by Bob Madgic
Ironically, Esteban and Rice became relatives. Esteban’s female cousin lived in Hawaii, and on a backpacking trip Rice and Esteban took there in 1986, Rice’s nephew joined them. He met and fell in love with Esteban’s cousin. The two later married. While surfing and hiking there, Rice wore long socks. Whenever anyone asked about his scars, he jokingly referred to them as an old football injury. Throughout the trip, neither Rice nor Esteban mentioned the Half Dome episode. There was an underlying friction between them that sparked little arguments over trivial things. According to Esteban, the two men “never got anything out in the open.”
For months afterward, Pippey’s emotions were erratic, intense, and often self-destructive. The lightning strike obliterated his tight circle of friends. The estrangement between Rice and Esteban, and Bob Friths death, left him without a hiking clique. His backpacking treks dwindled, causing his physical condition and spirit to deteriorate. He began drinking heavily again and abusing drugs. He clung to his marriage and job by a thread.
Also dashed were Pippey’s onetime hopes that nature would be a therapeutic force in the lives of the Jordan twins. Bruce Jordan seemed unable to cope with the death of his brother and withdrew into a shell.
Pippey: “It’s as though he descended into a darkness, where morbidity and a Gothic-like fascination with death and the occult reigned.” (Bruce Jordan chose not to contribute to this book.)
“For me, nothing good came out of the tragedy. It was all just sad and terrible.”
Pippey held considerable admiration for Rice’s drive to enroll in college and pursue a degree. When Pippey visited him at Chico State, Rice was in great physical shape—even better than before the lightning strike. However, Pippey also noticed that Rice hadn’t changed in some respects. For example, on a whitewater rafting trip together, they entered a dangerous rapid, out of control. Amid the mayhem, Rice and others tried to throw someone overboard in reckless horseplay. It was too much for Pippey, who demanded to be put ashore. On another backpacking trip, Rice hiked for a day and a half in the nude. Rice’s exhibitionism, it seemed to Pippey, was even more pronounced than before.
For Steve White, the days following Half Dome were filled with deep sadness.
White: “I would go to work, close the door to my office, and think of how tragic it was for the two who lost their lives, and for their families, especially the sixteen-year-old twin who died and his twin brother. I’ve gone back up to Half Dome many times since. It has a spiritual nature for me now because of what happened there. I’ve never been back into the cave and don’t want to go back in. Even though all of those trips have been with big groups who are thrilled to be there, I always take time to sit alone and remember. Sometimes I tell the story but tend not to because it has become more personal. I keep two pictures of Half Dome hanging in my office.
“I secured my EMT certification as a result of my involvement in the tragedy and my admiration for Linda Crozier and the other EMTs that night.”
A large framed picture of Half Dome being whipped by lightning hangs in paramedic Bill Bryant’s office along with the frontpage story that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner the day after the incident.
Mike Hoog proposed to his girlfriend, Louisa Munger, atop Half Dome. Their wedding cake featured a representation of it.
Hoog: “I wanted to bring her to the Dome because that was a part of me and my life. I have a lot of wonderful memories of Yosemite and Half Dome, and also some intense ones because of the lightning strike, and I wanted her to experience the things that I did so that she could understand. When we went to the Dome for our ‘dare the Dome in a day’ it was like filling her in on my experiences. I guess in a way the Dome is like a sacred place, a vortex for me. I knew that I would propose to her on the Dome.”
Because of her efforts that night, Linda Crozier frequently was asked to teach emergency medial technician classes in which she recounted her experience and outlined the steps that should be taken in such situations. She met and ultimately married another EMT instructor, Mark Ghilarducci, who led search and rescue operations.
ON JULY 28, 2001, Peterson High School in Santa Clara held a “Super Reunion” for all eleven classes that had graduated before the school closed in the 1980s as a result of district consolidation. Among Peterson’s graduates were Rice and Esteban.
