Shattered Air: A True Account of Catastrophe and Courage on Yosemite's Half Dome
Page 13
In the case of Brady, rangers continued administering oxygen and CPR to the man where he lay, despite the still-raging storm. At one point, his pupils constricted back to normal, his lips and ears became pink, and his tongue relaxed. But soon, his pupils began dilating again and his skin returned to a bluish tint. He had “doll’s eyes”—completely blank. Further efforts to revive him were futile. More than an hour after the lightning first struck, the rangers concluded that he was gone. They asked the family to go to the nearby visitor center so the two young boys would be spared the sight of their father, then hoisted him down to the parking lot. An ambulance took him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Schieler also was taken to a hospital. Doctors there determined he had a severe skull fracture, probable brain damage, and injuries to his arteries and organs. He remained in critical condition for several days and was hospitalized for three weeks. According to his physician, Schieler’s exceptionally strong heart kept him alive. But he sustained a total loss of hearing in one ear and a 90 percent loss in the other. A hernia protruded into his bowel; the resulting blockage caused severe hemorrhoids that eventually had to be surgically removed. Ever since the episode, he has suffered bouts of acute depression and fits of imbalance that have prevented enjoyment of most physical activities. Kidney and prostate problems also developed years later. He was unable to work again, and his family endured financial hardship.
Mr. Schieler and Mrs. Brady each filed suit against the National Park Service. They argued that a sign should have been posted warning hikers about the danger of hiking on Moro Rock in thunderstorms. The courts did not uphold this lawsuit.*
UP TO 1985, only three lightning deaths had definitely occurred in Yosemite, with a fourth possibility. The first happened in May 1921, when lightning struck a worker at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and the second in July 1936, when a middle-age man was killed at the Tuolumne Meadows garbage dump.
The third took place on August 27, 1972. Randall Boone and Edward Williams were on the first leg of a two-week camping adventure when they departed Yosemite Valley at midmorning en route to Half Dome. These best of friends, both in their late teens, had graduated the previous year from Serramonte High School in Daly City, just south of San Francisco.
Only one downy-white cumulus cloud drifted in the west as they ascended the trail past Vernal and Nevada falls. The sky directly above was still blue when Boone and Williams started up Sub Dome. But by that time, the single cloud—behind Half Dome, out of view—had joined other cumulus clouds to form a giant thunderhead that eclipsed lower Yosemite Valley and was moving rapidly.
Atop Half Dome, they encountered a gray, leaden cloud mass, its furls folding over one another like ocean waves. As Boone and Williams savored the sweeping vistas at 3:30 p.m., the dense cloud suddenly unleashed a torrent. The pair weren’t prepared for rain, so they frantically sought cover in and around the rock forms sprinkled about the smooth granite surface. Near the edge, they peered down into a crevice and spotted refuge—a chamber tucked within a jumble of rocks. A solid stone ceiling kept it dry.
Nearby, a hollow, two-foot-high iron pipe jutted up. Someone had drilled a hole in the granite and planted the pipe there for an unknown reason.
Boone and Williams slid into the shelter. It was the driest place on Half Dome, aside from a tent. Within minutes, two other damp hikers squeezed in. The four men huddled together while the storm played out its drama. Through openings in the rock, they saw lightning slice occasionally through the thick, wet air.
Boone reached for his camera in the hope of snagging a photo. That’s the last thing he remembers. Lightning hammered the Dome and shot through the cave, slamming his head against the stone wall and knocking him out.
When he regained consciousness, Boone saw Williams slumped over, not breathing. The other two occupants, who also had been knocked unconscious briefly, were alert by then, too. No one knew CPR. Boone frantically attempted to breathe air into his best friend’s mouth, and when that didn’t revive Williams, the three men hastily carried him a couple of hundred yards over to where other campers were. One tried unsuccessfully to find a pulse. Boone again tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but finally gave up. Williams was dead.
Park officials attributed Williams’s death to the iron pipe. Lightning had struck the pipe, they theorized, zoomed into the chamber via wet granite, entered the back of Williams’s head where it rested against the rock, and exited from his foot. Rangers ultimately sawed off the iron pipe, leaving a protrusion less than two inches long.
