Never underestimate the mountains! They showed me their teeth today!
I usually hike/run fast and light, and haven’t been carrying any survival type gear. Today was super warm, around 55 F, so I was dressed lightly in tights and a light jacket. I had a hat and headlamp in my running pack.
The trail was nicely packed and pretty solid. A bit slushy, but really great running. The mali-dog pack and I made it all the way to the summit without any trouble. I’ve had colder days up there in the summer, it was calm and warm with incredible views. As we headed off the summit, I ran across a patch of punchy snow.
My left foot went through a soft area of snow and I fell through the snow up to my mid-thigh. I wasn’t worried, and tried to pull my leg out of the snow. I couldn’t. I still wasn’t worried and tried harder, my leg didn’t budge. My foot felt clamped firmly in something very solid. I kept trying to pull my foot out, but it was not moving at all. I started worrying that I had wedged my foot between two rocks after breaking through the layer of snow. There are stories about hikers who die when they are stuck when something like this happens.
I began to try to dig myself out but wasn’t making much progress. I didn’t have anything harder to dig with than my hands so it was rough going. So I started really pulling on my stuck leg, and felt a little movement, finally. After some serious yanking, I managed to pull my foot loose from my shoe. Finally, my leg was free, minus shoe.
It took me a long time to dig my shoe out. The reason I was so stuck was because my foot had gotten really jammed under a solid layer of ice that was under the wet snow. I had to actually break about an inch-thick layer of ice to get my shoe out. Even then I’m not sure I could have gotten the shoe with my foot in it out of that ice.
Scary stuff. I did have cell phone service up there, but by the time help would have come, I would have likely been hypothermic with freezing injury to my stuck leg. And some of my dogs would not take kindly to rescuers, with me stuck like that.
What I learned? Well, I’ll be packing survival gear now, so I could at least stay warm, start a fire, and also a shovel of some kind to dig myself out.
And, I’ll never underestimate the mountains. Even a relatively short, easy summit is serious stuff! Stay safe out there! Shit happens!
