Your Closest Call

[DarthStiller]

This subject came up on the ride during last Sunday’s hike with Joe, and I thought it might be an interest thread topic: What’s been your “closest call” hiking, as in, almost died? I would think there are two basic categories: I’m sure there have to be interesting stories that people can share. I have had about 3. The first two were before I discovered HAZ, and involved no map, no GPS. It was after I hiked all the city and county parks and started venturing in the wilderness. My most recent one, 7+ years ago, was weather related: http://hikearizona.com/photoset=3201.

[joebartels]

Sliding down a fifty foot section of ice on Tahquitz ( Jacinto ) 1998 ish. Got lucky and snagged a tree. Too scared to move for about thirty minutes. Was visiting my sister in Idyllwild. When I returned my brother-in-law said "oh yeah, a guy died up there last week". Information that would have been helpful before the hike...lol

Second would be a tie with the Motherlode rock & camping on a sandbar in LCR 2007 awakened to a whisper quiet flood in action from Big Canyon ( no water passed through Cameron ).

Midnight rolls around and Dave's outside the tent hollering "joe water!". A flood rolled in rising the creek five feet to the base of my tent. I quickly stuffed everything into pack along with about ten pounds of sand being in such a hurry. Snapped off one shot of the creek and boogied on out. Beach access was a no go so we bushwhacked the nasty. Back at the confluence we walked through the Fish & Wildlife camp that surveys the chub on a yearly basis. Dave wants to camp here but I just want to go home. He thinks I'm nuts but agrees to head out. That idea was stopped in about two point two minutes when we found out Salt Trail Canyon was in flood. This dry canyon was raging eight to ten feet. We decided to crash at the helipad. I had just fallen asleep when Dave decides he wants to go back to the feds camp. Not really wanting to invade their camp I slept on the outskirts. Dave bummed a bag and a spot in one of the guys tents.

Wanted to die on Isis being so thirsty & other close calls. Yet the above were unexpected and have etched into my mind. While the flood may not seem scary it still rattles my mind. Dave originally wanted to camp at the confluence in Big Canyon. If I hadn't talked him out of that I wouldn't be here today. The reason for the trip was ironically eerie too.

My intentions for the trip were less to the see the "blue" and more to head up Big Canyon to see where George Mancuso got swept away.

[PatrickL]

First time I hiked Barry Goldwater Peak was on July 5th and I only had a few sips of water left with 5 miles to go (started with about 4 liters). Morale and shade were nowhere to be found. Considering that's the worst ive had, I guess I've been pretty lucky thus far.

[hippiepunkpirate]

I got caught in the midst of a mighty downpour combined with an intense electrical storm coming down from Slate Mountain back in '08. Luckily it's a pretty small mountain so I managed to get back to the safety of my car in a reasonable time. There were flashes going off around me constantly, with deafening thunder cracks that indicated that I was mere yards from getting struck on multiple occasions. If there was a time when I would've lied down on the ground due to lightning, this was the time, except it was raining so hard that any patch of ground was either a flood of water or a vat of mud. It's a classic Pinon-Juniper woodlands around there, so I figured sprinting from small tree to small tree and crouching as I went was the way to go. Big sigh of relief when I made it back to car. I was probably out in it for 20 minutes, but it was utterly terrifying. Supremely lucky that I didn't get struck that day.

[SpiderLegs]

My folks used to live on Catalina Hwy a few miles from the base of Mt Lemmon, so used to go climbing as often as I could when I was in college. My climbing partner and I got pretty good at being amateur meteorologists during the summer monsoon season. We would climb and time our departure for when the first drop of rain hit our car. One day we mis-judged the weather and found ourselves on a crag fifteen minutes away from our car parked at Windy Point when all hell broke loose. The choice was to risk walking across wet granite and possible slide off to our demise or hole up in a small cave that we found. Spent the next hour in the midst of lightning crashing all around us and literally praying for safety. Actually got to the point of discussing what would we tell the other person's parents if one of us did not make it.

[kingsnake]

Hiking, can't think of any. Parachuting, on the other hand, I could bore you for hours ...

[SpiderLegs]

Would these stories constitute type three fun?

[chumley]

Already documented here via the HAZ wayback machine: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2940&p=24485#p24485

But the photos are all from before the dangerous hike out and illustrate some amazing fashion sense. http://hikearizona.com/photo=366107

[toddak]

On one of my first canyoneering excursions down a long stretch of West Clear Creek, with no good reference points or GPS signal I became convinced that I had gone past the exit point and was headed deeper into wilderness. Wet, with just a daypack and running out of light, I decided to scramble directly up the 800-foot canyon wall, praying there would be a clear route to the rim. After scratching and clawing most of the way up I hit a 25 foot band of rocky cliff, easy 5th class climbing but terrifying un-roped, and practically wept with relief when I reached the top. Of course if I'd stayed in the canyon another half mile I would've found the exit. From then on I scouted out every entry / exit point before committing to the canyon.

