Every week I read half a dozen reports on search-and-rescue missions to save lost skiers, errant rock climbers, and the occasional stranded dog. Often these stories are sad tales of adventurers suffering injuries or losing their lives. But every so often, I come across a rescue story that makes me slap my forehead in amazement.

That was my reaction when I read about the fortuitous fate of a man named Julian Hernandez and his 12-year-old son. The two went missing this past Sunday, February 16, while hiking in , which is located just outside Saint George, Utah. The sun went down, temperatures began to plummet, and the two began to fear for their lives. And that’s when fate, or a miracle, or dumb luck stepped in.

While searching for shelter in a darkened ravine, they stumbled across a green backpack just sitting there on a rock ledge. They opened the pack to find a wilderness survival kit that would make Ranger Rick proud: Pop-Tarts, Clif Bars, a jug of water, an emergency tent, and first-aid supplies.

The gear helped the two to stay warm, fed, and hydrated overnight. Eventually rescuers equipped with night vision goggle hoisted them into a helicopter and flew them to safety. They were out in the elements for about 22 hours.

“The moment we found the backpack—it was lovely,” Julian Hernandez told TV . “We found some food in there so that kept us pretty well. It kept us pretty well into the morning.”

Hernandez’ quotes made me laugh. I envisioned a scene from the Netflix survival show Outlast where a half-starved contestant finds a cache of food and survival gear dropped into the wilderness by producers. Lovely, indeed.

I love this story from . A father-son duo got stranded overnight hiking in Southern Utah recently and found a backpack stocked with survival supplies. Turns out a teen had lost it 45 days ago and it’s being credited for saving them.

— Lindsay Aerts (@LindsayOnAir)

Now here’s the forehead-slapping part of the story: the lucky backpack had belonged to another hiker who had been rescued in the same spot more than a month ago.

On January 4, a 15-year-old boy named Levi Dittmanm from nearby Ivins, Utah, went for a hike in Snow Canyon with his green backpack. Like Hernandez, Dittman got lost and stuck in the ravine. He spent the night in the canyon, and at some point during the ordeal he tossed his backpack onto an adjacent ledge, but he was unable to climb up and retrieve it.

Eventually a SAR volunteer located Dittmann and brought to safety, but his survival backpack remained in the canyon. Nobody knew that, 45 days later, this pack would help a lost father and son weather a cold and lonely night.

“I’m really glad that it could help people, because that’s what the pack was intended for,” Dittman .

It turns out Dittmann had spent several months collecting survival supplies and cramming them into his backpack prior to the hike. Losing it was a total bummer, he told media. “I kinda just had to leave it there, which was a bit frustrating because I think at the time it was 200 to 300 bucks worth of stuff,” Levi Dittmann told ABC4. Apparently the SAR team gave Dittmann back his pack.

Are there survival lessons to be learned from this story? It’s tough to say. I’ve hiked in Snow Canyon State Park a few times, and I’d never thought you could get lost on the well-marked trail system.Ìę But once the sun goes down, even familiar territory can become alien. I don’t believe any seasoned SAR volunteer would recommend tossing backpacks filled with Pop-Tarts into random gullies or canyons.

Perhaps the best conclusion from this one is that the will always help in the wilderness, no matter if they belong to you or someone else.

Of course, no story with this amount of serendipitous coincidence could exist without someone offering a different takeaway. Levi Dittman’s mom, Gretchen Dittmann, is convinced that there was a higher power at play. She called the ordeal a “miracle.”

“You really have to have faith that God’s working. Sometimes he’s using a backpack that sat for a month and a half for some guy that needed help in that moment,” she told ABC4.

Her explanation works for me.

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On January 22, 2025, I hiked to the top of the Chief, a 2,303-foot granite monolith in Squamish, British Columbia for what I thought would be a casual BASE jump. I’ve done it over 100 times. It’s one of those jumps where you take off, open, fly to the parking lot, and land. There’s only one tricky spot: a corner ledge about 30 meters to the left after you jump—that’s the main hazard to worry about. You don’t want to make a 90-degree turn into that corner.

After two months of traveling and BASE jumping in Patagonia, these would be my first jumps back in British Columbia. The day that I was leaving Chile, I packed my BASE rig in a rush. It was a messy pack job, and I was distracted on the phone with another jumper.

