WILDERNESS SURVIVAL FOR PEOPLE WITH THIN BLOOD

One of the other counselors pointed. “That’s the summit." We looked up. The peak was actively reaching into the wind, pulling shreds of clouds toward itself and spinning a misty garment. The wind was picking up speed and the clouds were rolling toward us.

“Can we make a quick dash for it?” asked Ryan. He wanted to reach the top.

The other two counselors looked at each other. Unlike me and Ryan, they had mountain knowledge. “I’d like to get these younger kids down safely. I’m going to head back.” The other man nodded.

Ryan looked at me. “Stay with me?” he asked. I nodded.

Ryan and I were left with four big athletic kids, three boys and one girl. At the last minute another skinny girl decided to stay with her boyfriend. Kind of like me, endangering her own life to be with a boy. The others left, heading down with the smaller teenagers.

The snow began softly, gaining speed as it swirled in the wind. We stopped. The wind became ferocious and tore at us, each snowflake a tiny airborne razor.

Ryan turned around. “Okay, we have to find the trail and go down,” he said.

“We have to stay together,” I shouted. That was all I knew to say in this situation.

One of the big teenagers, Eric, shouted at Ryan. “We may need to find a place to build a snow cave and wait out the storm.” The snow was attacking us from the side as the wind blew. Drifts were accumulating. We could barely see.

“What do you recommend?” I asked Eric, my question coronating him as our new leader.

He pointed to an area with a vertical rock that we’d seen on the way up. “Let’s go find a place that’s protected from the wind. We’ll mound up the snow, then hollow it out.”

I was the only one with good gloves. Ryan, Eric, and I mounded the snow against the slope of the rock while the others huddled to stay warm. My mother had slipped a ski mask into my pack and we were able to use it as a makeshift trowel as we dug out the hollow for our cave.

Ryan raged against the weather. “Where did this come from? The forecast said clear skies, no precipitation.”

“Mountains,” Eric said, “make their own weather.” I didn’t ask this out loud, but did he say that mountains are gods?

The storm fought us for every inch of shelter. It was almost dark when everyone was able to sit inside out of the wind. Within minutes we went from whiteout to blind night.

Everyone tried to sit on my yoga mat except me because I was in a winter jacket with a waterproof cover that went below my hips. I got out my emergency blankets and unfolded them, one to cover four of us, the other for the remaining three. I passed out my snacks.

I found the flashlight in the bottom of the pack. Ryan took it from me, saying “I’ll keep that.”

It was easier to hear the others once we were in the cave. I said, “Hey everyone, I went to a mountain medicine class and the guy said ‘never stop improving your situation.’ Also, if a body part freezes, don’t thaw it until you’re rescued or rescue is imminent.”

Eric used the ski visor to scoop some snow, then passed it forward to me to throw out the cave entrance. He and I kept at it most of the night.

I thought about the Mountain Emergencies and Wilderness Medicine seminar my father, an ER doc in La Jolla, had taken me to before I left for this job. The instructor was another ER doc, but from Alaska. He had a lot of interesting slides of frozen parts of people’s bodies, as well as ‘after’ photos, once the same people had undergone amputations. The entire class was fascinated by the photos of cocaine-sniffers in Alaska who lost had their noses due to vascular constriction and the frigid outdoor temperature. I started laughing a little as I worked with Eric because I thought, good thing we don’t have any cocaine. Then I couldn’t stop laughing and Ryan wanted to know what was so funny, but he didn’t get it, no matter how many times I explained it. Stephanie, the skinny girl with her boyfriend, laughed with me after I’d explained the whole thing for the third time. I said, “also, blood alcohol level is negatively correlated to the length of time it takes to freeze to death outdoors.”

“I’d drink if we had a bottle,” said Ryan. Everyone agreed and I started laughing again.

The night went on forever. One of the other boys, not Eric, cried for a while.

I caught Ryan with a shoe off, his hands over his toes. “Your foot wasn’t frozen, was it?” I asked. A couple of the kids were trying to warm their feet also.

“No, just cold,” he said.

We must have slept a little, because we all rubbed our eyes and stretched at first light. The snowfall continued, still accumulating, but the wind had calmed to the point where it wouldn’t blow us off the mountain. Visibility was bad but we could see loads more than the day before.

