spectr17
05-15-2003, 10:11 PM
The first rule of wilderness safety: Don't take that trip by yourself
Tom Stienstra, San Francisco Chronicle
May 11, 2003
Now this was one hell of a mess.
I was under water, being swept down a flooded river, headed for a waterfall,
still wearing a 50-pound backpack. I gazed up at the river surface, seeing that air was just a few feet above me. I reached for the air, but grabbed only water. "So this is how it ends," I remember thinking.
This was in a trail-less wilderness canyon in the Klamath Mountains, the headwaters of Blue Creek. While trying to ford a river flooded from a surprise May storm, I'd been knocked off my feet and into the current.
I'd taken several safety precautions: I'd slashed a watermark on a tree along the shore to measure the height of the river as it climbed from storm runoff, to make sure it wouldn't be too deep for crossing. I'd unbuckled my backpack so I could slip it off if I fell. I'd fashioned a wading staff out of a stout tree limb to steady myself as I worked across waist-deep currents.
For 20 minutes, wading with red-alert caution, everything was fine. Then the limb slipped across the top of a flat-topped boulder, the river swallowed my chest, knocked me over, and in I went.
Under water, looking up, I tried to reach for the surface with my right hand, stretching and failing. I was under for 10 seconds and 40 yards of river,
and the best I could do was grab for air and fail.
Then, as I reached up, a giant hand came down from above, grabbed mine, and locked grips. It was Jeffrey Patty, my lifetime pal, who had been wading in an eddy downstream on the edge of the current, acting as my safety net. My velocity pulled him into the river, and we rolled and tumbled downstream. Then I felt a rock under a boot, and I launched forward, air filling my lungs. We then managed to scramble into an eddy, the water calm enough to escape from the river to land.
The only reason I made it out of that mess was because my wilderness partner, my buddy, saved my life. On another trip, when my canoe flipped, my brother, Bob, jumped in after I'd gone down for the count twice, and together we paddled to shore, using the capsized canoe, partially submerged, as a life raft. Another time, I was out free-climbing the Sawtooth Ridge in the Trinity Alps, and another pal, Michael Furniss, saved me by keeping me from trying to get through and on top of an impossible-to-traverse slot. There have been many other close calls, where I've been on both sides of the mess.
In the past few weeks, there have been reports about several outdoor accidents across the West with perilous results. In most cases, the victims were alone. They didn't buddy-up.
The most famous of these cases is that of rock climber Aron Ralston, 27, of Aspen, Colo., who was pinned when a boulder fell on his arm while canyoneering solo, stuck for five days. Ralston didn't have a buddy. He cut his arm off with a pocketknife to escape.
Each year, I get dozens of reports of accidents where outdoorsmen relying solely on themselves face perilous consequences -- the swimmer who got caught in a rip tide at Sonoma State Beach . . . the mountain climber who was crossing a snow bridge at Mt. Shasta without realizing he was traversing a crevasse, and then went plunging through the soft snow and ended up deep inside the mountain . . . the flyfisher who forget to strap on his wading belt,
and then slipped in the Trinity River, his waders filled with water, and then he was taken under . . .
This seems to be a guy thing. At a seminar, with about 200 people in the audience, equally split between men and women, I asked everybody to stand up. "Anybody who hasn't had a broken bone or serious scar can now sit down." Guess what happened? Nearly all the women sat down. About 90 percent of the guys were still standing.
What does that tell you? That's because guys have blind spots that can lead to the kind of accident we call "a hell of a mess." That's why you need a buddy in the outdoors to keep you out of trouble, or to save your butt after you're already well into the mess. "When two go upon a journey, one sees before the other." My old buddy Aristotle said that (or something close to it).
Some guys with gaping blind spots can't understand why enlightened women keep telling them what to do. To women, men are like grapes, a pal once told me. "We need to be stomped and aged until we get turned into something they want to go out to dinner with."
Here on Mother's Day, all moms understand this. Their little boys have blind spots and somebody better look out for them. When those little boys turn 12, the first thing the youngsters learn as tenderfoots in the Boy Scouts is to buddy-up. You learn that to stay out of a mess, or to be extricated from one, you'd best have a friend nearby.
It isn't until that boy becomes a man that he learns he is actually a grape.
