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Hunkering Down
For the first ten miles of the trip, the trail was well maintained, with a clear dirt path and markers on the trees. But it petered out above the tree line, and Hench got lost several times, in part because his new compass wasn't working. Late on Wednesday, he pitched his tent on the stark shore of the lake. "Holy moly, I made it," he wrote.As he lay in his sleeping bag that night, he heard the wind pick up until it was ripping across the lake with 50-mph gusts. By Thursday morning, the snow was coming down sideways.
Early-season storms in the Sierra Nevada are rare, surprising tourists who venture into the backcountry in T-shirts, lulled by Indian summer temperatures down below. On a single day a few years back, more than two dozen hikers were stranded at different points in the mountains when an October storm roared across the range, dropping four feet of snow. Three experienced climbers, blue and frostbitten, were fortunate to have been rescued from the face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, 60 miles northwest of Hench's campsite; two others in their party perished.
"Not sure what to do so am hunkering down for a spell," Hench wrote on Thursday after whiteout conditions drove two-foot drifts against his tent. Hikers elsewhere in the range that day reported that the wind was "from another planet," snapping trees with trunks eight feet in diameter. Hench, meanwhile, added a note in his diary: "May hang out here for a day."
Julie McGuigan was at her desk when a coworker stopped by to inquire about Hench. "Did you know there's a storm coming in?" he asked. McGuigan, a 46-year-old biologist, loved Hench's high spirits. He was the kind of guy who would do a funny little dance in the middle of her living-room floor just for fun. Who else would present her with a Valentine's Day gift of a backyard bat house? She glanced out the office window. Sierra storms often translate locally into clouds and rain; the sky outside was ominously dark. "He'll be okay," she said, reasoning that Hench always found a way.
When Hench woke up on Friday morning, the sun was out and clouds drifted lazily across the blue sky. He broke camp and began climbing toward Italy Pass, 1,200 feet above the lake. He planned to follow the pass across the Sierra Nevada ridgeline, then drop down to the eastern slope. But now, with the trail buried, Hench was forced to hop from one slippery boulder to the next, over treacherous gullies of deep snow.
Near noon, he reached a ridge. Doesn't look right, he thought. Though he didn't realize it at the time, Hench had made a wrong turn and ended up on a precipitous saddle north of the pass. He was trying to figure out his location when he fell, finding himself sprawled on a boulder, his wrist throbbing and blood trickling down the right side of his face. He looked out blankly at a lake sparkling several hundred feet below.
"Solo trans-Sierra hike!" he said out loud. "You idiot!"
His walking stick, map, and glasses were gone. His right wrist was on fire, broken for sure. Rising slowly to his feet, Hench straightened his backpack, his two-piece fishing pole still attached, but slipped again, scraping an elbow. He tried to steady himself and fell once more, this time skidding down the rock-strewn face and landing on his back on a granite ledge about the size of a grand piano. A sheer cliff dropped all the way to the valley floor, several hundred feet below. There was no going up or down. He was trapped.
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