[RedRoxx44]

Flash flood Paria canyon
Lightning in Gila WIlderness--loss of most of hearing for several days and sunburned side of face for a few days
Shotgun pointed in my face in New Mexico--was trying to hike but in wrong place at wrong time
Pass out deep in cave
Equipment problem on high traverse in cave
Bad air in cave x2
Fall in cave
Over heat in Anza Borrego

[trekkin_gecko]

two lightning incidents
1. picacho peak, foolishly wanted to summit when we could see the storm coming
one of my friends turned back, the other one and i huddled under a rock and his windbreaker for 20 minutes till it passed
2. mt. lemmon, climbing at primus wall with johnr1 last summer
stayed just a little too long for one more climb and to retrieve some equipment
i have a very healthy respect for lightning and try not to put myself in those situations anymore

[kingsnake]

@RedRoxx44 You live a charmed life ...

Btw, was that Walter White?

[Bradshaws]

I've been in two situations in my life that I was sure I wouldn't make it out of alive My first had to do with a lot of "less than legal" substances in my younger years My second was when I ran out of water on my Badger Springs hike.... Even typing this out right now is making me tear up I apologized and I said my good byes aloud to my wife and kids while laying in the shade of a large boulder.... Wow, I hadn't really thought about till just now.

Don't ever miss an opportunity to tell the people you love how much they mean, you might not get a second chance :kf:

[SpiderLegs]

So far the common theme seems to be heat and lightning.

[chumley]

So far the common theme seems to be heat and lightning

Well there was also that night I spent in jail in Mexico...

[Jim]

Nothing that really freaks me out. Had to self arrest on Agassiz once, huge rocks falling out of Stettner Colouir on the Grand was impressive and could have been bad, falling on rocks on a ridge on Agassiz and landing on my pack.

[kingsnake]

Don't ever miss an opportunity to tell the people you love how much they mean, you might not get a second chance :kf:

Words to live by.

[big_load]

I almost slipped crossing a washout. It was a thin wedge of steeply-sloping grus, and I was carrying about 50 pounds. I would have dropped me a couple hundred feet. The worst part about it was knowing I had to cross it again on the return trip. (That ended up being mentally easier, for some reason). I've also had a few stumbles that could have disabled me enough in a remote area to dehydrate before being found.

[neilends]

I hiked in solo a few miles from a ranger station at the Denali National Park for an overnight backpacking trip. To get to my mesmerizing, mind-blowing, at the foot of a mountain campsite that is still vivid in my memory after 15 years, I crossed two Alaskan (but low) rivers and climbed a fair amount of elevation. This was deep in grizzly country, so the intimidation and fear factor is ever present, but I dutifully stowed my bear-cannister some 100 yards away and had an uneventful, peaceful evening. I went to sleep to the sound of running water and with imagery around me that is impossible to describe in words.

At approximately 3 a.m., I woke up in a puddle of ice cold water. I was soaked. It had rained all night and my tent had failed. I zipped the entrance to my tent open and, again, words fail me in describing the sight before me, but for different reasons. It was the terrifying sight one sees when you've been caught unprepared in the wild at 3 a.m. in late summer in an isolated place in Alaska with no human being around for miles. With the quasi-midnight sun it was kind of dark, but not really dark, which created an eerie, horror-movie-like aura. Is there a grizzly lurking around the corner? Maybe. Can I stay here? No. Do I have to cross those two Alaskan rivers in order to get back? Yes. Has the rain been swelling these rivers to potentially dangerous levels? Yep.

That moment when I opened the tent door was actually the most intimidating one of the trip. Once I packed everything up and started moving, I was fine. I crossed the rivers without a problem, even though they were swollen. I didn't get eaten by bears. An angry ptarmigan did scare the bejeezus out of me.

I didn't appreciate until later the real danger I faced when I finally got back to the ranger station, where a National Park Service bus would arrive several hours later: hypothermia. Since it was cold and I was soaking wet, as was all my equipment including my sleeping bag, I had no way to keep warm. I began to shiver and desperately crawled into the wet bag to somehow try and salvage the small amount of insulation it had left in its wet state.

The hot shower I took when I got back to our "base camp" (I was a park employee for the summer) was easily the nicest one I've ever had. So were the lessons I learned from this: don't rely on cheap equipment, and for God's sake always bring the 10 essentials with you (like, say, fire).

[SuperstitionGuy]

I hiked with Joe B. and Johnlp once, does that count?
We did the Superstitions Fish Creek Via Lost Dutch and back near where I once came close to becoming a victim of the Superstitions.
You can read about it at this link on HAZ: viewtopic.php?f=64&t=3725&p=33429&hilit ... ers#p33429