12-07-2025
A California hiker fell in ‘no man's land' on a high Sierra peak. This is the incredible rescue story
The emergency alert came through at 3:30 p.m. on July 2: A woman hiking alone on a remote mountain in the rugged Eastern Sierra was badly injured after a fall and needed rescue.
While hiking through the jumble of pinnacles on the western side of Mount Williamson in Inyo County, California's second-highest peak, she'd ventured off the main summit route and tumbled 30 feet into a steep gully, landing with bone-breaking impact on an outcropping about as wide as a picnic table. She lay bleeding on the small slab.
Pain shot up her right leg. She looked down and saw a gruesome sight: Her ankle bone had burst through her skin with such force that it punctured her sock.
She'd lost her backpack in the fall. But in a fanny pack strapped to her waist were two things: a plastic lighter and a Garmin inReach Mini — a handheld satellite texting device hikers use to relay distress messages. She pushed the SOS button.
That action triggered a chain reaction of emergency responses that would send five helicopters and a half-dozen ground rescuers to the mountain. More than 28 hours later, it would take one of the highest helicopter mountain rescues in California history to lift her to safety.
'A terrible place to be stuck'
The hiker's emergency was relayed to the 75-odd members of Inyo County Search and Rescue, a volunteer group of mountain experts called to find and extract hikers and climbers who get into trouble in some of California's highest and most dangerous places.
Inside a gym in the town of Bishop, the cellphone of an Inyo SAR member named Ben, whose last name has been withheld at the request of law enforcement officials, buzzed with the alert.
As a professional climber and outdoor photographer, Ben has vital technical proficiency with ropes and rigging, topography and terrain. He has summited peaks around the world but never attempted the wild hike up Mount Williamson, where the woman was stranded.
'My first thought was, what a terrible place to be stuck,' Ben said. 'It's sort of a no man's land.'
As Inyo SAR mobilized for a response, Ben went home that evening and researched Mount Williamson.
'The clock is ticking'
The Eastern Sierra hangs like a granite tidal wave above the arid flats of Owens Valley. Its peaks rise nearly straight up from the desert floor to heights where trees can't grow and vegetation is sparse.
Inyo SAR is called to dozens of emergencies each year and has rescued countless people — particularly on the extremely popular 14,505-foot Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48 states. But they rarely hear from anyone on Whitney's neighbor to the north, Mount Williamson, a muscular pyramid standing nearly as tall at 14,380 feet.
The standard route to Mount Williamson's summit is unmarked and barely discernible at the higher elevations. Hikers must scramble among loose rocks and navigate sloping slabs to find a way up.
'There's really no trail,' said Howie Schwartz, a mountain guide in Bishop. 'It's a moonscape. … You have to be more savvy and physically fit to pull that trip off. It's brutal on people.'
On the day of the hiker's emergency call, temperatures in Owens Valley hovered around 100 degrees. But dark clouds formed above Mount Williamson, eventually building into a thunderhead that dropped late-afternoon temperatures above 13,000 feet to near-freezing while kicking up bursts of high winds, intermittent snow, lightning strikes and hail that pelted the upper reaches where the hiker was stranded.
High-altitude helicopter rescues are a common, if ominous, reality of summertime recreation in the Eastern Sierra. California Highway Patrol helicopters perform emergency hoists almost weekly during the warm months, including on Mount Whitney, where flight crews have plucked injured hikers off the summit in recent years.
The inclement weather pressing down on the peaks on July 2 made such an extraction impossible. That evening, a CHP helicopter carrying two Inyo SAR rescuers tried to reach the hiker, but the conditions prevented the aircraft from getting to her.
The rescue team plotted out other possible ways of getting to the hiker.
'We know we can't just wait,' Ben said. 'We know the clock is ticking on this subject. She's lost blood and sustained trauma. She's going to have to lay there all night and she could die from exposure, especially in the rain.'
A Navy helicopter from an air station in Kern County flew to Lone Pine to assist. The craft arrived after dark, scooped up four Inyo SAR members loaded with ropes, radios and other gear then flew to Mount Williamson and deposited them below 10,500-foot Shepherd Pass just before midnight.
The four continued by foot in the dark to the mountain's west face, following the summit route before diverging to home in on the hiker's emergency GPS coordinate. The rescuers ascended a steep gully, but by first light on July 3 they'd reached an impasse at the base of a cliff hundreds of feet below the hiker's location. Hoping for a sign of life, they yelled up the sheer rock face.
High above, a voice shouted back.
'Pushing the envelope for what's possible'
On the morning of July 3, Inyo SAR members, including Ben, had mobilized at Lone Pine airport and were preparing contingency plans. The night's rough weather had blown through, and the sky above Mount Williamson was clear.
A CHP helicopter crew of two flew from Lone Pine to Shepherd Pass, hoisted one of the four Inyo SAR rescuers into the bird, then flew up the mountain to visually locate the hiker and see about depositing the rescuer there — a tactic called an insertion.