Yosemite’s records on a fourth fatality possibly due to lightning are not definitive. The case is instructive nonetheless. In June, Timothy Clark, 22 years old, had been hiking in Yosemite’s high country when he got caught in a lightning storm. Desperate, he abandoned all of his gear, descended the mountain and hiked five miles back to Merced Lake High Sierra Camp, where he told persons he got struck by lightning. Observers noted during the next couple of days that he behaved strangely and was somewhat disoriented about his location. After another two days had passed, Clark set out on the four-mile hike back to Yosemite Valley. He left the trail at one point, walked onto a grassy ledge, and apparently fell to the switchback below. Hikers later stumbed upon his body and notified a trail crew working at Merced Lake. Authorities later confirmed that Clark had died as a result of the fall. But if he had indeed been struck by lightning as he claimed, then it may have been the true culprit by causing erratic behavior that led to the mishap.
ON SATURDAY, JULY 27, 1985, as the Rice, Hoog, and Cage parties, along with other hikers, tramped toward Half Dome, another tragedy was unfolding just to the south.
Kings Canyon National Park, which borders Sequoia National Park, is only forty miles from Yosemite as the crow flies. It took John Muir several weeks to travel there from Yosemite Valley with a pack mule named Brownie. His purpose was to locate groves of giant sequoia trees, an effort that eventually led to their protection from timber mills. Today the drive from Yosemite Valley to the lower reaches of Kings Canyon takes three or four hours.
James Wunrow, twenty-seven, who worked on a park survey crew in Kings Canyon, left early that Saturday morning for a day hike by himself. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going; nor did anyone see him leave, including the ranger who at 7 A.M. opened the Roads End Permit Station at Cedar Grove, located at the eastern end of the canyon. Wunrow must have started up Bubbs Creek Trail before the ranger arrived, aiming for the high country.
In 1984, while trimming trees for the Forest Service in Superior National Forest in Minnesota, Wunrow had touched a live power line and received a severe shock. Ever since, he had been prone to intense headaches. His co-workers and supervisors in Kings Canyon found Wunrow to be extremely introverted and often depressed, even disoriented at times. Wunrow wasn’t a skilled or knowledgeable outdoorsman. He took only day hikes, always alone, and stayed on maintained trails.
The weather pattern that week had been consistent—warm, clear mornings followed by a buildup of midafternoon storm clouds, then an hour or two of heavy rain and some lightning. On that particular Saturday, however, thunderheads began building earlier, around midday. By one o’clock, a severe thunderstorm had moved east from Kern Canyon into the Bubbs Creek drainage. At one thirty, Wunrow was hiking back when, about four miles from the Cedar Grove trailhead, a violent thunderstorm swept in, producing high winds, drenching rains, fierce hail, and frequent lightning bursts. He was on a moderately forested hillside at sixty-three hundred feet in elevation, about three hundred feet below the ridgeline and up from the gully where Bubbs Creek flows. Wearing only a T-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap, Wunrow donned a long-sleeved wool shirt that he had wisely brought along. He hurriedly searched for shelter and spotted a rock formation just off the trail. On the side of the formation away from the trail was an opening formed by two boulders and covered by a large stone slab—a small, cave-like structure about five feet wide, four feet deep, and two and a half feet high.
He crawled in and lay down to escape the downpour.
Around ten the next morning, a woman backpacking up the trail saw Wunrow’s boots and part of his day pack sticking out from the rock shelter. Only someone ascending the trail could have seen them. But she assumed that the person inside was napping, so she continued on. The same thing happened an hour later when another backpacker came up the trail. He didn’t stop, either.
Backpackers Steven King and Marvin Talbert set out on the Bubbs Creek Trail later that afternoon. Three miles up, they met a ranger coming down who, citing a bear nuisance, advised the two men to stow their food properly. It was around five o’clock when they approached the rock structure and saw Wunrow’s boots. At first, like the two earlier hikers, King and Talbert assumed someone was resting inside. But on second glance, the feet seemed to be at an odd angle, so they decided to investigate.
