If I were to put it in running terms, I’d say that climbing Mount Olympus is like running a 10k; in comparison, Mont Blanc is like a marathon.”

And with money too tight to hire a guide for Mont Blanc, he was left with a dilemma: wait a couple of years to save up enough for professional help, or teach himself the skills and go sooner.

Climbing Mont Blanc without a guide is widely discouraged, then and now — especially for someone untrained and inexperienced.

“What I did was a reckless thing at the time,” Cris says. “I don’t want to be a bad example for people, either. It was not the right decision. It was not a good idea, and if I could take back time, I wouldn’t do the same thing all over again. I would save up the money and probably at least do a course, and wait a bit longer to find a climbing partner to do this with.”

But for Cris, climbing Mont Blanc that year had become symbolic of something bigger. It gave him a sense of purpose and a “wave of energy” every time he thought about it.

“… Which was something that I hadn’t felt in a very long time at that point, that enthusiasm of a mission,” he says.

Viv, understandably, was terrified. She didn’t try to stop Cris, but she made it clear she couldn’t support the plan either.

Meanwhile, Cris buried himself in Mont Blanc research.

“I read about all of the dangers,” he says. “Some of them I was more afraid of than others. Altitude was a big fear, because I didn’t know how my body was going to respond.”

He watched video after video on YouTube of rock falls on the mountain. He read stories about climbers getting lost. He studied the route “religiously.”

In August, Cris arrived in Chamonix to be confronted by Mont Blanc and the size of the challenge ahead.

“I saw the mountain … I looked up,” he recalls. “That’s when it became a real thing.”

Before he’d left for France, Cris had reassured Viv that he wasn’t going to put himself in any unnecessary danger.

“I said, ‘I’m only going to do as much as I feel I’m capable of. If I feel I’m incapable of handling a certain thing, I’m going to turn back. I’m not going to risk my life doing this,’” he says.

Cris repeated that promise to himself as he stared at the mountain.

First ‘magical’ morning

The first day went better than he feared. Other climbers were around, so it seemed unlikely that he’d get lost. The altitude didn’t affect him severely. He slept overnight in a refuge, then, in the early hours, he started the final push to the summit.

That morning was “magical,” says Cris.

“That’s one of the most memorable experiences that I ever had… it was two or three in the morning, and you can see the lights of Chamonix down below, which is absolutely gorgeous.”

The view gave Cris a thrill. He felt peaceful, relaxed, fulfilled — all the emotions he’d been longing for in London.

“I just remember having this feeling like, ‘What a cool thing I’m doing right now. This is such a cool moment,’” he recalls.

But as daylight rose, so did the wind and so did Cris. As he neared 4,600 metres above sea level — 15,000 feet — altitude began taking a physical and mental toll. The weather conditions worsened.

“I was pushing for the summit, and it was basically a lot of high winds,” says Cris. “I got onto a ridge and it was very sketchy. The wind was pushing me left to right. I had to squat down to pass this section. It was extremely tiring in the altitude … really hardcore … you feel lethargic, you have shortness of breath. Everything is a lot harder.”

Cris also found himself solo for the first time on his trek.

“It was just me for a while, and that’s when I started questioning, ‘Okay, when is that point for you, Cris? When are you turning back, like you said?’”

About 180 metres from the summit, he encountered two figures — a British father and son he’d met the night before in the refuge. The father, James, was in his 50s. His son, Matt, was a similar age to Cris, both in their 20s.

He couldn’t see their faces but could sense their panic.

“Both of them were covered up from the wind,” says Cris. “The wind was howling and smashing, and the younger guy basically said to me, ‘This is a really bad idea. It’s getting just worse and worse and worse.’”

For Cris, this was “the sign” he was waiting for.

“I was like, ‘Screw this. Let’s go back.’ It was luck that made me meet them, and I turned around.”

