The Last Season (19 page)

Just past noon, Hoffman mused from the summit, “There's Crag Number 8. We should bag it while we're up here. Plenty of daylight.” Ingraham hesitated for a moment, then agreed. They were in prime shape and could quickly rappel from Crag Number 9 to the saddle, climb the less technical Crag Number 8, and be back in their camp near Rambaud Lakes before dark.

True to form, they were atop Crag Number 8 at 3:30, marveling at a spectacular group of clouds forming around Mount Woodworth. They felt as if they were in an Ansel Adams photograph—black mountains and white clouds, the only color in the landscape a surreal blue sky that darkened with thunderstorms to the north before their eyes. Time to get off the peak.

Sure-footed yet cautious, they descended the west side of the cirque and entered a class 2 gully that would take them back to camp. About 300 feet from the bottom of the gully, it steepened into a chute filled with loose rock that split into a fork. Centuries of rockslides and snow avalanches had run between these walls, leaving an obstacle course of loose debris to slip, slide, and negotiate.

A few yards above the split, a refrigerator-sized boulder sat perched, seemingly solidly in place. Hoffman tested it for stability, then traversed beneath. That was when it shifted, bringing the entire chasm to life in a violent rockslide that swept Hoffman off his feet and pulled him down the left-hand fork of the gully. The roar was deafening. Ingraham, who had been standing on solid rock only a couple of steps above where the slide began, watched in horror as his partner—unable to self-arrest—rocketed down the steep incline out of view. Hoffman came back into view 40 or 50 yards away, just as an airborne rock the size of a bowling ball struck his head. Then he disappeared into a void.

Charged with adrenaline and fear for his friend's life, Ingraham ran down the opposite gully. He found Hoffman lying amid the jagged
rubble of talus at the base of the 50-foot cliff over which he'd fallen. Fearing the worst, Ingraham yelled. Hoffman sat up and Ingraham heaved a sigh of relief.

But that euphoria was short-lived. Hoffman collapsed when he tried to stand. “My leg is broken,” he shouted in pain.

A cursory exam revealed that Hoffman had also broken his arm and suffered a serious head laceration. Internal injuries, if any, were unknown. Hoffman screamed as Ingraham reluctantly honored his request, straightening his grotesquely broken leg and building a rock cradle as a brace. All the while, Ingraham's mind was working, realizing that they were far, far from help. Then he remembered the ranger's cabin they'd passed in LeConte Canyon.

Ingraham carefully dressed Hoffman in all of their warm clothing and announced that he had to get help. Hoffman begged him to stay. “Please don't leave me. Please don't leave me,” he said over and over again. But Ingraham knew that his friend was seriously injured and probably bleeding internally.

Part of the draw for coming to this location had been its remoteness. “Seldom traveled” was an overstatement. Entire seasons passed without anybody attempting even the approach to Ingraham and Hoffman's base camp, which had begun with an icy wade across the Kings River just south of Grouse Meadows, then headed into a horrendously steep bushwhack through waist-deep, skin-tearing manzanita topped out by a jigsaw puzzle of increasingly steeper granite slabs. Nearby assistance was a zero possibility.

The only chance for survival this far into the backcountry rested on Ingraham's physical fitness.

At 4:30
P.M.
, Ingraham told his partner, “You'll be okay. I'm going to get a chopper. I'll be back soon.” He left behind a water bottle and at Hoffman's request gave him a bottle of prescription Tylenol with codeine.

The landscape became a complete blur for Ingraham as he ran a talus-strewn cross-country route toward their camp. At 5
P.M.
, rain and then snow began to fall. Thunder growled and lightning flashed in
a darkening sky. “All I did was run and pray,” says Ingraham. “I prayed to God for mercy.”

At 6
P.M.
he rushed into their camp and grabbed a flashlight, batteries, candy bars, and dry shirt. He clutched briefly at his sleeping bag but tossed it aside: “Too much weight.”

After spending little more than a minute grabbing gear, Ingraham was off and running toward a path that would take him to LeConte Canyon and the trail intersection to Bishop Pass, which was adjacent to the ranger station. From the site of the accident, the cabin was more than 10 miles away. If nobody was at the cabin, a long, grim uphill hike awaited him; it was another 15 miles to their car at the trailhead. Twenty-five miles at altitude after a day of climbing that had already worked him to the point of shaky legs and burning muscles.