Ryan got out the topographical map. We knew we were on the western slope, near the summit. It was a straight shot down to a ranger station below us, if we were where we thought we were. A blue line on the map worried me. “Maybe we can find the trail this morning,” I said.

“I don’t think we should go out in this,” Ryan said.

“I’m going down,” said Eric.

“Some of us should go down. We can send help,” I said. “I’m going down.”

“Me too,” said skinny Stephanie. She and I were leaving our boyfriends behind.

I took the flares out of my pack and handed them to Ryan. “There are just four of these and they last for 15 minutes, so save them until you see or hear rescuers in a plane or helicopter, then use them one at a time.”

“I know,” said Ryan.

Ryan and I kissed, then I said goodbye and good luck to those staying with him. One of them was crying again. I asked Ryan if we could take the map with us, but he said no.

***

I thought I knew mountains. That’s the thing that makes me laugh now. I was an outdoor education teacher and summer camp counselor for two years in a remote area of Southern California. I’d never been on hike above 7000 feet.

Ryan had persuaded me to take a summer job with him at a youth camp over a thousand miles to the north. I was dancing on clouds—nineteen years old and about to spend the summer with the man of my dreams.

My parents were unhappy but helpful when I announced my news. My mother took me to the REI store and bought every kind of mountain gear, including a winter jacket with a waterproof shell, thick gloves, winter hats, snow boots, heavy socks, waterproof rain pants, foil emergency blankets, flashlights, flares, a jumbo-sized day pack that would hold all my gear, and an overnight camping pack.

“Your blood is thinner, living here all your life. Northern people have thicker blood,” my mother said.

My dad invited me to the wilderness medicine seminar I mentioned previously, taught by the wilderness doctor from Alaska. The Alaskan doc was horrified to learn that my dad’s emergency room didn’t have a dedicated heart bypass machine, and he said, “Defibrillation won’t work in a hypothermic patient,” several times. Some of the docs laughed and said we didn’t need that in La Jolla.

“What’s the average temperature of the ocean here?” the wild doctor asked. The answer was 67 degrees. “And is that compatible with human life?”

Even now, I remember so much of that lecture. If a body part freezes, leave it frozen until you’re sure that rescue is imminent and it won’t refreeze. Repeated freezing damages tissue more than leaving it frozen. Survival depends on constantly improving your situation. Kind of like, don’t give up, right? Except more active.

I arrived at the camp in time for all the training, CPR certification, medication administration training, and conflict resolution. I learned the rules, like nobody goes up the mountain without a buddy.

Some of the other counselors watched me unpack my stuff, scoffing at how it was almost all brand-new heavy-duty winter gear. “I’m from La Jolla. We have thinner blood,” I said.

“Are you going to wear all that every day?” asked a strong-looking blonde woman with the tiniest smirk. Sometimes I wish that people would just gossip behind my back rather than give me snarky looks that they think preserve plausible deniability.

“Only when I hike on the mountain,” I said. “Defibrillation won’t work in a hypothermic patient.”

I see their eyes meet from the edge of my peripheral vision. One shrugs; another taps her temple in an oh-so-subtle coo-coo sign. I turn and smile.

The campers arrived on Sunday afternoon. Each counselor presided over a cabin with seven or eight campers from the age of thirteen on up. Someone with a great sense of humor had given me a cabin completely full of super-athletic high school girls.

I thought I’d be able to spend time with Ryan at night, but that’s when the campers misbehave. The first night Ryan and I met at midnight, I returned to find an empty bunk where a camper should have been. She returned after breakfast, strolling through camp in her pajamas. I didn’t even ask questions.

I could handle lifeguarding, canoeing, and paddleboarding, but there was also kayaking. Ryan and some of the other male counselors held kayak-rolling clinics at the lake day after day. I told them I was inadequately buoyant.

Four counselors, including me, planned to take ten campers on a day hike to the mountain summit and back. The mid-June weather was clear and there were no warnings of any kind on the weather report for the mountain. We knew there was still snow on the trail in the higher elevations, so everyone was advised to wear long pants and waterproof boots, and to bring jackets. I, of course, brought my winter jacket with waterproof cover, winter hat, waterproof gloves, flashlight, flares, and one of those yoga mat things people use for camping. All that went into my super-jumbo day pack along with my water bottles and snacks. I wore heavy socks, snow boots, and waterproof rain pants.