Wunrow lay on his left side in a semi-fetal position, steel-rim eyeglasses askew on his face, his right arm at his side, and his left arm resting on the ground.
Hey, buddy. You okay?
No response.
They noticed that Wunrow’s fingernails were purple, a condition that King, a police officer, recognized as being caused by a lack of blood circulation. He looked closer and concluded that Wunrow was dead. King’s training had taught him that any death could be a homicide, so he didn’t touch the body. On the left side of Wunrow’s head was a wound—it looked liked a bite of some sort—and there was a small rip in the back of his shirt. These signs and the ranger’s earlier warning triggered a question in King’s mind: Had a bear killed this man?
King and Talbert marked the spot with handkerchiefs and returned immediately to Cedar Grove, where they called the ranger dispatch office. The park dispatcher, in turn, contacted rangers Debbie Bird and Richard Fishbaugh, who packed overnight gear and headed up the trail. They arrived at the fatality scene around 10 P.M.
Illuminating the body with their flashlights, Bird and Fishbaugh didn’t see any evidence of an animal attack. In any case, fatal attacks by black bears were very rare. The rangers considered hypothermia, although Wunrow’s wool shirt should have provided adequate warmth. Then they detected a singed hair on the victim’s scalp, which raised the specter of lightning. But the evidence wasn’t conclusive. They could only speculate that Wunrow had died of hypothermia or from a natural cause such as heart attack, or had been struck by lightning. They radioed in their report and pitched camp.
The next morning, a helicopter brought Fresno County coroner Robert Hensel to the scene. He examined the body and noted a small puncture with dried blood in the victim’s scalp, behind his right ear. Hensel thought it might be a gunshot wound, but then quickly determined it was superficial and probably caused by an ear loop on Wunrow’s wire-frame glasses. However, on the left side of the head were numerous burned and singed hairs, and almost imperceptible wounds that looked like tiny hemorrhages. Body hairs on the right wrist, lower back, and just above both knees also were singed. Midway down and in the center of the back was scarred tissue, as if someone had bored small holes in the skin and created little craters with black, cauterized edges. Hensel concluded that lightning caused the wounds—that the electrical charge had entered Wunrow’s head, traveled through his body, and sparked a fatal cardiac arrest.
Exactly how Wunrow had been struck wasn’t at all clear. There weren’t any signs of a lightning strike in the vicinity, nor any high trees or jutting rock formations nearby to attract a bolt. But surely lightning had hit somewhere, perhaps on the ridge, and streaked across the moist ground into the rock enclosure where Wunrow lay. The damp conditions, including his wet clothes and skin, obviously placed him at greater risk. His death, a chance occurrence, illustrates the fickle nature of lightning.
The savage storm that had erupted in Kings Canyon and claimed Wunrow’s life was part of a larger, intense weather system rumbling north toward Yosemite.
BILL PIPPEY AND BRUCE JORDAN were setting a furious pace, hoping to outrace the burgeoning storm. Close behind, Tom Rice and Adrian Esteban made a quick stop at their secret spring. Brian Jordan soon joined them. Meanwhile, Mike Hoog’s party leapfrogged ahead. The hikers weren’t unfriendly with each other, but neither did they mingle or banter back and forth in good spirits, as hikers often do. Those with Hoog still viewed Rice’s band as rowdy and crude. Back at Nevada Fall, someone—maybe Pippey—had jokingly referred to Hoog’s party as a “bunch of weenies.”
Leaving Nevada Fall, Weiner felt encouraged that the remaining distance wouldn’t be as steep. Still, he and Frith plodded. The pair fell behind again, in part because they stopped every ten to fifteen minutes to trade off carrying the forty-five-pound backpack but also because Weiner was fast becoming exhausted, especially his leg muscles, which were cramping up due to dehydration. They gulped down the last of their water. Esteban had told them about the secret spring, but Weiner and Frith couldn’t locate it. Other hikers they asked didn’t know its whereabouts, either. Though Weiner wanted to take a longer rest, Frith, gung-ho as ever, urged that they push on and catch up with the others.