As Ingraham and Hoffman were climbing Crags 8 and 9, Randy was on patrol to Echo Col, some 8 miles north of his LeConte duty station. Around the time of the rockslide, Randy was caught by storm clouds, probably the same ones Ingraham and Hoffman had seen gathering to the north. Of his descent off Echo Col, Randy wrote, “Graupel showers on the way down,” which made the route slippery and wet. Up high, the ground was white, making it look like winter. It would be a cold night in the high country.

Randy generally enjoyed leisurely headlamp or moonlit nighttime strolls back to his cabin at the end of patrols. But on this day, the gathering storm quickened his pace and he made it back to his cabin in record time, just after nightfall at around 8:15
P.M.
Crossing the rushing creek in the conifer grove near his cabin, he saw a glimmer of light through one of its windows.

Cautiously, he walked around the front of the cabin and found the door shattered and a lone figure leaning over his table with a flashlight in his mouth, illuminating something. The cabin had been locked; a note on the door had said Randy would return that afternoon, and he was more than 15 miles from the nearest trailhead. Whoever this person was, he clearly didn't have permission to be inside his home.

“Hey!” yelled Randy. “Why are you inside my cabin?!”

The response he heard was “Thank God you're here!”

“That,” retorted Randy, “doesn't answer my question.”

At that moment, Robin Ingraham sank to the floor. “My friend is hurt. You've got to get a helicopter here quick. He might be dying.”

The young man's frantic tone was genuine. “Slow down,” Randy said, helping him to a chair. “Tell me what happened.” Ingraham recounted the accident while Randy calmly lit a lantern and picked up a notepad and his radio: “Dispatch, this is 113—please close all park channels, we have a SAR in progress.”

“We need a helicopter now!” Ingraham broke in frantically.

Randy gently pointed his palm at Ingraham to stop. He set down the radio and focused his gaze on the floor. Then he looked up and said, “Robin, we need to think this through. I need to coordinate the rescue with Fallon Naval Air Station. Maybe we should hike back to him right now. There are no air evacuations in the mountains at night. The Sierra is too high and rough. It's too dangerous. Those helicopter rescues are television fiction or military operations. What do you want to do?”

“He probably won't last the night,” Ingraham choked out between sobs. “But. There's. No way we can get to him on foot in the dark.”

“Robin,” said Randy, “I'm sorry, but all we can do is wait until dawn. Let me coordinate the rescue.”

Over the next hour, Ingraham listened as Randy organized logistics with his supervisor, Alden Nash. Alternately, he argued with the dispatcher—his relay to someone at Fallon Naval Air Station who said the station's airships, which, unlike the NPS helicopters, were equipped with a rescue hoist, weren't available. Between radio calls, Randy provided Ingraham with warm clothes and dinner. “Looking back, Randy was so kind to me,” says Ingraham, “and at the same time he conveyed such confidence. I tried to sleep per Randy's directions sometime around midnight, but I just lay there till he lit the lantern again at 4
A.M.
My mind was with Mark.”

Randy tried to get Ingraham to eat a big breakfast, “as one never knows how long these days will be,” wrote Randy in his logbook. Then
the two hiked to a nearby meadow that was covered with frost—not a good sign. Ingraham's heart sank. He started praying again.

Dawn broke, and still the air was silent. No thumping helicopter blades. Randy patted Ingraham's back and walked a few feet away, where he paced back and forth with the radio to his mouth—noticeably disgruntled at the tardy Park Service helicopter. An hour after sunrise, the helicopter finally approached from down-canyon, and a few minutes later, they were lifted skyward along with two Park Service medics.

The pilot indicated that the terrain on the southwest side of the Crags—where Hoffman was—was too steep and treacherous to attempt a landing, so he ascended the ridge and was able to insert the three-man rescue team plus Ingraham on a giant granite slab on the northeast side. Retracing his route from the evening before, Ingraham couldn't believe he'd run down the gully without falling. Then he realized how fortunate it was that Randy had shown up at his cabin when he had. Five minutes later, and Ingraham would have been off to Bishop Pass, some 15 miles from the ranger station. With the temperatures dropping, Ingraham, who had been physically exhausted, wet, and cold, was certain he would not have made it. Foremost in his mind was that he hadn't been taken out by the slide. He let himself grow optimistic that his friend would be alive.