Cris joined James and Matt as they began the descent. Conditions were deteriorating. The wind battered the three men, making it difficult to balance and drowning out all other sound. James kept bending down every so often to adjust the crampons on his shoes.

Then, suddenly, James was on the ground and toppling over.

One moment he was upright, the next he was scraping and sliding across hard snow, the rope between him and his son spooling out, about to snap taut and start dragging Matt down the mountain too.

Cris stood in shock for a moment. Then, without thinking, he leapt into action.

“I just kind of woke up out of it and I was mid-air, going for the rope.”

He grabbed the rope with one hand and, landing on his stomach, he dug his ice axe into the slope and drove his boot spikes in hard. Then, he clung on tight and braced himself for the worst.

Eyes still shut, Cris felt his right arm “yank really violently.” But he stayed still. The pressure stopped.

“I managed to stop the fall, and that was it. That was the moment,” recalls Cris. “When I opened my eyes James was on the slope/incline underneath, around 10 metres below me. A short distance below him was the drop off the mountain.

Matt was standing on the ridge above, looking down at us. By the look on his face he had just witnessed the last four, five seconds, he had a look of terror on his face.”

The three were all frozen in fear for a moment.

Then, suddenly, a couple of other mountaineers appeared on the scene, they sprung into action and helped Cris pull James up. He was unharmed, other than the total shock.

‘Terrible’ moment

A decade on, James still remembers the “terrible” moment on Mont Blanc. He tells CNN Travel it “occurred very, very quickly, in a few seconds, and could have had shocking consequences.”

James says that while the incident was over quickly, like Cris, he remembers it playing out in slow motion. Only much later did he figure out what happened.

He says the spikes on one of his boots had come loose and got caught on snow.

“The wind, which was probably about 80 kilometres an hour, pushed me onto my back,” James recalls. “And I lost my balance, and then I was going down the slope. I was falling down on my back. … Then the rope went towards me, and flicked me onto my front.”

At which point, he saw Cris jump into gear.

“He grabbed the rope, just as I was falling,” he says. “If he hadn’t have been there, I think it would have been a terrible end. It was about a 4,000-foot drop, and I’d have probably pulled my son to his death as well.”

James, who prefers his last name not be used in this story for privacy reasons, recalls the other climbers helping him to his feet and seeing the look “of complete horror” on his son’s face.

From there, Cris, James and Matt made it to the bottom.

“All I wanted to do was get off the mountain,” James recalls. “I was just so incredibly relieved to get down and had an overwhelming sense that I’d cheated death — and a great sense of guilt that that fault would have probably dragged my son to his death. That was the worst part of it … an overwhelming sense of guilt.”

That evening in Chamonix, James treated his son and the man who saved his life to dinner. Cris recalls how James refused to even look at the mountain still towering over them.

“It’s like the Eiffel Tower if you’re in Paris, as they say, you can kind of see it from everywhere,” Cris says. “But James was sitting with his back to Mont Blanc … refusing to turn around and look at it. I imagine this was a very difficult experience for him, especially thinking about it now.

But he treated us to dinner. He then gave us 50 quid, me and his son, and was like: ‘Go and get drunk, boys, you deserve it.’”

Cris and Matt blew off steam, still in shock at the day’s events. The next day they exchanged email addresses.

“You saved my life,” said James to Cris, shaking his hand before they said goodbye.

James swore he’d never climb a mountain again. His son seemed similarly shaken. But Cris was already planning a return trip to Mont Blanc.

“Even though I didn’t summit Mont Blanc … it changed me in a positive way,” he reflects today. “This solidified to me that: ‘This is the thing that you’re going to be doing for a very long time.’”

And two years later, he was back. This time, he was far more prepared — he’d bought sunscreen, he’d bought electrolytes, he’d trained beforehand and he had two climbing friends with him.

“I just kind of had a sense of how serious it is and how long it is, and how mentally resilient you have to be to actually get to the top and get yourself safely back down,” he says.