The wind calmed, but with the cross-breeze blowing I thought I should static line—that’s the type of BASE jump where you tie the line that opens your parachute to an anchor on the rock so the action of jumping opens your chute. A static line is a safe way to jump for a windy day or a low jump.

I remembered that this was the pack job from Patagonia and made up my mind. I suggested my friend and I do a two-way jump, where we both leave the cliff at the same time. Since my parachute would open immediately as I jumped, the two of us wouldn’t collide.

We counted down, and, one after the other, we took off. My parachute opened in a 180-degree line twist to the left, and suddenly I was facing the cliff. Because of the twist, any input into the parachute with my control lines was useless.

I don’t know what ultimately went wrong. I assume it was some combination of my hasty pack job and the cross breeze. Maybe I’ll never know.

I reached for my lines but didn’t have time to look up because the wall was so close. I tried to fight it, but there was nothing to fight. I smashed into the wall with my whole body. The rest happened in five seconds. I smashed into the wall, trying to fight the parachute to fix my lines because I had some clearing air-wise. The parachute continued collapsing as I slid down the wall. Then the chute caught air again and I smashed into the wall once more. The crashing and sliding went on for a few seconds as I waited for the final impact. In those moments I knew I was ready to die or get really badly hurt. There was nothing below me but hundreds of meters of air.

Then my parachute caught a tree. I was left hanging—air below me, air around me, nowhere to grab, nowhere to step. My first thought after the chaos died down and I caught my breath was, What am I hanging onto and how long is this going to take? I was in a panic for the next 20 minutes because I didn’t know if my tangled chute was going to hold. I called my boyfriend—he’s a jumper as well—and said he needed to call 911 and get the search and rescue process going. I didn’t know how long I was going to be hanging, I might have gone at any moment.

I heard people above me screaming, and they probably had called for a rescue as well. Within five minutes, I saw cops and firemen below, but they couldn’t get to me from above. I waited—dangling on the line.

I’ve been part of rescues like this before with other jumpers and I knew that it was going to take a long time. I tried to assess my body. I had hurt my knee crashing into the wall and it was swelling up. My next problem was suspension trauma—extended periods in a harness can restrict your blood flow and cause an injury—because I was fully hanging on one leg. I didn’t want to move an inch, because I was scared that if I moved, my parachute could give in and I would fall. I tried to look up at the parachute, but I couldn’t see what it was hanging on. I tried to look at the ledge below me, which was about 100 meters down, and I thought that at least I would have a very clean death if I fell.

After half an hour, my leg started going numb. I knew I had to take the weight off it to get blood flowing. After that much time, I felt better about the stability of whatever I was hanging on, so I pulled up on my risers to put the weight on my arms for a few seconds and immediately felt the blood rush into my leg. Some friends came up to rescue me with ropes on their own, but they decided to wait because they didn’t want to throw a rope that messed with the parachute and could cause me to fall.

It was the longest four hours of my life.

I was just trying to keep my mind occupied counting to 60 slowly ten times, trying to count minutes. Ten minutes of counting was 30 minutes in real time. Words came into my head, something like With the power in my mind I am pushing forward. I probably repeated that line a thousand times. I have no idea where it came from.

I thought of TomaĆŸ Humar, the great Slovenian alpinist and soloist who had a very bad, very famous rescue on Nanga Parbat that took six days. He was wet, cold, and stuck in a snow cave at 21,000 feet. My situation wasn’t even that bad, and he survived with the power of his mind. That’s all I could think of.

Two hours in, my body started to shut down. I just wanted to conserve the energy I needed. I was running out, and then all of a sudden I heard this voice: James, one of the SAR team members.

“Hey Alenka, I know your dad.” He was a few meters away from me. The moment he clipped me in, I felt everything I didn’t feel before. I felt cold. I felt my knee really hurting to the point where I was screaming. I just felt everything. I felt safe.

Alenka Mali walked away from her crash with nothing but a bruised knee. She told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that she doesn’t know why she is still alive, but that she believes there must be a reason. —Ed.

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Search and rescue crews in Las Vegas continue to have a busy start to 2025.

On Wednesday, February 6, members of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s search and rescue squad saved a woman who had fallen from a climbing area in Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

According to a , the woman, who was not named, had fallen while climbing near the White Rock Hills hiking and climbing area. She landed in a boulder field and was unable to hike out.