As they reached the base of the gully, they could see Hoffman's brightly colored clothing beneath a 50-foot cliff.

“He fell off
that
?” Randy asked.

“Yes,” replied Ingraham.

“That doesn't look good,” said Randy, who let out a loud whistle and yelled, “Hey, Hoffman!”

There was no response.

Randy placed a hand on Ingraham's shoulder and said, “Robin, you're going to have to be real strong.” Then he unshouldered his pack and walked up to Hoffman, kneeled, and shook his arm.

It was too late.

Ingraham sat down where he'd been standing. “My mind emptied
as the weight of the mountains seemed to crush me,” said Ingraham later. “I hated the mountains and regretted not sitting with Mark into the night so he wouldn't have died alone. I prayed that God allowed him the opportunity to be forgiven.”

The coroner would report that in his opinion Hoffman had likely died, sixty to ninety minutes after Ingraham left for help, of “shock from injuries sustained.” Those injuries included a fractured pelvis, left femur, and right arm; a separated back; a head injury; and internal injuries such as a ruptured spleen.

Since it was deemed too dangerous to evacuate the body up and over the Devil's Crags to the landing zone, Randy called upon Fallon Air Station, which this time sent a large military helicopter with a hoist. Ingraham watched his friend being hauled skyward in a body bag, a vision that would forever haunt him.

Randy helped the emotionally defeated climber pack up his camp and Hoffman's belongings. Then the park's helicopter delivered Ingraham to Cedar Grove, where Hoffman's body had been transported.

As he said goodbye to Ingraham, Randy was informed of another search-and-rescue operation in progress on the Hermit. It was a busy day in the mountains. He gave Ingraham another long squeeze on his shoulder and said, “I'm sorry.” Randy's instructions were to stand by, so he did, hoping this SAR wouldn't also end in a Code 13. One body recovery in a season was bad enough. To have two on the same day would be unthinkable.

Patience was usually a state of mind Randy achieved easily. But this time his empathy toward Ingraham's plight made it impossible to relax. Hating the hurry-up-and-wait routine, he picked up his radio and contacted the wilderness office at Cedar Grove. He asked the dispatcher to make sure somebody watched over Ingraham. “He should not be left alone,” he said before signing off.

Nina Weisman, who heard this call and volunteered to sit with Ingraham until his family arrived, was a second-year trailhead ranger, a recent college graduate at the threshold of a long career with the National Park Service. At the time, she dreamed of someday becom
ing a backcountry ranger and living alone in the far reaches of the parks. She knew Randy by reputation and considered him the ultimate ranger mentor. “I was impressed and touched by Randy's actions that day,” says Weisman, “because he'd made the effort to follow up on the well-being of this young climber who he'd assisted, even while en route to another rescue.”

To summit the Hermit, which Randy had stood atop numerous times, required a confusing scramble. At 12,352 feet, the Hermit's exposed granite dome has been battered by the elements for millennia. Climbers liken its cracked face to the skin of a weathered mountaineer, head thrust into the clouds and set slightly apart from its nearest granite neighbors. Randy loved the Hermit's distinct personality and the thunderheads that regularly gathered around its summit, grumbling like grouchy old men keeping the Hermit company.

Visible anywhere from the lower Evolution area, the final crux had proven problematic for solo climbers in the past, so Randy guessed this was where the fall had occurred.

He was wrong. This time, another experienced climber by the name of Douglas Mantle was the victim of another loose rock. He'd taken a serious fall near the summit crux and was unable to descend without assistance.

Anybody who's climbed a peak in the Sierra, then or now, would recognize Mantle's name; he has signed virtually every register on all the major and most other summits multiple times. The Hermit in 1988 would have been the then-38-year-old climber's 199th peak during his attempt to complete the Sierra Peak Section's “list” (247 mountains) for the third time. Instead, a chunk of granite that could easily have killed him “chewed me up and sent me home by chopper,” wrote Mantle of the incident in 1998, when he would become the first climber to complete the SPS list solo.