Lost in the Mountains

Charlie Hench thought a solo hike through the Sierra Nevada would quell his midlife wanderlust. Then things took a dangerous turn.

Fun But Reckless

At eight months shy of 50, Charlie Hench had the happy-go-lucky air of an unfettered younger man. A former Michigan State rugby player, he was six feet tall and could bench-press 315 pounds. In recent years, he'd run with the bulls in Spain, canoed through the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, and hiked the Sierra backcountry in California with a group of friends.

These days, though, Hench wasn't feeling so great. His right knee was hurting from a ligament he'd torn 30 years earlier. His father had recently died. And he and his girlfriend of seven years, Julie McGuigan, were going through another rocky patch. Their relationship was a tumultuous one, Hench admits. She had, he says, "this incredible need I didn't know how to satisfy."

So Hench did what he'd often do when things got tense: He cooked up an adventure to get lost in. This time a solo hike across the Sierra Nevada sounded especially appealing. "I'm getting soft," Hench told McGuigan. "If I don't do it now, I never will."

Hench is not the first person one would think of to undertake a five-day hike across an imposing mountain range. He often joked that for his group camping trips, he'd sooner pack a case of beer than a sleeping bag. In addition to being a cutup, he was a klutz at work, stumbling on things at job sites as an engineer with the California Department of Transportation in Cambria, on the central coast of California. He was fun but reckless, steering a car with his knees while pounding the dash in time to U2's "New Year's Day." Once, he accidentally rolled a company truck over an embankment, somehow emerging unscathed. On numerous occasions, "you'd think, This is it -- we're taking him to the hospital for sure," says his longtime friend John Luchetta. "Then he'd get up and dust himself off."

Many in Hench's tight-knit group of friends found his wild streak endearing; all of them admired him for his generosity. Want someone to bust up your patio with a jackhammer? Need help roofing your house? Call Charlie. "He even made a bench in honor of my grandmother when she died," says close friend Steve Baliban.

Hench had plenty of help, then, in preparing for his solo Sierra quest. His friends supplied rain gear, freeze-dried meals, and a headlamp; one called up Google Earth on his computer to plot Hench's mountain route. If Luchetta and the group had misgivings about the trip, they didn't say so, figuring that if Hench had gotten this far, he could survive anything.

His gear neatly stuffed in a nylon backpack, Hench hitched a ride to the Sierra foothills. On a Monday evening, he made camp at the edge of Lake Edison, 9,200 feet up the western slope of the range. He'd brought five days' worth of food, a portable stove, a sleeping bag, a tent, and a fishing rod. He sat on a log, tending a campfire and gazing at a canopy of stars. He was happy to be there. Life seemed easier in the clear mountain air. He took out a pen and wrote, "Into the Wild. Ramblings of Charlie on a solo trans-Sierra Nevada, Sept. 17-22."

The next morning, a campground employee gave Hench a ride to the trailhead to start his 15-mile hike to Lake Italy. As the truck pulled away, the driver mentioned that a storm was expected to blow through later in the week. "Don't know whether it's going to snow," he told Hench.

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