Recently I did something really stupid, and I’m going to prove it to you by telling you this story. So please, read on and don’t make the same mistake I did.

My friend Dave had arrived from California. We hadn’t climbed together in about 10 years, so this was gonna be fun. After he had some emergency repairs done to his truck, we were all set to go. I left mine at home, and we loaded up his and headed out. Our first stop was Bisbee, Arizona. Ninety miles southeast of Tucson, in its heyday in the 1880s it was one of the richest mineral sites in the world and the largest city between St Louis and San Francisco. Today it is a quirky city of 5,000+, and a great place to visit and stay a while.

There’s a mountain nearby called Fissure Peak, with over 2,700 feet of prominence. I’d climbed it a few years back, but Dave needed it. I decided I’d climb something else nearby while he bagged that one. It looked like Mount Martin would be just about right, so Dave picked a good spot to drop me off. Bisbee is a very hilly town, and it was at the end of one of its steep streets that he left me. It was a cold, windy day as I readied my day pack and started up a steep slope and into the bush. What a thrash – it was bush-whacking at its finest, a mixture of manzanita, cactus and spiny bushes! A thousand feet higher, I reached a bump where I had a bit of a view. Jeez, it still looked like quite a way to the summit along a winding ridge.

I carried on, as we peakbaggers do, and before too long arrived on what I assumed was the highest point. I sent a message via satellite on my emergency communication device to my closest contacts, letting them know where I was.

My first mistake of the day was that I didn’t go far enough – by not paying close enough attention to the topo map, I’d stopped on a bump to the north of the true summit, 940 horizontal feet shy of where I wanted to be, thus losing my peak. Assuming I was done, I started back down, choosing what appeared to be a less brushy route – hah! Not quite – it too was a nasty, albeit downhill, romp.

I finally reached the town, walking into someone’s back yard and surprising the hell out of them. They directed me to the nearby highway, where I planned to call Dave on my cell phone. Walking down a lane, I saw several metal sculptures gracing someone’s yard.

As I walked along the shoulder, I saw the rotting remains of a dog, its white teeth frozen in a macabre grin, and decided to move a little farther away from the stench. Sitting on a rock with the traffic roaring by 20 feet away, I called Dave (this was to become an important detail) and told him where I was. Half an hour later, he made it down off his peak and drove the few miles to pick me up.

We turned around and drove back north a few miles, then up a steep dirt road to the top of Peak 7161, only because of its high prominence. My God, the wind! – you should have heard it screaming through the radio towers on the summit. It was cold, dammit, so we didn’t stick around.

Back down into Bisbee, stopping for a milkshake lunch and then on to Douglas, hard by the Mexican border. From there, we turned northeast and drove another 50 miles through the broad San Bernardino Valley and San Simon Valley, passing briefly into New Mexico. Then, a turn west back into Arizona and 12 short miles to the mountain village of Portal. A quick stop at the Forest Service ranger station supplied us with the info we needed to find a campsite, where we spent an uneventful night.

For 24 years, ever since I met my wife, I have always left her detailed information on my climbing plans: peaks to be climbed, routes I plan to take, dates and times – in other words, all important details, without fail. In our haste to get an early start, I had forgotten to do that. Also, I had neglected to call her during the day to give her a progress report. Normally, at the end of the day I always send another satellite message to her letting her know exactly where I am, but today I got so involved in getting camped that I also forgot to do that. The plot thickened.

Early the next morning, Dave and I broke camp and drove the few miles to a trailhead at 4,960′ elevation. Our goal was to climb an impressive-looking mountain called Silver Peak, elevation 8,008′, another one of Arizona’s high-prominence beauties. It was around 8:00 AM when we started up the trail in the chill morning air. Friends had told us that this was one spectacular climb, and we were looking forward to it. Right from the git-go, we found they were right. Down low, the path wound its way through grassland dotted with the occasional tree.

Before long, we passed below a spectacular feature called “The Fingers”.

The higher we went, the better the views became.

The trail entered a more heavily-forested area, and at about 7,400′ we climbed many switchbacks, to arrive on a ridge just below the summit.

When we started from the parking lot at the trailhead, we met a Border Patrol agent who was heading to the summit. Just below the top, we met him once again. He told us he was waiting for his partner, who soon arrived. Once a year or so, they made a routine climb to the summit, just to check for evidence of Bad Guys. There was a set of 50 or so steps, some stone and the rest concrete.