Circling Williamson's crumbling crown, the crew spotted a human form among the rubble, seated upright on a tiny throne in the sun. She wore burgundy leggings, a black puffy jacket and navy blue helmet covering shoulder-length blond hair. Her right leg was outstretched, showing an ankle bent inward at an unnatural angle.
The hiker waved at the hovering helicopter. Through a loudspeaker fixed to the craft, the pilot confirmed he could see her and that help was on the way. But the helicopter wasn't able to get close enough with its 164-foot-long hoist cable to insert the rescuer or attempt an extraction due to the sloping cliffs and adverse winds. In such tight quarters, maneuverability would be limited, and a wind gust could blow the aircraft into the mountainside.
'We weren't able to get to her with the way the winds were,' said Todd Brethour, helicopter pilot with CHP's Office of Air Operations Fresno Air Unit. 'But once we physically located her we could formulate a plan for how to try to get her out.'
On the ground in Lone Pine, Inyo SAR received a photo from the flyover showing the hiker's location. After studying the image and scouring climbing guidebooks to get a better sense of Mount Williamson's contours, Ben identified a razorback ridgeline about 300 feet above the hiker, at 13,800 feet, where an insertion might be feasible.
Ben was not pumped about going to the peak but pledged to volunteer, if needed. He was two days away from his 50th birthday. A lifetime of risk-taking in wild places has given him perspective regarding dangerous assignments.
'As you can imagine, it's pretty exciting to be involved in a rescue where you fly in a helicopter into the mountains and potentially save someone's life,' Ben said. 'But it's a thrill I don't really need. It's something I do to help my team and help the subject.'
An Inyo SAR member named Isaac, an emergency room technician with extensive climbing experience, was enlisted as well. Once on the mountain, he and Ben would work as a two-person unit, with Ben rigging rappel lines from the ridge down to the hiker and Isaac triaging her wounds. Together, they'd have to relocate her to a place where a helicopter could safely drop a hook to pull her out.
The plan was simple on paper but would approach the upper limit for helicopter hoist rescues in California.
'We knew we'd be pushing the envelope for what's possible,' Ben said.
'We're here now'
The insertion was textbook. At 1:15 p.m., the CHP helicopter lowered Ben and his pack into a notch along the jagged ridge 300 feet above the stranded hiker, then pulled away to retrieve Isaac from the Lone Pine airport.
Once the bird was away, the mountain air was still and silent. Ben scrambled around until he could see the hiker around the rock chimneys separating them. He thought about how she'd been trapped on the mountain for 24 hours with helicopters coming and going, raising and dashing hopes of being rescued.
'I can only imagine it's an emotional roller coaster for her,' Ben said. 'She's thinking each time that she's going to get rescued, and she hasn't been.'
He hollered to the hiker and she flipped around, startled.
'I said, listen, we're here now and we're going to figure this out,' Ben said.
Ben got to work making an anchor he'd use to rappel down. He descended slowly, careful not to accidentally dislodge any rocks that could tumble toward the hiker. About 100 feet from her, he ran out of rope. But minutes later, the helicopter was back depositing Isaac in the notch with his own climbing gear and another rope. Between insertions, the helicopter hoisted the three remaining Inyo SAR members at Shepherd Pass and carried them back to town.
When Ben and Isaac reached the hiker, she was in pain and desperate for water, but alert.
The rock where she sat was covered with blood dried brown in the sun. Isaac gave her 'a head-to-toe once-over' and checked her vitals. She'd wrapped a shirt around her wounded ankle, and removing it exposed a spike of bone poking through her sock. It was wet with congealed tissue. Isaac wrapped the ankle with gauze and medical tape, then fixed it with a splint.
'She was battered and bruised but didn't have any other injuries that needed to be immediately addressed on the mountain,' Isaac said. 'She was very with-it, she understood what was going on. … She'd need to be brought to a hospital sooner rather than later.'
Along with her satellite device, the hiker had kept a pocket lighter in her fanny pack. Isaac noticed scorch marks burned across the chest of her long-sleeved base layer. During the previous day's storm, she'd crouched around the small flame for a semblance of warmth.
Drops of rain from above began to fall, prompting the rescuers to move the hiker from her narrow perch to a safer spot. They improvised a harness, clipped her into a fixed rope, then helped her to a more protected nook about 20 feet upslope. After sucking down an energy gel and slipping into a sleeping bag provided by the rescuers, the hiker lay back and fell asleep.
On a call with the Inyo SAR coordinator in Lone Pine, Ben learned that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had dispatched a helicopter with a longer hoist cable to help. Shortly thereafter, the craft swung down from the sky in front of the rescuers. But after a brief hover, it lifted up and left.
'They took one look and were like, we can't do it, then flew away,' Ben said. 'By this point there have been multiple helicopters that haven't been able to get her, so we have to find a place we can move her where a hoist is possible.'