Finally reaching the summit was an incredible experience for Cris. He’s since climbed many more mountains including with Viv — who is now his wife and a climbing convert.

“After I did two or three by myself, and she kept being home and being very anxious, and in her words, just like drinking and smoking the whole time, she started to say to me, ‘Why don’t we climb together?’” recalls Cris. “So she’s now my mountaineering partner. We’ve climbed everywhere around the world.”

From Mont Blanc back to Montblanc

A year or so after Cris successfully climbed Mont Blanc, he was on vacation in Salerno, Italy, with Viv, enjoying a stroll through the streets after dinner.

“We’re a little bit drunk, and we were walking through the center, and I saw one of these Montblanc shops again,” recalls Cris.

He marched straight inside and approached the attendant.

“I was like, ‘Sir, this is gonna sound completely ridiculous what I’m about to say, but I went and I climbed Mont Blanc, which is your Monte bianco, and I had a very difficult day, and I managed to make the top. And my question really to you is, ‘Can I get a discount for one of your watches?’”

The store attendant paused. He looked Cris up and down. His facial expression read as completely unimpressed.

“He literally, in the most anticlimactic, dry way, goes, like, ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t speak English.’ And that was literally it,” recalls Cris, laughing.

While Cris never got a discounted watch or pen, he says mountaineering gave him the purpose in life he was searching for as a disenchanted twentysomething. He still climbs without guides, but he’s now extremely experienced.

And while his confidence has grown, he never takes unnecessary risks. He regularly thinks back on the moment with James on Mont Blanc.

“It made me understand the reality better, and it made me understand the risks better,” he reflects.

Cris has stayed in touch with James and Matt via email over the past decade. The pair continue to credit Cris with saving James’ life. Cris also attributes his decision to turn around in the bad weather to their advice.

James, who regularly summited mountains in his youth, never returned to mountaineering after Mont Blanc.

“That was the last trip I ever made,” he says. “My son has never been to the high Alps again either, so only Cris has continued with it.”

Generally speaking, James tries not to dwell on his near-death experience.

“I think when you’ve been through something like that, your brain tends to push it into the past and you want to forget it,” he says.

But whenever he does reflect on the day — such as when he emails with Cris, or sees updates on his mountaineering adventures — James says he’s awash with overwhelming gratitude for the intervention of a stranger. His family and friends all know the role Cris played on the mountain that day.

“We’ll just be indebted to Cris for the rest of my life for intervening like that,” James says. “There’s no way I can adequately thank him.”

‘Every day counts’

James also feels gratitude for what he perceives as a second chance at life.

“Every day counts, I think, after that,” he says. “It’s almost as if all the years since that event have been an ethereal dream, that it should have all ended there on that ridge. But it hasn’t. So it was almost as if life could begin again … I appreciate every day that’s gone past. Even if it’s a bad day. You have to get it into perspective.”

Today, Cris is focusing on a new mountaineering project — climbing the world’s biggest mountains from sea level to the summit and back to sea level.

He’s also excited about reuniting with James and his son. The three are planning to meet up in the near future, for what James calls a “survivors reunion,” marking 10 years on.

“I suppose it’s a bit like, perhaps, old soldiers who’ve been in the trenches together and they thought they were going to die, and somehow survived, meeting up after years, after the war,” he says.

James has enjoyed following Cris’ mountaineering exploits over the years and is eager to hear about his latest adventures.

“He certainly deserves it, he’s an absolutely great guy,” he says. “A great guy.”

Cris is equally excited to see James and Matt again and he plans to bring along his wife, too.

“We don’t have a plan, but I’m looking forward to the day, because I want to meet them together with Viv,” says Cris.

For Cris, encountering James and Matt on Mont Blanc is a moment he’ll never forget.

“When I reflect on everything that happened, in a way, I feel that they saved my life,” he says.

By Francesca Street, CNN