An ill-fated move left a man stranded on a ۶in ledge over ۱۰,۰۰۰ft off the ground for hours in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, before a volunteer rescue team came to his aid.
The climber, who has not been publicly identified, had been scaling the Mendenhall couloir, a gully on the face of Laurel mountain, with a friend on Saturday.
The route is steep with portions of potentially destabilizing loose rock. The section the man, reportedly an experienced climber, had been traversing had no route markers, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Veering off path, which the man did by accident, can be deadly, according to the Mono county search and rescue team.
“Traveling off-route quickly leads to increasingly vertical, un-protectable ۵th-class terrain with no viable means of continuing either up or down. With thousands of feet of vertical exposure below, any fall would almost certainly be fatal,” the volunteers wrote in a Facebook post last weekend.
The rescuers were in a race against time.
After the sheriff’s office alerted them to the stranded climber, they searched for two hours without coming across the man, the New York Times reported, until at last a voice in the distance became audible.
The climber alternated his weight between each foot, which indicated to rescuers his legs could be cramping. “It was determined that, without intervention, a fatal fall was increasingly possible if the subject remained in place overnight,” reads the Facebook post.
A hoist operation, when a helicopter crew lifts someone to rescue, was not viable due to powerful winds.
The team opted to go by foot, operating at night using their headlamps for light.
“It was incredibly dangerous and a little scary moving around in the dead of night – everyone’s operating on pure trust,” Mitchell Quiring, a rescuer, told the Chronicle. “It’s navigable terrain during the day but it becomes unnavigable at night.”
Still, it was not an acceptable option to leave the man there overnight, once the team saw his situation, Quiring told the paper.
A rescuer reached the climber from overhead, attaching him to a secure rope system, to prevent a fall, according to the team’s post.
The operation wrapped in the early hours of Sunday morning.
“He did not give up, and that is really one of the biggest takeaways from this,” Quiring said to the New York Times. “This could have been a very different story if he didn’t push through the adversity.”
