Paul was taking stock of our situation. He had already drank much of his supply and our day had barely begun. This was only the sixth day of climbing he had ever done in his entire life, and he was starting to question whether he could pull this off. Maybe this was too much. Maybe he hadn’t brought enough to drink. He didn’t say anything, though, so we kept on going. He asked me if I had ever before had such an encounter in the wilderness with a lost person – I told him that it had happened only once before today, and that person had survived.
A few more miles brought us to the end of our valley, where we reached a pass. From there, we could look south to Mexico, a faint smear on the shimmering horizon.
After a brief rest, we dropped down into the valley to the south and traveled almost two more miles. We were now forced to leave the known quantity of the trail in the valley bottom and start to do what we had come there to do in the first place – climb!
We rested for about ten minutes and ate something, then started to climb uphill, describing a large arc which curved back around and headed us almost north again. This seemed to be the easiest way to gain elevation, to get up on to high ground. We made our way up through a series of cliff bands, picking our way through, finding several Class 3 spots which allowed us to continue, but barely. I took the time to mark our passage in case we had to descend this way, and eventually we gained the summit ridge of our peak. We had hit it too high though, so had to descend to a saddle to continue south, wasting precious energy. Paul was going slower and slower – I asked him if he was okay, and he said he was exhausted. I told him we could go slower if that would help, but that we were now fully committed and had no choice but to continue. Gamely, he carried on.
As Murphy’s Law would have it, we had to cross over three bumps on that seemingly-interminable ridge, and finally stumbled on to the summit. Stick me with a fork, I’m done! We were exhausted. My field notes don’t say what time we arrived on top, but it must have been close to 2:00 PM. Okay, I’ll tell you where we were – it was Peak 3019. I was really concerned because it was already so late in the day, so I sat there studying the slopes below us, trying to see if there was an obvious line of descent to the valley far below. We already knew we didn’t want to go back the way we had climbed up. It looked like it would go, and I said so to Paul. He didn’t care which way we went, as long as it would get us off the mountain. We were too tired to eat anything, and I doubt we spent more than five minutes on the summit. Jeez, today’s effort was only half-done, and it felt as if we were on the back side of the moon, we had so bloody far to go to get out of there.
We started to descend, heading in a southwesterly direction down a ridge, taking us even farther away from our vehicle. Paul was going slower than ever, even though it was all downhill. He was stumbling at times, and I kept asking him if he was okay. He said he was, so on we went. We had to negotiate a series of cliff bands which forced us to downclimb Class 3 in several places. It seemed like we were going in slow motion. I was becoming very frustrated and concerned with Paul’s slowness, and I kept urging him on as well as I could without pissing him off. I knew he could only do what he could do.
It took hours, but we did it. 1500 vertical feet later, we reached the valley bottom. We rested for a bit and took stock of our situation. Unbeknownst to me, Paul only had three-quarters of a liter left to drink! However, I didn’t know that, as he didn’t say anything to me. For sure, I still had one full liter and maybe part of a second. We found a good trail in the valley bottom and started following it. We wanted to be back at the pass before dark – we figured we could follow the trail all night by headlamp if needs be to get back to the truck. I had some concern about encountering border-crossers in the dark.
Two miles of steady uphill to the pass really took it out of us. From that point on, because of the lateness of the day, we were in shadow down in the valley bottom all the rest of the way once we left the pass. Fortunately, perhaps because we were going downhill, we seemed to get our second wind. Paul ran out of drink about a half-mile north of the pass, but once again didn’t tell me! Nevertheless, we kept on at a frantic pace, trying to get as far as we could before we lost the daylight. Even all of the side gullies we had to cross didn’t slow us down much, although they added to the tiredness.
We wondered aloud if our friend had made it out to the road okay, wondered if we had done the right thing by him, wondered if we would find him lying beside the path. Amazingly, we got all the way down the main valley with a bit of daylight to spare. A cairn we had built early in the day marked the spot where we needed to leave this valley and head across the hilly country with the stony ground. We hadn’t gone much past the cairn when nightfall overtook us, and the darkness was complete.