“The victim fell while climbing and was unable to move due to a back injury,” read a statement from the department.

White Rock Hills is located in a remote corner of the park, approximately 6 miles past the park entrance, down a dirt road. The area is ringed by a four-mile trail that takes climbers to several different climbing routes.

Rangers from the Bureau of Land Management hiked in to the area and made contact with the victim, but they were unable to bring her to safety on foot. Officials decided to send an emergency helicopter to the area. According to the release, three search and rescue officials flew in on the helicopter and helped the ground crews move her to a suitable extraction point.

Dramatic photos showed the helicopter removing the injured climber. According to the release, she was taken to a ground ambulance.

The rescue was the third major lifesaving mission in Red Rock Canyon this year involving rock climbers. On Saturday, January 18, crews responded to near the Pine Creek area of the park.

One rescue involved four climbers who became stranded on the “Cat in the Hat” climbing route after their ropes became entwined. The four were preparing to rappel the route when the incident happened, and they retreated to a ledge. One of the climbers, Joe De Luca, was able to call rescuers from his cell phone.

As De Luca was waiting for rescue crews to reach his party, he witnessed the other incident 100 or so yards away. A climber named Micah Manalese, 30, fell from a route and hit the rocks approximately 130 feet below.

“It was evident to me that the chance of life was zero, or at least very low, if we didn’t do something quickly,” De Luca told Climbing.

De Luca called rescuers after the fall occurred, but they were unable to save Manalese.

Her partner, Robert Hiett, ŽÚŽÇ°ùÌę°ä±ôŸ±łŸČúŸ±ČÔČ”.Ìę

“With her training, she somehow still managed to squeeze in time with her family and friends. She could do it all,” Hiett wrote.

Red Rock Canyon is one of the most popular outdoor destinations in the Southwestern U.S., and climbers and hikers flock to the destination in the winter and early spring, before temperatures begin to soar in late April. The canyon’s famed Navajo Sandstone formations are traversed by several dozen climbing routes.

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Tanner Bean stepped over the cliff edge and rappelled down a slope of crumbling rock, as other members of Colorado’s Mesa County Search and Rescue team watched him descend.

After lowering 300 feet, Bean reached a ledge no bigger than a dinner table, jutting from the sheer precipice several hundred feet above the valley floor.

That’s where Bean found Tiny the dog.

“She looked at me like ‘oh my god, oh my god, a human!'” Bean told °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ.Ìę“She started wagging her tail and running back and forth. She just seemed so excited.”

Bean, 40, was ecstatic but also worried by the reaction.

“I was like ‘No no no, please don’t fall off this cliff, not now!” Bean added.

It had taken Bean and his SAR teammates six hours to reach Tiny on this cliff edge in a remote corner of the state, several miles outside of the community of Collbran. The group had set out early on the morning of January 2 after receiving an SOS call from Tiny’s owner, a local hunter. The previous day, Tiny, a 20-pound hunting hound, had been tracking a mountain lion across a series of peaks when she had descended the cliff face and become stranded on the ledge. She couldn’t ascend the loose rock, and trying to navigate the descent would be fatal.

SAR officials said that Tiny was wearing a GPS tracker on her collar, which showed her approximate location within the dizzying terrain. Tiny’s owner could see the stranded dog from below with his eyes.ÌęNight fell, and the owner realized that Tiny would have to spend the evening on the precipice. The following morning, he called rescuers.

Mesa Search and Rescue, which is based out of Grand Junction, oversees a huge swath of Colorado’s western quarter, and its area of operation includes popular hiking and biking trails outside of Fruita, the Colorado National Monument, and a stretch of the Colorado River that’s beloved by river runners. During the spring and summer, the team fields numerous calls from hikers, cyclists, and boaters.

“Most of our calls are lost hikers or swiftwater rescues,” said Nick Ingalls, 30, one of the other rescuers. “But we will get maybe two or three dog calls each year.”

Fifteen SAR members met at a trailhead near Collbran that morning. Due to the tricky terrain, the group split into two groups to see if they could find the best route to the top of the cliff. The hike in took far longer than they anticipated, as the teams had to trudge through knee-deep snow drifts and navigate tight gullies and washes.

“We were hiking over these ridges that felt like they were made of Frosted Flakes,” Bean said. “You’d take a few steps up and then slide back down.”

