A British man and three other climbers who froze to death while trying to scale Mont Blanc spoke repeatedly to approaching mountain rescue teams during their final hours.

Mark Emerson, 30, and his ill-equipped companions made successive calls by mobile phone after being stranded by a blizzard at an altitude of 13,200ft (4,052m). With temperatures plunging to -15C and winds rising to 75mph, the French rescue team struggled towards the stricken group, who had endured a night exposed to the elements without a tent and with no spade to dig themselves a snow hole.

The rescue team, listening to increasingly agonised calls from the climbers, made it to a point some 3,900ft below them. But with the weather against them, they could get no closer. Italian rescue workers, dispatched separately, were forced to turn back.

“Their situation was desperate,” said one rescue worker. “We practically listened to their final hours as they happened.”

Mr Emerson, who was born in Scarborough and whose family live in Moulton, North Yorkshire, died alongside his girlfriend, Jane Jerram, 26, from New Zealand. The two other victims were Clement Morgane, 25, from France, and a 27-year-old Chilean woman.

Two other climbers, a Belgian and a German, died of exposure in the Italian Alps in separate incidents.

After recovering the bodies of Mr Emerson and his companions, French police used the tragedy to stress that inexperienced climbers were taking excessive risks in the Alps.

“The group decided on this mythical climb without taking into account the weather forecasts. This is stubborn-ness and stupidity,” said Stéphane Bozon, the captain of the High Mountain Police in Chamonix, France. “They persisted despite the weather and focused only on climbing Mont Blanc. Their responsibility is total.”

Colonel Olivier Kim, regional police chief, said that the group was ill-equipped to deal with the sudden deterioration in the weather. “They didn’t have a tent or even a spade,” he told The Times. “And they didn’t have the right clothes for those conditions.”

Colonel Kim said that with Mont Blanc attracting growing numbers of amateur mountaineers, such failings were increasingly common. “People think it’s an ordinary outing, but climbing Mont Blanc is not. A lot of people go up in the summer without realising that the weather conditions can change brutally. Wisdom would sometimes counsel you to abandon the attempt, but people who have spent a lot of money to get here, taken a holiday and booked a hotel often want to do it anyway.”

Mr Emerson was described yesterday as a “brilliant” engineer who would not usually take risks. He had studied at Imperial College London before moving to L’Enshmg, a highly-respected college in Grenoble, France, as an Erasmus civil engineering student seven years ago.

He completed his PhD two years ago and was working in a laboratory at the college. He had recently secured a job as a lecturer at University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His post was to have started in December and he and Ms Jerram planned to set up home together.

Pierre Foray, who taught Mr Emerson and Ms Jerram, said: “It is such a waste of two young lives. They had wonderful careers and happiness ahead of them. They were both brilliant students. Very, very intelligent and such lovely people. They were very gifted and enthusiastic and brought a great ambiance to the class. They both spoke fluent French and Mark gave engineering lectures in French. I have Jane’s manuscript of her thesis sitting on my desk in front of me. I am completely devastated.”

The others victims were also students at L’Enshmg. The Chilean woman lived in Grenoble with her husband and Ms Morgane had just got a job as a schoolteacher. The four travelled to Chamonix last week and spent three nights at a mountain refuge at 11,800ft to acclimatise to the altitude.

They left the hut at 3am on Monday. The weather was already closing in and the group managed to proceed only 2,000ft in seven hours. Forecasters had warned of Monday’s bad weather on Saturday.

At 3pm they contacted emergency services, but were unable to give their location. Police helicopters were unable to take off and rescue workers were unable to go further than 10,300ft. The last contact with the group was at 4am on Tuesday. The French woman spoke to rescuers but was delirious after a night exposed to the elements. One of the party was already dead.

Rescuers reached the group at 3.20pm on Tuesday, but it was too late. Mr Bozon said: “We became powerless witnesses to the deaths of these four people despite deploying our rescuers. We did the maximum we could in these atrocious conditions."

The body of the French woman was brought down by helicopter on Tuesday afternoon. The other three bodies were recovered that evening.

High risk

— 30,000 climbers reach the summit of Mont Blanc every year, an estimated 200 per day at busiest times

— The mountain has become so popular that this year French authorities plan to install toilets at the top

— The most popular routes require little or no technical climbing ability, but because of the dangers due to weather, avalanche and glacier movements, police advise inexperienced climbers to use a guide. A guide for a week costs about £1,000 per person

— About a dozen people die climbing Mont Blanc annually, with mountain rescue called out 120 times last year

— The Office de Haute Montagne in Chamonix has a free advice service. Here, climbers receive weather forecasts and advice on avalanche risk and route difficulty

— The office advises: “Badly used equipment, ignoring weather forecast warnings and not knowing the area can have dramatic consequences”

Source: Office de Haute Montagne, agencies

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