Ryan looked at me and sighed. “You don’t think that’s a little much?” he asked.

“I have thin blood,” I said.

We left in the cold of the morning. The ground was wet as we started on the trail. Walking through the dark forest and listening to the towering giants dripping dew from their needles, I knew I was just another forest animal, tolerated, but not welcomed by the forest and the mountain.

We planned a brisk hike up the shortest trail—not the easiest trail—to the summit. I was hot by mid-morning, but soon we were walking in muddy slush. The air was colder each step we took. The slush transitioned to hard-frozen old snow. We passed the timberline. That’s when the mountain spun up the storm that caught us.

***

Eric, Stephanie, and I walked down the slope the next morning. I turned to look back at the snow shelter after a few steps but couldn’t see it anymore.

Walking downhill should be a failsafe way of getting down a mountain, but of course there were obstacles. The snow was so deep in many places that we sank up to our hips. Eric and I took turns on point, plowing through the powder while the other two followed behind. There was a slope too steep to walk on, so we went sideways till we could find a way down. There was thick brush below the snow that scratched our ankles and legs.

Stephanie cried and said that her feet hurt, but I told her to keep walking. Eric carried her piggyback when he could, but most of the time the terrain was too treacherous for him to keep his balance and carry another human. The snow stopped, then it was foggy and cold. We continued walking through fresh snow.

The blue line I’d seen on the map proved to be a creek rushing madly between ten-foot banks. By this time the snow was only about six inches deep. We walked along the bank for about forty-five minutes, then saw a tree that had fallen from the bank on our side to a sandy area at the far edge of the creek. I looked at Eric and he nodded.

We had to go around a gigantic vertical snakes’ nest of roots to reach the straight trunk that bridged the water. Eric went first, skirting around the spreading peripheral roots. He held onto branch-like roots with his hands while inching forward on the lower roots. I hoped that Stephanie could manage a maneuver like that. “It’s your turn,” I said.

Eric stood on the other side of the wall of roots, reaching a hand toward her. “See that thick one right there? Hang onto that and step forward.”

She followed his instructions step by step until she lost her footing on a wet root. Still holding an upper root with her hands, she dangled over the edge of the bank. “I can’t,” she said, and started sniveling.

Eric was the hero, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder and give her instructions on how to regain her footing. I looked down at where she might land on the rocks beside the water. A ten-foot fall isn’t necessarily that big a deal, at least in terms of dying-not dying. Maybe a broken ankle. The problem would be that she’d still be on the wrong side of the creek. I imagined throwing my winter jacket down to her and dashing even faster to get help. By the time I pictured the entire scenario, Eric had helped her straddle the log.

I moved forward quickly with my toasty-warm feet in my waterproof winter boots. We straddled and scooted backwards on the log. The water below shouted murder to us if we fell.

Eric scrambled up the bank like a goat. I gave Stephanie a hand up, then she stood on my shoulders and reached out for Eric. I fell a couple of times as I climbed, even with Eric’s advice about hand and footholds.

“What now?” asked Stephanie.

“Keep the mountain behind us,” I said. We looked up to see the summit still shrouded in clouds. Ryan and three campers were still in the middle of a nightmare. “We’re not out of the woods yet either,” I said.

Stephanie collapsed. “I can’t go any further,” she said. She took off her shoes and her feet were white as bread dough. Eric carried her on his shoulders. I put a winter glove on each of her feet. She cried as the blood returned to the frozen parts.

We came out of the woods at the ranger station. They told us the sheriff’s team was on the mountain, but they couldn’t use small aircraft in the storm.

The search and rescue team brought the last hikers down two days later. We stood in brilliant June sunshine watching the helicopter land. The men were all dead, the other girl barely alive.

I stayed through that summer, then stayed another twenty years. My family doesn’t understand, but it’s because I know my place in nature here. I’m just another animal under the forest canopy, walking through the woods on the side of a mountain. One day I’ll be gone, but the gods and giants will remain.