'A very, very narrow margin'
Aircrews with the California Army National Guard are rarely deployed on search-and-rescue missions that don't involve catastrophic wildfires — maybe five times per year, according to California National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Anthony Poppick.
But after four helicopters had returned from Mount Williamson without the hiker, rescuers needed a bigger bird.
'When no other local agency can do it, that's when they call us,' Poppick said.
At the request of Inyo County Sheriff's Office, Poppick and two other aviation officers out of Sacramento readied a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, a 65-foot-long craft known for transporting troops and carrying out medical evacuations. Theirs was outfitted with a 290-foot hoist cable.
They knew Mount Williamson's thin air would test the craft's ability. They calculated they'd need 75% torque to hover and hoist, and they'd have 78% torque available at that altitude.
'It's a very, very narrow margin,' said Maj. Christopher Morisoli, who piloted the mission.
Exceeding that 78% threshold could stall the craft in midair and cause a rapid descent. 'That's when bad things happen,' Morisoli said.
The men pulled whatever they could out of the helicopter to lighten it — 'every seat, helmet bag, spare pencils, everything,' Morisoli said. 'Being up at 13,500 feet, that's unique,' he said. 'We hadn't conducted a hoist that high in a UH-60 before.'
In the air 5 miles north of Mount Williamson, the crew rehearsed hovering maneuvers up to 14,000 feet. 'We wanted to be far enough away (from the stranded hiker) so she couldn't hear us and get false hope because we didn't want to be hovering over the patient and then leave if we couldn't rescue her,' Poppick said.
'I didn't think I was ever going to get off that mountain'
The sun was beginning to set when the Black Hawk arrived at Mount Williamson. Ben and Isaac had moved the injured hiker 30 feet down a vertical cliff to a broad ledge covered with boulders and talus using a two-person rappel method known as a 'pick-off.'
On the radio, the rescuers guided the craft into hoist position. As it approached overhead, the helicopter whipped the air around the hiker and rescuers and blasted them with deafening rotor wash. The pilots tucked the bird into the mountainside, bringing its enormous rotor blades to within 15 feet of a sheer cliff face, according to Lt. Col. Michael Christensen, mission co-pilot.
From the hoist arm out the right cargo door of the craft, Poppick lowered an aluminum rescue basket toward the ledge 250 feet below. It spun like a top in the wind before coming to rest beside the hiker.
Isaac hustled the woman into the basket and clipped her in with a locking carabiner. Then he signaled to the craft above by whirling a pointed finger over his head — go up.
Within seconds, the craft lifted away from the cliff as the hoist reeled in the payload. Poppick hauled the basket into the helicopter and secured it.
'She was overjoyed to be out of there,' Poppick said. 'I remember her saying, 'Thank you so much. I didn't think I was ever going to get off that mountain.' That was pretty powerful.'
Within 15 minutes, the Black Hawk landed at the Bishop airport, where a paramedic helped the hiker onto a gurney and wheeled her into an ambulance waiting on the tarmac. The crew had just completed the highest Black Hawk rescue in the history of the California Army National Guard, according to Col. Brandon Hill, the California Military Department's director of communications.
The air officers then gassed up the bird and flew back one last time to extract Ben and Isaac, who'd descended to a flatter area lower on the mountain.
'We won'
When the Inyo SAR team debriefed from the incident, one thing was clear to the rescuers: The hiker probably wouldn't have been heard from or found without her personal satellite device. Placing it in her waist pouch, rather than her backpack, was essential to her survival.
Still, as news of the rescue filtered out last week, some social media commenters questioned the hiker's judgment in entering the wilderness alone. But the Inyo County Sheriff's Office — never shy about issuing cautions to inexperienced hikers — was quick to quell criticism of this hiker's actions and motivations.
'Despite the severity of her condition and the remote location, she remained calm and responsive while awaiting rescue,' reads a statement from the sheriff's office. 'The climber's bravery and composure in extreme conditions were remarkable.'
The hiker could not be reached for an interview.
Another thing was also clear: the high level of expertise, coordination and cooperation involved in one of the most complex rescue efforts in recent memory.
The flight officers of the Black Hawk crew that executed the extraordinary hoist emphasized that they couldn't have succeeded without the resources deployed during the 28 hours prior — the Inyo SAR ground crew at Shepherd Pass, the Inyo County Sheriff's Office's coordination, the CHP's efforts and reconnaissance, the helicopter attempts by the Navy and L.A. County Sheriff's Office and of course the two rescuers on the mountain.
'This was an incredible team effort,' Morisoli said. 'We stood on their shoulders to complete the final rescue.'
Back home in Bishop, Ben wasn't able to sleep much for several days after the rescue.
'I get so jacked, so excited,' he said. 'I don't think adrenalized is the right word, but I'm just replaying every aspect of it in my head. I'm so thankful that everything worked because if any of us had made a mistake and there was an accident, I'd be playing that back and it'd kill me.
'But in this case, we won.'