It was nearly 4 P.M. when Bean and Ingalls finally located the bluffs above Tiny. Several miles away, SAR members set up a spotting lens to watch the operation unfold. After fixing anchors, Bean descended the cliff, found Tiny, attached her to a specialty dog harness, and lifted her to safety.

Ingalls said that Tiny’s enthusiasm quickly wore off once she got to the top of the mountain. The pads of her feet were bloody and scarred, and she seemed exhausted.

“She acted a lot like a human patient who had been out in the elements,” he said. “So happy at first, and then after the adrenaline wears off, she just laid down.”

They gave Tiny water, but nobody in the rescuing party had brought dog food. Ingalls said he had a single bar of cell service and he texted a friend who is a veterinarian to ask whether the food they had in their packs was safe to feed a dog. In the end, they opened a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli and meat sauce and spooned some out for Tiny. She gulped the meal down.

“I’ve never seen a dog happier to eat human food,” Ingalls said.

But the rescue mission wasn’t over yet—the team still had to get Tiny back to their vehicles. At first, Tiny walked beside the rescuers, but she quickly sat down with fatigue. So Bean, Ingalls, and the other SAR team members took turns carrying the 20-pound dog as they rappelled down cliffs, climbed through dense brush, and trudged through snow drifts. After several hours, Tiny’s owner met them on the trail with his horses, and they finished the journey on horseback. It took them four hours to return to their vehicles.

It was dark when Bean and Ingalls finally reached their vehicles and completed the rescue. The total time for the mission was 13 hours—a grueling day of long hikes, technical climbing, and route-finding in the backcountry. Rescue missions for stranded humans often take a fraction of the time—and this one had been to save a 20-pound pooch. But neither Ingalls nor Bean complained about the outing when I spoke to them on a video call in late January.

Bean told me he’d “100 percent” go through the ordeal to save Tiny again. Ingalls agreed.

“I think we try to always try to have empathy and to put ourselves in their situation,” Ingalls said. “Whether it’s a human or a dog, they’re having the worst day of their life, and we get a chance to help them.”

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Search and rescue crews in rural Vermont are praising a small electronic tracking device for helping them save two people in the backcountry.

On Saturday, December 7, Drew Clymer, the deputy chief of  received a call from a local woman who said her husband and eight-year-old son hadn’t returned from a backcountry ski outing. The sun had gone down and temperatures were plummeting, so Clymer radioed other members of the team to launch a rescue operation.

The region where the two had gone missing is called the Bruce Trail, which is located adjacent to Stowe Mountain Resort. A recent storm had dumped nearly a foot of fresh powder on the area.

“Everybody knows the Bruce,” Clymer said. “Back there you’re a long way from home if something goes wrong.”

The woman then told Clymer that her son was carrying a device called a , a GPS tracking tag made for children. The device, which is about the size of a thumb drive, connects to a smartphone app that shows the location of the device on a map.

Clymer asked the woman to meet him at the Bruce Trail parking lot with her phone. When Clymer opened the Jiobit app, he could see the boy’s exact location on a detailed map, several miles from the trailhead. Clymer and other rescuers zipped into the backcountry on an ATV and found the missing duo within 15 minutes of departing. Stowe Mountain Rescue has not released the names of the rescued individuals.

“This was the easiest rescue I’ve ever been a part of,” he said.

Neither the father nor the boy had headlamps or extra clothing. They had planned to ski down the trail, but a broken binding forced them to walk. When SAR crews reached them, the father was bootpacking through deep snow while towing his son behind.

Clymer said the small device was “pivotal” for helping the two avert disaster.

“We were back at the trailhead with them in under 25 minutes,” said Clymer. “Coming from someone who spends most of his professional life searching for missing people, this thing was revelatory.”

Had crews been forced to search for the duo in the dark, Clymber believes they would have eventually located the two. But it would have taken several hours to find them in the dark, since neither the father or boy were carrying headlamps.

Similar to the Apple AirTag and other electronic tracking devices, the Jiobit shares location via cellular data, WiFi signals, and bluetooth. But the Jiobit also has GPS capabilities, which allow it to function in the backcountry where there’s no cellular signal.

The Jiobit is hardly the only device to boast these capabilities—Tack GPS, Gabb Watch, and SecuLife S4 all use GPS signals as well.