Coincidentally, the Super Reunion coincided with the sixteenth anniversary of the Half Dome calamity, almost to the day. On a whim, Esteban contacted Rice before the event and asked if he planned to attend. Rice wasn’t sure, due to job commitments. But when the reunion rolled around, Rice was there.
Esteban: “He was the same old Tom, the best I had seen him since the accident. As usual, he was the center of attention, dressed to kill in some outrageous black leather pants and custom shirt with hair slicked back, looking like a model out of GQ.”
The Half Dome epic, which had widely circulated during the intervening years, bestowed celebrity status on Rice and Esteban. Reuniongoers were curious: Had they really been involved in such a tragedy? Esteban, always willing to play second fiddle, just sat back and listened as Rice rattled off his typically quick and superficial account:
We were up there hiking, went into this cave when it started raining, and it was just very unlucky that a lightning bolt hit us.
Rice said he recalled very little about the accident and rescue; he had been hospitalized for four months, he hated the whole time he was in there, and he was lucky to be alive. Rice also praised Esteban: If he hadn’t left the cave before the second bolt struck, and come back afterward, “we would all probably be dead.”
“Esteban,” he said, “saved my life and was the hero of the whole thing.”
It was the first time Esteban had heard Rice talk so expansively about the incident. It was also the first time he had cast Esteban as the hero. Later that night, the two had a heart-to-heart talk. Esteban really had saved his life, Rice explained, because if he hadn’t fled the granite enclosure, the second lightning bolt probably would have incapacitated him, too. Consequently, no one else would have known their whereabouts on the summit or that they were in dire need of help, without which Rice and Weiner surely wouldn’t have survived the night. Rice, aware of Esteban’s tremendous guilt about having abandoned his buddies in the chamber, said that in fact he was grateful to him.
Rice gave Esteban his blessing to tell their story in a book but said he wouldn’t participate. And whatever bad feelings there may have been between them, real or imagined, he was willing to consign to the past and move on.
Esteban: “I think neither one of us wanted to face the severity of what had occurred, and neither of us wanted to take responsibility for the death of two human beings. And finally, over time, we just let the hurt in us die to the point that everything now was just an afterthought and we could finally acknowledge that we were happy to have survived. We never really talked about who was to blame for this.”
DESPITE THE JORDANS� initial threat to sue over the death of their son Brian, they never did. However, legal action regarding two other lightning-related incidents—the one in 1975 on Moro Rock and the other in 1990 on Mount Whitney, both in Sequoia National Park—shed important light on culpability in such cases.
The 1975 event spawned two lawsuits: one by the wife of the deceased, Lawrence Brady, and a second by Edward Schieler, who incurred extensive, life-altering injuries. Both plaintiffs alleged that the National Park Service “failed to provide any warning, guidance, or supervision with respect to the danger of being struck by lightning atop Moro Rock, or of the fact that such a storm was impending, and further failed to provide and maintain reasonable or any safety devices to de-electrify the observation area.”
The court dismissed their claims. It held that:
… the National Park Service has broad discretionary power to regulate the parks in such a manner that the scenery and natural and wild life in the parks are preserved unimpaired so that they may be enjoyed presently and
in the future. Placing signs throughout every area that might be potentially struck by lightning, or subject to any other dangers, such as rock slides, certainly would impair the scenery and naturalness of the parks. And, before this lightning strike on Moro Rock, there had been no prior record of lightning striking it. No injuries from lightning ever happened there before.
The outcome of several lawsuits filed against the National Park Service after the July 1990 lightning strike on Mount Whitney was quite different. (In addition to the fatality, two people were injured, one seriously.) Plaintiffs won damages totaling $1.7 million. The judge was very disturbed by the five-year history preceding the accident, beginning with an event in 1985 in which several hikers who had sought shelter in the Smithsonian Hut on Mount Whitney’s summit were injured by lightning. In 1986, the safety manager for Sequoia and Kings Canyon prepared a plan for installation of lightning protection on the hut, and the park superintendent approved it. Implementing this plan, however, was a low priority for the next safety manager. Lightning struck the hut again in 1987, 1988, and 1989.
