Lost in the Mountains (page 4 of 4)

A Different Kind of Dream

At his home 50 miles away in Bishop, Dave Grah noticed the full moon shining outside his window. He hadn't slept well all week, thinking about Hench and the note Grant Krueger had left on his desk. Thirty years earlier, his brother had nearly died in a fall off an icy Sierra cliff while hiking alone. The accident occurred at an altitude of 12,000 feet, on a saddle between peaks northwest of Italy Pass. Grah couldn't shake the feeling that maybe Hench was in the same spot.

At 6:30 the next morning -- the start of a clear, cool day -- he powered up his 1950 Cessna 170 and climbed up the range's eastern flank and over Italy Pass. Most pilots allow at least a thousand feet of clearance when crossing the Sierra to avoid sudden updrafts and downdrafts; wrecked planes can be found here and there across the range. But Grah knew there was no way he could spot Hench from well above the peaks. He would be cautious but fly low, scouring every square mile of the granite wilderness.

He soared past the saddle, straining to see anything that would suggest a human form among the rocks. Nothing. Grah felt deflated. It was probably silly to have come, he thought. He banked the Cessna around Lake Edison, then skirted the cliffs once more.

Suddenly, level with the passenger window and about a football field away, Grah spotted a man standing on a snow-covered ledge -- in almost the exact same place where his brother had fallen. The man was waving a stick with a bit of red fabric on the end.

Hench saw the silver Cessna dip its wings. It was so close, it looked like it was flying straight into the mountain. He shouted. He danced. A few minutes later, the plane reappeared, this time trailed by a California Highway Patrol helicopter. The chopper crew dropped a message on a line attached to a weight. "If you're Charlie Hench," read the message, "raise one arm. If you're hurt, raise the other." Hench raised both arms.

The mountainside was almost vertical, and shifting wind currents made it difficult for the chopper to hover in place. But pilot Bill Dixon managed to ease the aircraft into a horizontal gap in the rock and to rest one set of skids on the narrow ledge. Flight officer Andrea Brown leaned out and motioned for Hench to step forward. He shook his head no. "I could tell he was scared to death," Brown says. "It was slippery, and if he fell, it was hundreds of feet down."

Dixon maneuvered the chopper a few feet closer. "You need to come now," Brown mouthed to Hench. He lifted his wrist to indicate it was fractured; as he stepped on the skid, Brown grabbed him by the belt, pulling him inside. The Fresno County Sheriff's Department would later report that on a scale of difficulty ranging from 1 to 10, the rescue of Charlie Hench was a 9.9.

In San Luis Obispo Wednesday morning, an announcement came over the Caltrans PA system: "They found Charlie Hench." Cheers erupted throughout the building.

Grant Krueger, who was at that moment on a trail on the eastern side of the ridge just below the summit, received the news on his satellite phone.

Back in Bishop, Grah called McGuigan and scratched his head, trying to make sense of the coincidence of two men falling off a mountaintop in exactly the same spot.

Hench phoned his girlfriend from a hospital in Bishop, where doctors had inserted 12 pins in his right wrist and treated him for chipped vertebrae and abrasions. McGuigan cried when she heard Hench's voice. "He broke down crying too," she says. "He told me he'd sat all night on a rock, thinking it was over for him."

Hench now bears a two-inch scar next to his right eye, and he will always have the pins in his wrist. He and McGuigan are planning to move in together. Occasionally, while walking a construction site or mowing his back lawn, he flashes back to his time on the icy ledge and a current shoots through his body. He remembers the friends who kept up their search for him. Maybe, he now thinks, a man doesn't find himself by running with the bulls or hiking solo across the mountains. Maybe getting lost in the clouds isn't the only way to dream. Maybe a man can find himself warm at home, surrounded by the people who love him.

From Reader's Digest - September 2008

 

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