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Wednesday, June 17, 2009
'I'm sorry about this. I miss you'
By Polly Summar
Journal Northern Bureau
SANTA FE — Their trip started easily enough. Megumi Yamamoto and Paul Harrington took the Rail Runner to Santa Fe on June 8, walked to Hyde Park Road and hitched a ride up the mountain with some hikers in a pickup truck.
It was an uneventful start to what Harrington described as a planned three-day, two-night stay in the mountains above Santa Fe, undertaken partly in preparation for a planned vacation to the Peruvian Andes.
"We'd been on day hikes before" but mostly in the Sandias, he said.
"We were in good spirits and good shape," said Harrington, rejecting speculation he's heard that perhaps he and his girlfriend of four months had a fight or that Yamamoto became disoriented while hiking because of altitude sickness, dehydration or exhaustion.
Whatever the reason, the outing went terribly wrong on the second day. Harrington and Yamamoto became separated and she got lost. She died June 9 when a rescue helicopter crashed while attempting to remove her from Santa Fe Baldy in bad weather.
The pilot, State Police Sgt. Andrew Tingwall, also died and another officer was seriously injured.
Yamamoto would have been 27 today.
Harrington, in a telephone interview Tuesday, spoke about his relationship with Yamamoto and gave a detailed account of how a three-day camp out turned into a catastrophe.
Separated
Harrington, 25, described himself as an experienced outdoorsman and said Yamamoto had hiked in the Japanese Alps.
After spending the night at camp near Lake Katherine close to Santa Fe Baldy's peak, their Tuesday hike was to be a loop on the Skyline Trail, after which they would return to camp. At some point they got separated by about 100 yards, the length of a football field.
"It's basically because I just walk faster than her," Harrington said. "Essentially, the way we'd been doing the whole trip was that I'd be out in front of her, not far, and then I would stop, and then she'd catch up."
He said that after the last time he saw her on the trail, he turned his back to the wind and it put him in a direction facing away from her.
"I sat down and started eating something, and she just never got there," he said.
"My best guess is that she saw a bear. I know she was really nervous about animals. She's not a wilderness person. ... She saw a bighorn the day before, and that really scared her."
He said maybe Yamamoto "got off trail and got scared and couldn't find her way back."
Harrington began walking downhill following what he thought to be her tracks.
"And then I lost them but kept going straight downhill," he said. "And at that point, you get to a saddle near Puerto Nambe, between Santa Fe Baldy and Penitente Peak. From there, I could either go to the left or to the right to look. ... I went to the right and it turned out she went to the left. If you go to the left, you wind up going to Spirit Lake, but to the right, you go to the ski basin or you follow the Rio Nambe straight downhill."
Hikers' help
Harrington said he left clothes, food and water at the saddle where the two became separated, thinking Yamamoto would make her way back there.
They both had cell phones but Harrington's "was nearly dead," he said. "I figured at some point she would get her bearings, either make it to camp or get out to the road."
"What I was really worried about was that she fell off the cliff," he said. "I spent most of my time scrambling up and down this space I thought she might have fallen off of."
After convincing himself she hadn't fallen, he looked for her tracks again, blowing on a whistle he kept on his pack. "It was getting to be fruitless because the wind was high and the sound didn't carry very far," he said.
Harrington met up with three other hikers. "We thought, 'Either she's hiking to the ski basin or she's back at camp,' " he said. The hikers went to see if she was along the trail to the ski basin, and Harrington went back to camp. When she wasn't there, he continued to search.
Harrington gave the three hikers contact information, and they called his father in Florida. "I think they called 911 as well," he said. Harrington said he thought his cell phone was dead so he couldn't retrieve Yamamoto's phone number to give to the hikers.
Falling asleep
A half-hour before sunset, Harrington hiked to the top of a peak to try to get cell-phone reception. "I saw the storm rolling in from the north and then it was like, 'Oh, shit.' "
At this point, he realized his phone had enough of a battery charge to try to make a call, but he couldn't get reception. He tried to make a call at two other spots, but by the third time the battery was dead, he said.
About that time, he saw helicopters. Harrington said he didn't want to think they were there looking for Yamamoto, "but I kind of knew they were probably looking for her."
He said he didn't have enough clothes on for cold weather. He was wearing a T-shirt, a windbreaker and thin pants and said the temperature was dropping .
Yamamoto had been wearing an orange jacket, her winter coat, because she got cold easily, Harrington said.
"I kept watching Santa Fe Baldy and when that storm started rolling up ... I knew I still had a few miles to get back to camp," said Harrington, "and I got my ass back to camp and made a big fire."
He said he built a wind block and used his camp stove to get a fire going, thinking that if Yamamoto made it close to Lake Katherine, she would see the fire. He heard a helicopter over his camp, but "it was completely dark and snowing," so he didn't know if the helicopter saw him or the fire.
"I prepared a bunch of boiling water and put it in water bottles and put (some of) them in my sleeping bag, and put (some of) it in my freeze-dried meal," he said.
Harrington was planning to get warm and then go back out to look for Yamamoto. "I was cold and exhausted," he said. "My hands and my feet were numb." He put a liter bottle of hot water on his stomach, another between his feet and was holding the third between his hands.
"I planned on laying there, getting a little rest, warming myself and hiking to Spirit Lake," Harrington said. "I just inadvertently fell asleep. I didn't mean to, but I was just so exhausted."
'I still had hope'
The next morning when he awoke, the tent was weighted down with the some 8 to 10 inches of snow that had fallen overnight. "I woke up kind of disoriented and confused," he said. "It took me a while to figure out where I was."
Eventually he strapped Yamamoto's backpack onto his and began to hike out.
That's when he ran into State Police officers on horseback. They first told him Yamamoto had been picked up by helicopter, "and I made an amazing sigh of relief," Harrington recalled. "And then they said the helicopter crashed, and I was just staring at them with my mouth open."
By the time he made it to a rescue base camp, shortly after noon, he was told Yamamoto was presumed dead.
"The whole time I still had hope," he said. "Despite all evidence you believe what you want to believe."
Harrington now is headed to Japan for Yamamoto's funeral.
"Her mom said she doesn't blame me, that she was worried about me, that she didn't want me to allow this to ruin my life," he said, "because that's not what Megumi would want."
Final message
Harrington and Yamamoto met in the physics department at the University of New Mexico, where both were in the physics doctorate program. She had arrived in Albuquerque from Japan in January. He moved to New Mexico three years ago.
Describing their relationship as serious, Harrington said, "We spent all our time together." The two had not yet talked about marriage, however. Harrington said he was divorced a year and a half ago, "so I was trying to be really careful to take things slow."
After waiting for a ride to Albuquerque, Harrington finally arrived home about 1 a.m. Thursday. When he checked his phone, there was a voicemail from Yamamoto saying she was "completely lost."
There was also a text message from her: "I called 911. Meet with rescuers at Lake Katherine. I'm sorry about this. I miss you."
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