These led the last of the way to the very top, where stood an old concrete footing dating from the days when a Forest Service lookout graced the highest point of Silver Peak, elevation 8,008 feet.

As promised, the views were so spectacular as to be almost unbelievable. Here are some of them.

Dave called home from there – why I didn’t, I can’t explain, just laziness I guess, but that was another mistake. It was 10 minutes after 11. We went back down the steps to a small hut on the ridge and ate a leisurely lunch.

By the time we left, it was noon. Our return trip down the mountain went smoothly, covering the 4.6 miles in 2 hours (compared with the 3 hours up). It didn’t matter the time of day, the views were amazing.

As we walked up to the parking lot, discussing our favorite Star Trek episodes, we saw a large pickup truck plainly marked with “Cochise County Sheriff” on its side. A man was standing there, and as soon as he saw us he called out my name – I responded in the affirmative. My immediate thought was that some emergency had happened at home and they had come to give me the bad news. Then I saw the wording “Search and Rescue” on the truck. He said “You’re okay”. It turns out that the Border Patrol agents had spoken to him a few minutes earlier when they returned, confirming that 2 guys were not far behind them. Then it became clear, all too clear, what had transpired. Allow me to reconstruct.

My first mistake was not leaving a detailed written account of where we were going to climb for these 3 days. Yes, I had sent a satellite message yesterday at 11:00 AM from Mount Martin, but my next mistake was not phoning home to give my wife those climbing details I should have left her in writing. My next mistake was not sending a satellite message home at the end of that day. I easily could have, but I was so distracted with setting up camp and cooking supper that I dropped the ball there too. There was no cell-phone reception in the deep canyon where we spent the night. The next morning, when we climbed Silver Peak, I should have sent another satellite message where we parked, but did I? – nope. I could have phoned home from any point during the climb, but didn’t – sheer laziness on my part.

At 11:00 AM, as we reached the top of the mountain, my wife, now in a total panic, knew she had to contact the authorities and file a missing-persons report. Worried ever since yesterday passed without any contact after my first-and-only message from Mount Martin, she went to work. At precisely 24 hours since my last message, right to the minute, she started to make calls. One of the first things she did was to call one of my emergency contacts, a climber friend in Tucson named Andy Martin. He was no stranger to emergency rescue procedures, and knew exactly what to do. He used details in an earlier email from Dave to construct a probable timeline of where we might be.

Many phone calls between him and my wife got the ball rolling. She contacted the Cochise County Sheriff, and they called their search and rescue people, who immediately mobilized and set out. One or two were local, but most of them had to drive from either Bisbee (86 miles away) or Sierra Vista (109 miles away). They were all well-trained volunteers whose sole mission was to save the lives of those in distress, and we were told that a total of 15 of them were on their way. Andy had prepared co-ordinates of the peaks we planned to do and made them available to the search and rescue folks. The search and rescue folks, with my wife’s help, had put a trace on my Delorme satellite rescue device, but since I had it turned off, they couldn’t tell where I was at that time. They had also traced the last ping from my cell phone, to the spot where I’d called Dave from the side of the road.

They soon reached the parking lot and ran the plates on Dave’s truck – they knew we were up there somewhere. As soon as Andy got the call, without any hesitation he hopped in his truck and left Tucson, in constant communication with my wife. His plan was to drive to where he thought we were and start looking for us, a distance of 150 miles, regardless of the hour. Once Dave and I walked out to the parking lot, the fellow who was already there got on the radio and called the others. He told them all was well, and that they could go back home. Even so, a few others showed up because they were already so close. They even had a German shepherd with them, ready to help in finding us.

One lady officer asked for our identification and wrote down our particulars so she could complete her report. Another officer, who had choreographed the whole rescue, had also arrived and stood quietly in the background.

I then began a round of thank-yous to everyone involved, thank-yous and apologies both. They were all very gracious, in spite of the fact that this whole thing was my fault and could have all been avoided. I was able to contact Andy and tell him we were fine and were down from Silver Peak. He was most of the way to us by then, and rather than write the whole thing off, he ended climbing some other peaks before returning home.

As I write this, only 3 days since my rescue, I am still embarrassed by the whole incident. A lot of people spent a lot of their time on my behalf, and all because I was careless. I have learned a valuable lesson – ALWAYS let someone know where you’re going to climb, with as much detail as possible. If you change those plans while in the field, try to get word out with the new details – your life could depend on it.