On its website, the product is described as “waterproof, durable, discreet, and provides accurate real-time tracking at any distance.”  It’s designed specifically to track kids, and comes with a locking device that cannot be disabled.

Clymber, who is also the search and rescue coordinator for the Vermont Department of Public Safety, said he plans to recommend GPS trackers to parents and also caregivers of the elderly. A sizable percentage of the SAR rescues in Stowe, he said, are for elderly people who suffer from dementia or Alzheimers. GPS tags, he said, could dramatically reduce the time it takes to locate them.

“It’s not a silver bullet,” he said. “But at least it gives you some peace of mind.”

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At the Whitney portal trailhead—the main starting point for both dayhikers and backpackers on the Mount Whitney Trail—there’s a scale to weigh your backpack. This September, before I started my trek, I slipped off my pack and hung it on the scale. For my 22-mile dayhike, I had packed 3 liters of water, breakfast, lunch, some snacks, hand warmers, gloves, a puffy, a solar-powered phone charger, my first-aid kit, a water filter, and a couple more extraneous pieces of gear. My total pack weight for a day on the trail tipped the scale at 19 pounds, which wouldn’t earn me the respect of any ultralighter.

So when that last weekend had to rescue a pair of Mount Whitney hikers—who between them had “150 lbs of newly purchased gear plus 5 gallons of water”—my jaw hit the floor. Five gallons of water weighs just under 42 pounds; in total, that meant that each of these hikers was toting roughly 96 pounds—or five times my not-so-light pack weight. The strongest hikers would seriously struggle to carry this gear. How could these hikers manage?

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t make it very far. The pair started their trek at 6 P.M. Friday, November 1, with a plan to camp at Lone Pine Lake and tag the summit on Saturday. They hiked 2.7 miles until they became too exhausted and stopped around 3 a.m. By then, one hiker had two blisters and a bad headache, so they set up camp on the trail. One of the hikers also told Inyo SAR she had a mass in her brain that was sensitive to barometric pressure. Later, the pair woke up to snow showers that had filled their shoes.

Luckily, the pair recognized they had reached their limit and called for help via their iPhone’s SOS setting. By 10 A.M. Saturday, the search and rescue team was on the move, reaching them by 1:40 P.M. and escorting them down the mountain to reach the trailhead by 3:15 P.M.

It’s clear that this pair was new to the trails: They had to buy all the gear for this hike, and the sheer amount they brought would give the strongest hikers pause. Among their 150 pounds of gear, they didn’t bring a map, a bear canister, or a water filter. The last item would have been especially helpful: On the Mount Whitney Trail, there are lots of lakes and reliable sources, which means that carrying more than a couple of liters at a time is generally overkill.

Being the tallest mountain in the lower 48, Mount Whitney is a dream peak for all types of hikers. However, it’s a serious undertaking that requires lots of research and training. In their Instagram post about this rescue, Inyo SAR recommends that hikers without proper gear or experience hire a guide service. So we reached out to Ryan Huetter, an IFMGA/AMGA Certified Mountain Guide who works for Sierra Mountain Guides in Bishop, California, to get his perspective on this incident. He has guided anyone from “complete novices to seasoned experts” on expeditions all around the Sierra and the world.

“For a lot of inexperienced people who may not even have previous backpacking experience, let alone experience at altitude, or in inclement weather, [the Mount Whitney Trail] may be incomprehensibly hard for them,” he says. Sure, an inexperienced hiker might be able to blaze up and down the mountain without a problem in perfect weather, but “in early season, late season, or winter conditions, it is not a place to learn those skills,” he says.

In many cases, having a guide would help stop preventable disasters on the mountain, like bringing 150 pounds of gear and five gallons of water. Guides can perform gear checks to help remove unnecessary gear from your pack. Depending on the company and the specific expedition, guides can also sometimes provide gear if the hikers don’t already have it. When it comes to gear mishaps, Huetter, however, has seen it all.

“I’ve watched people duct tape a 30 pack of little water bottles to the outside of their packs,” he says. “I’ve also seen the same but with a case of beer.” In the Sierra, he recommends carrying two liters of water and packing a BeFree, a Sawyer Squeeze or some other easy filter.