E-mail Tom Stienstra at tstienstra@sfchronicle.com.
Tom Stienstra, San Francisco Chronicle
May 11, 2003
Now this was one hell of a mess.
I was under water, being swept down a flooded river, headed for a waterfall,
still wearing a 50-pound backpack. I gazed up at the river surface, seeing that air was just a few feet above me. I reached for the air, but grabbed only water. "So this is how it ends," I remember thinking.
This was in a trail-less wilderness canyon in the Klamath Mountains, the headwaters of Blue Creek. While trying to ford a river flooded from a surprise May storm, I'd been knocked off my feet and into the current.
I'd taken several safety precautions: I'd slashed a watermark on a tree along the shore to measure the height of the river as it climbed from storm runoff, to make sure it wouldn't be too deep for crossing. I'd unbuckled my backpack so I could slip it off if I fell. I'd fashioned a wading staff out of a stout tree limb to steady myself as I worked across waist-deep currents.
For 20 minutes, wading with red-alert caution, everything was fine. Then the limb slipped across the top of a flat-topped boulder, the river swallowed my chest, knocked me over, and in I went.
Under water, looking up, I tried to reach for the surface with my right hand, stretching and failing. I was under for 10 seconds and 40 yards of river,
and the best I could do was grab for air and fail.
Then, as I reached up, a giant hand came down from above, grabbed mine, and locked grips. It was Jeffrey Patty, my lifetime pal, who had been wading in an eddy downstream on the edge of the current, acting as my safety net. My velocity pulled him into the river, and we rolled and tumbled downstream. Then I felt a rock under a boot, and I launched forward, air filling my lungs. We then managed to scramble into an eddy, the water calm enough to escape from the river to land.
The only reason I made it out of that mess was because my wilderness partner, my buddy, saved my life. On another trip, when my canoe flipped, my brother, Bob, jumped in after I'd gone down for the count twice, and together we paddled to shore, using the capsized canoe, partially submerged, as a life raft. Another time, I was out free-climbing the Sawtooth Ridge in the Trinity Alps, and another pal, Michael Furniss, saved me by keeping me from trying to get through and on top of an impossible-to-traverse slot. There have been many other close calls, where I've been on both sides of the mess.
In the past few weeks, there have been reports about several outdoor accidents across the West with perilous results. In most cases, the victims were alone. They didn't buddy-up.
The most famous of these cases is that of rock climber Aron Ralston, 27, of Aspen, Colo., who was pinned when a boulder fell on his arm while canyoneering solo, stuck for five days. Ralston didn't have a buddy. He cut his arm off with a pocketknife to escape.
Each year, I get dozens of reports of accidents where outdoorsmen relying solely on themselves face perilous consequences -- the swimmer who got caught in a rip tide at Sonoma State Beach . . . the mountain climber who was crossing a snow bridge at Mt. Shasta without realizing he was traversing a crevasse, and then went plunging through the soft snow and ended up deep inside the mountain . . . the flyfisher who forget to strap on his wading belt,
and then slipped in the Trinity River, his waders filled with water, and then he was taken under . . .
This seems to be a guy thing. At a seminar, with about 200 people in the audience, equally split between men and women, I asked everybody to stand up. "Anybody who hasn't had a broken bone or serious scar can now sit down." Guess what happened? Nearly all the women sat down. About 90 percent of the guys were still standing.
What does that tell you? That's because guys have blind spots that can lead to the kind of accident we call "a hell of a mess." That's why you need a buddy in the outdoors to keep you out of trouble, or to save your butt after you're already well into the mess. "When two go upon a journey, one sees before the other." My old buddy Aristotle said that (or something close to it).
Some guys with gaping blind spots can't understand why enlightened women keep telling them what to do. To women, men are like grapes, a pal once told me. "We need to be stomped and aged until we get turned into something they want to go out to dinner with."
Here on Mother's Day, all moms understand this. Their little boys have blind spots and somebody better look out for them. When those little boys turn 12, the first thing the youngsters learn as tenderfoots in the Boy Scouts is to buddy-up. You learn that to stay out of a mess, or to be extricated from one, you'd best have a friend nearby.
It isn't until that boy becomes a man that he learns he is actually a grape.
E-mail Tom Stienstra at tstienstra@sfchronicle.com.