In early 1990, the National Park Service moved forward with its lightning protection plan but chose not to install warning signs until the protective equipment was in place. Thus, when lightning struck in July of that year, killing one and injuring two, the warning signs were stashed in a ranger station at the bottom of Mount Whitney.
The judge found that “the actions of the Park Service over the period 1985 to 1990 constituted a willful failure to guard or warn the public.”
Given the findings in these cases, the Jordan family would have had great difficulty winning a lawsuit. In Yosemite, warning signs were posted both at the bottom of Sub Dome and at the top of the cables on Half Dome. Furthermore, Esteban and his companions had stated that they were aware of the dangers and chose to ascend Half Dome regardless. Other hikers, too, were prepared to testify that the men who took refuge in the granite chamber behaved recklessly and irresponsibly.
MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE about lightning injuries has increased considerably since 1985. In 1992, Dr. Mary Ann Cooper and colleagues co-edited a text, Lightning Injuries: Electrical, Medical, and Legal Aspects, that had its roots in the late 1970s, when Dr. Cooper treated a lightning patient in the emergency room at a Cincinnati hospital. She discovered there was little information about such injuries in medical texts. Her text was an effort to pull together what medical professionals knew about lightning injuries up to that point. Today Dr. Cooper is the first to admit that much has changed since her text was published.
Based on her own extensive research, Dr. Cooper has concluded that substantial quantities of lightning probably do not enter the body. That’s because, contrary to common belief and the way people speak or write about lightning, it isn’t a simple, unidirectional force comparable to a bullet. Rather, lightning is a very complex wave-and-current phenomenon that behaves more like a wave washing over, around, and perhaps through some portions of a fairly large area. A lot of evidence suggests that much, if not most, of lightning energy doesn’t even enter the body. It creates a flashover effect instead. This is why Dr. Cooper dismisses as inaccurate the terms entry and exit—words applied in the field of electrical burn treatment—when describing the flow of lightning. More accurate terms, she says, are source and ground.
Experimental evidence suggests that a fast flashover appreciably diminishes energy dissipation within the body, thus producing the low percentage (10 percent) of lightning fatalities. Current may flow internally for an incredibly short time—thousandths of a second. When it does, it can cause the heart, respiratory centers in the brain, and the autonomic nervous system to short-circuit, and spark spasms in arteries and muscles. Such injuries can be severe and in some cases fatal.
From her studies, however, Dr. Cooper has found that lightning current seldom results in significant burns or tissue destruction. A heat source must be in contact with skin long enough to burn it. Lightning’s exposure time is so brief, it can’t cause substantial skin burns. Those that do occur are mostly secondary. They happen when sweat or dampness from rain vaporizes and the resulting steam causes red burns and blisters. Clothing, such as a jacket, or a backpack may trap the steam, which enables it to inflict more damage. The conversion of moisture to steam and the resulting vapor “explosion” can blow clothing and shoes off someone’s body. Metal, which holds lightning heat longer, can burn nearby tissue. But the direct burns from the lightning current are generally quite minor and superficial.
A LONG-OVERDUE BAN on overnight camping on Half Dome took effect in 1993. The unlikely impetus for this action was the rare Mount Lyell salamander, an endangered species. Quantities of human waste under the summit rocks and the many rock shelters built there by campers were threatening the salamander’s survival. Clearly, humans’ impact on the summit had become widespread and destructive. Only one of seven trees that populated the summit for many years remained; the others became firewood.
Tens of thousands of hikers tramp about Yosemite and thousands hike to Half Dome’s summit every season. So many were cramming into Little Yosemite Valley to camp overnight that the park began requiring reservations. The hordes on and around Half Dome can make the journey, as Brian Cage complained, “more like a trip to Disneyland than a solitary refreshing backcountry experience.” The constant foot traffic widens and churns trails into dust and degrades the land. For those same reasons, Mount Whitney limits the number of hikers, a possible restriction that looms for Half Dome, as well.