Mount Whitney’s height and beauty attracts hikers of a wide range of experience from all around the world. Seeing hikers rules or acting erratically is not uncommon. Although hiring a guide or doing more research would have saved the hikers from last weekend’s incident a lot of trouble, they did a few things right. They stopped to rest when they were exhausted instead of pushing forward. Instead of splitting up, they stayed together. They called for help when conditions deteriorated, and when SAR came, they listened to instructions and descended.

The morals of this story? Don’t pack too much weight, and make sure essential gear makes it into your pack; make sure you’re physically prepared before tackling a challenging hike; check the weather forecast and be ready for bad conditions when hiking the mountains in late and early season. Most of all, remember that having SAR access is a life-saving privilege that relies on community donations and, sometimes, volunteer labor. Consider reaching out to your local SAR team, donating, or even joining.

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Claire Nelson was more than a mile off the trail when she fell 30 feet in Joshua Tree National Park. As she lay there with a broken pelvis, she realized she had no cell service, and no one knew where she was. As three days alone and broken in the desert turned into four, she was forced to reckon with all of the choices that had brought her there, and ask: What does it mean to be truly alone?

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You’re on a hike with your dog when his paws start bleeding on sharp rocks. Soon after, he refuses to move. It’s not possible to carry him out, because he’s not only injured but stubborn and heavy. You’re miles from your car and dark is coming. So what do you do?

If a human is in trouble, the easy answer is to call search and rescue either with a cell phone or satellite communicator. But if an animal needs rescuing, the answer isn’t so simple.

Many SAR organizations will not respond to emergency calls for an injured animal. They are restricted by law to only dispatch missions for humans, says Keelan Cleary, a member of , which serves Oregon’s northwest corner.

The dispatching agency—in the western US, usually a sheriff’s office; in the eastern US, either a fish and wildlife office or a fire department—must take into account the risks of a mission as well as a team’s bandwidth. Since many teams are made up of volunteers, there’s only so much time and energy they can offer.

It doesn’t mean that SAR team members aren’t animal lovers. Cleary, who has two dogs and a cat, brings treats on every mission just in case an animal is involved.

“When we do deal with animals, it’s usually because a human is injured and the pet is with them,” says Cleary.

Oregon is among the rare places, along with , , and Los Angeles, with an animal-specific rescue organization. Hikers can call the (OHSTAR) team if their pet is in trouble. The team is trained in high angle ropes, tree climbing, and austere environment training, which includes map reading, terrain analysis, risk mitigation, and first aid.

This summer, OHSTAR rescued a Newfoundland named Levon after his owner took him camping in the Mount St. Helens area for respite from a Portland heatwave. That night, Levon started showing signs of heat stress, and in the morning, despite a cool evening and lots of water, he was unsteady and started to stumble. The rescue team arrived quickly with a special piece of equipment called a stokes basket to carry Levon, who weighs more than 100 pounds. Other OHSTAR missions have included saving a horse stuck in deep snow and a dog stranded for a week on a steep cliffside.

Cleary recommends that all pet owners, especially those without access to a rescue organization, add a few more items to their list of 10 essentials in case they ever need to spend a night on the mountain—either because the hiker is in distress or their animal is.

Along with extra layers, water, and food for you, he recommends bringing water and food for your animal. Duct tape can also be a lifesaver; Cleary says he once made a bootie when his dog’s paw pads got scraped. He also brings a lightweight fabric sling in the event he ever has to carry a dog off the trail. Here are for caring for your adventure animal:

• Keep your dog hydrated on the trail. Carry a collapsible dish and offer them water often, especially if it’s hot out.
• Choose pet-friendly trails. Make sure you’re aware of your pet’s physical limits—it’s best to start slow and ramp up the difficulty as you and your pet gain experience hiking together. It’s best to leave your pet at home for technical scrambles and high mileage days. Make sure to follow any restrictions for the area you plan to hike.
• Spend time training recall and obedience off the trail so you can be confident in your control over your pet in the backcountry.
• Familiarize yourself with before embarking on longer adventures, just in case something happens, so a call for help is your last resort.

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Brad Smith hiked into Damascus, Virginia, on the Appalachian Trail just as the rain from Hurricane Helene thickened into a torrent.

“The last 6 miles was the worst weather I’ve been outside in, and I’m 49
I could have kayaked off the mountain if I had one,” he wrote in a message. “The trail was a small river. Guessing I was one of the last customers at the Damascus Diner before Laurel Creek took it and the street over.”