Pippey and Bruce Jordan were shooting to reach the top first. For Pippey, it was more than a competitive thing; he was proud to be in good physical shape. So, despite the intimidating weather, the two hikers plowed ahead, never stopping. They ignored the danger warning at the base of Sub Dome and never once pondered the potential hazards as they scrambled up the cables on Half Dome.
But a hundred feet up, Pippey’s stomach suddenly became bloated.
Pippey: “One minute, I’m fine. The next, I can barely keep my bowels from exploding.”
In a voice loud enough for Jordan to hear, he uttered, Yes, God, I understand.
Clearly, Pippey thought, a very powerful force was trying to discourage him from going up there. He and Jordan retreated down the cables so Pippey could relieve himself.
ESTEBAN AND RICE, with Brian Jordan not far behind, were putting on steam to reach the summit ahead of the storm. Two wild-eyed young climbers—Ken Bokelund and Rob Foster—scampering down the trail advised Esteban and Rice, Don’t go up there—it’s too dangerous, then continued on down toward the Valley, obviously in a rush to get off the mountain.
The warning sparked rather than doused Esteban’s and Rice’s motivation to pick up the pace.
Esteban: “If there was one trait that set Rice apart from everyone else, it was his strong will. When he committed himself to something, it was all or nothing.”
Esteban, of course, was Rice’s alter ego—just as tough mentally, just as unswerving in grit and determination. Neither was likely to cower when he faced a physical challenge or risky situation on his own. Together, such a response was unthinkable.
Buchner and Ellner still poked along somewhere far behind. A fearful Ellner wanted no part of a lightning storm. His snail’s pace and constant complaining angered Buchner, who didn’t like being held back. When the two were about halfway between Nevada Fall and Sub Dome, lightning flashed ahead and thunder growled. A shaken Ellner slowed even more. The next lightning burst prompted him to turn around abruptly and pound back down the trail.
Buchner dropped his pack and ran after him, arguing, It’s crazy to go back down now!
He persuaded Ellner to hike toward Half Dome. If necessary, Buchner said, they would camp at the base.
HOOG’S GROUP METHODICALLY clawed away at the miles between them and Half Dome. In addition to all of his camping gear and supplies, Hoog hauled a three-gallon water container weighing more than twenty-five pounds. The five hikers arrived at the camping area beneath Sub Dome soon after the retreating Pippey and Jordan. Although dark clouds were moving in, the blue sky directly above still glistened.
Without hesitation, Hoog led his group up Sub Dome but didn’t get far before he encountered a gentleman descending the granite stairs. The older hiker, who was fiftyish and carried a staff, said a storm was about to hit and strongly advised Hoog and his companions not to continue up.
Hoog badly wanted to spend the night on Half Dome. Initially, he dismissed the man’s cautionary words and was about to press on. On second thought, however, the advice seemed wise. Hoog stared at the stairs for several long seconds, deliberating. Then he and his four cohorts turned around and retraced their steps. The gentleman had already disappeared from view.
The third party back was Cage’s, which held a steady pace. All members of his troupe were experienced backpackers, so they didn’t think much about the oncoming storm, a familiar phenomenon in the Sierra Nevada. They would continue hiking through the forest, and if the weather got nasty, the group would simply stop, wait, and decide what to do next.
Esteban and Rice charged up the trail. Just below Sub Dome, they encountered Hoog’s group in retreat. Dan Crozier repeated the gentleman hiker’s precaution.
Rice brushed by Crozier, muttering, Someone’s gotta do it.
He and Esteban pushed on.
FOOTNOTE
*The two helicopter pilots, Laurence Perry and Rick Harmon, were both honored with the Pilot of the Year Award for 2003 by Helicopter Association International.
*The disposition of this lawsuit will be covered in chapter 10, Aftermath.
* The disposition of this lawsuit will be covered in chapter 10, Aftermath.
6
FIRST STRIKE