The cables that put Half Dome within reach of countless persons wouldn’t be installed if the decision arose today, given the current priority to keep national parks as natural as possible.
Twenty-five years have passed, as of this writing, since the adoption of Yosemite’s master plan, yet implementation has occurred at a glacial pace, principally due to the parks tradition of administrative gridlock, competing interest groups, and political seesawing. Nonetheless, in 2004 Yosemite finally embarked on a $440 million plan to limit or change human activity in the park consistent with the 1980 master plan. As Park Superintendent Michael Tollefson put it, “the goal is to have a smaller human footprint.” This ambitious undertaking may take two decades to complete. It involves demolishing a parking lot near Yosemite Falls; replacing another one with a grassy pedestrian promenade; rebuilding and rerouting trails near waterfalls; razing a dam on the Merced River; moving some employee housing outside the park; eliminating about 250 campsites, including those along the Merced River; limiting the number of day-visitor cars to 550 (additional visitors will have to ride buses into the park); and launching extensive remodeling projects.
Despite objections to the plan from some quarters, a broad coalition of organizations supports the overall plan as a sensible approach to preserving the natural wonders, historical values, and sublime beauty of this national treasure called Yosemite.
EPILOGUE
Think like a mountain.—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
In the annals of hiking tragedies caused by lightning, July 27, 1985, ranks as one of the most calamitous dates of all time. By all accounts, the storms in the Sierra Nevada on this day were exceptionally violent; when combined with human misjudgments, this proved a formula for disaster. All told, three people in two close-by national parks were killed. These occurrences in eerily similar circumstances were most startling, like the night in the 1960s when grizzlies killed two hikers in different locations in Glacier National Park.
Three other hikers on Half Dome were stricken in 1985, with two sustaining life-altering injuries. It could have been even worse, because other hikers and rock climbers also were in extremely high-risk circumstances in Yosemite on this day.
Twenty years later, those who were involved in the episode reflect on its meaning and aftermath.
LINDA CROZIER FOUND HERSELF primarily responsible for the emergency medical treatment of two individuals for over five hours. All of the other helpers that night looked to her for leadership.<
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“I’ve always marveled at the raw power of nature and am amazed when people make careless, at times reckless, decisions in the outdoors. Our natural world can at one moment be beautiful and serene, and in the next violent and terrifying. It gives warning signs—hints of what’s to come—but people sometimes ignore the signs or are simply unaware of what those signs are saying. What individuals don’t realize when they act irresponsibly and put themselves in a high-risk position in the outdoors is that they are also risking the lives of those who have to rescue them. I have the deepest respect for the men and women in the search and rescue community who put their own lives on the line to save others.
“On that July day in 1985, some of us rested and stared in awe at the sights, sounds, and sensations of the most intense electrical storm I have ever seen, while at the same time that very storm was taking the lives of two men and injuring three others. From this experience, I learned to love and respect nature even more, and expand my own knowledge about the outdoors. I joined a volunteer search and rescue team. I learned more about wilderness medicine and, in turn, passed along what I have learned to hundreds of others through classes and lectures. It is my hope that recounting this story will do the same.”
BILL PIPPEY WAS AS emotionally affected as anyone by the episode, both at the time and afterward.
“What was revealed to me was how everybody deals with tragedy differently. That night, several courageous persons stepped up and kept it from being an even worse catastrophe. Others turned away and seemed concerned only about themselves. Some used the tragedy to make something of their lives, to chart a new direction, to finally live their dream. One devoted himself to helping others. Another retreated into a shell and allowed his life to deteriorate. One creep who wasn’t even involved in the incident saw it as a chance to make money. One thing is true: No one was the same afterward and no one looked upon the other person in the same way as before. No one seemed interested in rekindling old ties.