A Tale of Two Trails

Twice in one shift I scurried up a popular local hiking trail to help someone. Each trip had very different outcomes.

A middle-aged man fell more than 50 feet, according to eyewitnesses, when the parasail glider he was flying in, collapsed during an afternoon flight. Our ambulance responded to assist the man and after a 15-minute ascent, arrived to find our patient, exhibiting an open leg fracture and complaining of back and hip pain.

Additional rescuers arrived on an ATV and transported the man to the base of the trail. His pelvic x-ray later that day revealed a severe separation of the base of the pelvis. He wouldn't be flying for a while, but he survived.

That night a 20-year-old woman, a student at a local university, called 911 from high on the same trail, claiming that she wanted to kill herself. Again, my partner and I arrived at the base of the trail and began a fast-paced hike up the hill. Dispatch advised that a police officer was already heading up the trail, just a few minutes ahead of us.

Switching my radio to the police channel, I periodically heard brief exchanges between the dispatcher and the obviously winded officer. The young woman was still on the phone and told dispatch that she had crawled out to the edge of an outcropping of rocks just below the eighth switchback and although she wanted to crawl back to safety, she was afraid.

Twenty years my junior, my partner was pulling away from me as we rounded the fifth switchback. Suddenly, the officer reported that he could see the caller and was attempting to make contact with her. Thirty yards ahead, my partner rounded the sixth switchback when the officer reported that the caller had slipped and was clinging to the side of a 30-foot sheer rock wall.

If it had been daylight, I could have seen her. She was just a few dozen vertical feet above us, but the steep grade required the trail to traverse for a few hundred yards before we would arrive to her location.

Mercifully, the darkness obscured her fall. Seconds after reporting her slip, the officer quietly, but tersely, reported that she had lost her grip and had fallen approximately 40 feet to the hillside below. My partner arrived first and dived off the trail into the scrub oak, in search of the victim.

I arrived a few minutes later and worked my way through the thick brush towards his flashlight. She was breathing but not conscious. Our initial examination revealed classic symptoms of a brain injury consistent with blunt trauma to the head. Undoubtedly, she had struck her head on a rock during the fall. Time was working against her - and us - now.

What seemed to be an eternity later, the same ATV that had so successfully removed our parasailer from the trail earlier that day, slowly transported our young patient off the mountain. It slowly crawled down the steep trail, almost like a hearse.

Sitting at the head of the patient, I assisted her failing respiratory drive with a breathing device. Her brain was dying from the certain internal bleeding and we all agreed that good oxygenation might allow doctors to save her, or at least preserve her organs for possible harvest.

As we passed a group of college-aged hikers, a young woman in the group stepped forward and timidly reached out towards our unmoving, unconscious patient. "C'mon, you can make it." she said. Her words were almost more a pleading than an encouragement. "Just keep fighting. You can do it."

After transferring our patient into the waiting ambulance we were told that reportedly police had found a suicide note in her dorm room explaining the circumstances that had led her up the trail that night. I couldn't believe when I heard that her remorse for sleeping with a boy had driven her to this fatal ending.

This morning I hiked that same trail and hurried past that same switchback and glanced at that same rock cliff. I don't like to look at it but it's always there every time I go up the mountain. I'll always think of that night and of that poor girl's desperate decision.