We had taken a GPS waypoint at the truck (so very long ago, it now seemed) so we turned on our headlamps, took out the compass and fired up the GPS. I have to admit that I was concerned. It was the blackest of nights, we couldn’t see any landmarks and I just kept hoping that we could zero in on the truck. We crossed the stony country and entered the big wash. What a mess! In the dark, the brush seemed thicker than ever, the thorns sharper than we had remembered them, and the many branches of the wash seemed endless. Finally, about 13 hours after we had started out, we stumbled out of the brush and found the truck. Hallelujah!! Here is what it looked like when we found it.
We had left a large reserve of water at the truck and we drank deeply. Man, it tasted good. We were so happy to be done. I don’t think we had been back at the truck more than one or two minutes when we saw a set of headlights approaching along the dirt road from the west.
A Border Patrol vehicle pulled up right beside us and the agent got out. He was young, clean-cut and friendly. I don’t remember if we told him exactly where we had spent our day, but we probably did. He wasn’t concerned, even though he knew darn well we shouldn’t have gone into that off-limits area – all he cared about was that we weren’t the Bad Guys. Paul and I kept guzzling while engaging in a lively conversation with this fellow. Our curiosity was getting the better of us, so we finally asked him if the BP had encountered a thirty-something Hispanic male along the road to the west earlier in the day. He replied that he was the one who had found him. We told him how we had encountered the guy and given him a bit of help and sent him on his way toward the road and rescue.
He told us how he had found the guy lying at the side of the road, in a very bad way, at about 1:30 PM. The man was so far gone that he felt him to be no threat, and he broke with protocol and got him up into the passenger seat of his SUV and seat-belted him in. He then put an IV into each arm and cranked up the air-conditioning to the max. Fortunately, he was a trained EMT and could assess the situation properly. Oh yes, he also said that the man said that “two angels had saved him in the desert”. He radioed in an urgent request for a rescue helicopter, which arrived and flew the man to a hospital in Phoenix, where they saved his life. Strange, isn’t it – he got his wish, he made it to Phoenix after all.
The agent said he was curious about what we had given him. I told him it was a quart of an electrolyte drink, to which he replied that it was good that we hadn’t given him water as it would have killed him. There is a condition called hyponatremia which, when your body’s electrolyte levels are very depleted, can cause you to die if you are given plain water. He also told us that, if we ever found anyone again, to call the Border Patrol, not any other agency, as they were all trained to administer life-saving help in such cases. Well, we all felt pretty good about what we had done that day, so we shook hands with him and said goodbye. Everything had turned out okay – we bagged our peak, helped save a life and survived to tell about it. We had covered 19 miles in rugged, remote terrain and had climbed 3,865 vertical feet.
Remember in the first installment of this story, where I said I’d talk a bit more about what I was drinking that day? I said it was Zipfizz. It is a powder which comes in a tube, you add it to water, and it makes a good electrolyte replacement, perfect for the desert. I had 20 tubes of it which had been sitting around my house for a while, so I decided to use it up. I added all 20 tubes of it to the five quarts of water I started out with that day. I didn’t know much about it, or how to use it, but I do now. The manufacturer recommends taking a maximum of three tubes a day, warning that it can keep you up at night, but that it also keeps you “awake, energized and refreshed”. Well folks, this is my unpaid testimonial for Zipfizz. I can attest that it works. The Energizer Bunny couldn’t have outrun me down that long valley during those last hours of that fateful day. One tube of Zipfizz contains, among many other things, almost 42,000 % of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin B12, so by taking 20 tubes of it I consumed well over 800,000% of my rda of B12!!! As a result, an hour into our drive home, when Paul told me he was exhausted and asked me to drive, I said sure. I drove the last two hours, and I remember telling him that I felt funny, sort of tingly all over. I don’t drink coffee, so I’m not used to having a buzz like that. When I got home much later, I lay there all night as if someone were running an electric current through me! I couldn’t sleep a wink, even though I had completed a death march. Maybe the Zipfizz gave the crosser we met enough zip to make it out to the road. Personally, I don’t think I’ll use Zipfizz again.
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