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Thursday, June 18, 2009
Hiking 101: No One Gets Left Behind
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
Paul Harrington hiked 100 yards in front of his girlfriend, physics Ph.D. candidate Megumi Yamamoto, on a trail in the Pecos Wilderness last Tuesday.
On Sunday afternoon in another part of the Pecos, I looked at the clouds gathering over the mountains and said, "That storm's heading toward Truchas, we'll be fine."
By now, we all know the consequences of the decisions Harrington made.
Yamamoto didn't catch up to Harrington and she turned onto the wrong trail and got lost. A State Police helicopter flew in to rescue her, lifted off at the base of 12,622-foot Santa Fe Baldy in a quickly approaching storm after dark and crashed. Yamamoto and pilot Sgt. Andy Tingwall were killed. Officer Wesley Cox survived with serious injuries.
The consequences of my decision — to keep hiking toward the Santa Barbara Divide under storm clouds instead of turning back on Sunday — weren't deadly, just ridiculous: lying low under a dense stand of trees, watching lightning hit the high peaks and feeling wet and cold and stupid.
Choices, judgments, outcomes.
I don't know anyone who spends any time hiking in New Mexico's back country who hasn't been talking about the Yamamoto rescue and the circumstances that put the whole tragic operation into motion.
How did they get separated? Why wasn't she better prepared? Why wasn't the rescue confined to the ground? Why didn't Tingwall wait out the storm?
And the most plaintive question of all: Why do rescue personnel have to keep risking their lives to bail out careless hikers?
Harrington, also a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, has been blistered in conversations I've heard and on message boards where the incident has been picked apart.
Harrington has gamely faced the news media and tried to explain how he thought it was safe to walk with more than a football field separating him (6 feet, 2 inches and 200 pounds) and his girlfriend (5 feet, 2 inches and 100 pounds) in the forest ("It's basically because I just walk faster than her") and about how the late spring trip came unwound once he realized she was missing.
They were taking a day hike along the Skyline Trail from their base camp, he told Journal Santa Fe's Polly Summar. He says he saw Yamamoto on the trail some ways behind him and stopped to have a snack, turning his back to the trail.
"I sat down and started eating something, and she just never got there," he said. He said he guessed that Yamamoto had seen "a bear or a mountain lion and got off trail and got scared and couldn't find her way back."
He went off trail to look for her, didn't know her cell phone number and didn't have his cell phone charged so he couldn't call her or get the message when she called him. He waited until he was sure she was lost before he started blowing on the whistle he had in his pack. And at sunset he went back to their tent, ate dinner and slept until the next morning.
I'm certain no one feels worse about what happened than he does, but look at the previous four paragraphs and try to count the mistakes.
Next came the rescue phase of the tragedy. Department of Public Safety's Peter Olson tells me two ground crews did go in to try to find Yamamoto that Tuesday evening. But she was alone with only a light jacket and no provisions — Harrington had been carrying the day pack — and a storm was coming, so the helicopter also was dispatched and reached her first.
Tingwall lifted off with Yamamoto to clear skies toward Santa Fe, safe weather to fly in. But the storm enveloped him quickly and the chopper crashed.
Instead of second-guessing the whole mess, let's try to focus on the months that are left in this hiking season and all those little bad decisions we all make sometimes when we're on the trails.
The people at Santa Fe Search and Rescue Group, who have been plucking lost and injured people from the mountains since 1994, have put together a common-sense list of 10 bare essentials of wilderness travel as well as a checklist for planning a wilderness trip and a guide for what to do when you get lost.
You can find it on their Web site, www.santafesar.org, and it's all great advice: take a hat, matches and enough emergency food and water to last for 24 hours. Tell someone exactly where you're going and when you'll be back and stick to that plan. Stay put as soon as you realize you're lost.
The group's founder, Dave Burdett, says people forget just how wild and dangerous it can get in backcountry that's a half-hour drive from Santa Fe.
Snow squalls, lightning strikes, twisted ankles, falls down a rock ledge, they're all out there along with the grassy meadows, aspen groves, rushing streams and peak-top views. The goal is to avoid the former and enjoy the latter.
You can make that more likely by sticking to the trails, sticking together and watching the weather, which can turn on a dime, Burdett says.
So when your hiking partner says, like mine did on Sunday at 10,000 feet, "It's going to rain," it's probably best to say, "Yes, dear," turn back and avoid watching a lightning show hunkered down with old I-told-you-so.
But anyone who's done much boy-girl hiking knows the conversation often doesn't go that way. Backpacking fights are the stuff of legend, whether they're about how far to go, which trail to take, who's acting like a wimp or who ate all the M&Ms out of the trail mix and left the raisins.
Did Harrington and Yamamoto have an argument that led to them hiking apart? Harrington says they didn't. And it really doesn't matter now.
What matters is that they were separated by too long a distance on a trail, violating one of the cardinal rules of wilderness safety.
Burdett says the rule to follow is to put the slowest or weakest hiker in the front and have the stronger hiker act as a "sweeper" so no one gets left behind. "You want to keep track of each other," he says. "See them, hear them."
Instead of getting hung up on an arbitrary distance, Burdett says, just make sure you're always hiking together.
Packing your common sense and leaving your hubris at home is also good advice.
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com.
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