More than are dead and many more are missing after Helene carved a 500-mile-long path of devastation through the southeastern United States with 30 people losing their lives in North Carolina’s Buncombe County alone. Among the hardest-hit communities were trail towns in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia that some of the AT’s best-known businesses and trail angels call home.

Drew “Birdman” Glines, an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, rafting guide, and North Carolina local told Backpacker that the “devastation” inflicted on riverside communities was hard to describe.

“Roads and bridges have been completely destroyed, making some areas still completely inaccessible to even emergency vehicles,” he wrote in an email.

While destinations like the Nantahala Outdoor Center, the Western Smokies, Gatlinburg, and Pigeon Ford escaped major harm from the hurricane, other areas were not so lucky. Glines rattled off a list of landmarks affected by the hurricane.

“ in Roan was flooded. Hot Springs was hard hit
as was Hartford,” he wrote. “ is devastated.” The majority of western North Carolina is out of cell service, water, and power, although ‘disaster roaming’ has allowed locals to connect to any functioning network in the wake of the tragedy. The town of Asheville is still largely isolated due to infrastructure damage and washed-out roads.

On Trail When the Hurricane Hit

Smith wasn’t the only hiker caught in the weather. Lisa Woodward was hiking through Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee when the hurricane struck.

“[We] experienced torrential downpours and wind gusts of up to 80 miles per hour or so at almost 6,000 feet elevation,” she wrote in a message. “Had to take a zero on Fri. at TriCorner Knob Shelter to wait out the worst of it. Made it out on Sunday via the Low Gap Trail to Cosby CampGround, where Ken from Discerning Hiker Hostel ‘rescued’ us.”

Mollie Dembek was on trail near Hot Springs when the weather turned.

“I was at Flint Mountain Shelter, north of Hot Springs, NC when it started raining HARD on Tuesday,” she wrote. “I decided to hike the next day to Hemlock Hollow Hostel and Campground in Greeneville, TN the next day to get out of the rain. I am SO GLAD I did. I stayed the night there, warm and dry, but was watching the weather and news the entire time growing more and more anxious,” she said.

Dembek was able to make it to Asheville to stay with a friend. On Saturday, they decided to leave the area. Strangers lent her gas money at a station in Weaverville that was only accepting cash. (“They said it was ‘trail magic,” she recalls. “I absolutely started crying.”)

“They ended up following us over the mountains because we were able to get turn by turn directions from my friend using my Garmin InReach,” she wrote. “I was able to communicate with friends and family using my Garmin and got seven people to safety because of the technology. I was never so grateful to get to Maryville, TN and get a cell signal.”

Hot Springs, North Carolina. My grandfather’s summer mountain pasture was over on Spring Creek, near this lovely little town.

— Anne Margaret Daniel (@venetianblonde)

While locals are still fighting for their lives, other members of the trail community are rallying to support them. Trail Angels like “” Hensley of Erwin, Tennessee are scrambling to support flooded communities in the wake of the tragedy. Matthew “Odie” Norman, a thru-hiker, trail angel, and former owner of the Hiker Yearbook, was in New Jersey for the hurricane but is preparing to drive south to support local trail communities.

Trail Organizations Warn Hikers to Stay Away for Now

Determining when hiking should resume in the southern part of the Appalachian Trail is a sensitive topic. Norman said that “most hikers should not attempt to hike in the south at this time.”

In a statement, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) warned visitors to stay off trail between Springer Mountain (NOBO Mile 0) and Rockfish Gap (NOBO Mile 864.6).

“Over the coming weeks and months, the ATC will be working with the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and state and local partners to inventory the damage to the treadway, trailheads, bridges, overnight sites, privies and other A.T. features,” the organization said. “Landslides and falling trees could continue for some time, so we ask volunteers and trail crews to pause work on this section of the Trail and to coordinate closely with regional ATC teams.”

Hensley said that the devastation in trail communities like Damascus and Hot Springs is “dire.”

“These communities are asking us to please stay away
They cannot handle the infrastructure or any people walking into town,” she said. In the event that hikers choose to continue hiking through southern Appalachia and they get into trouble, she adds, emergency services are unlikely to be able to help in a timely fashion.

Hensley said that hikers should stay informed and start making plans once they reach Virginia.

“When people come through the Shenandoah they need to be deciding what they’re going to do,” she said. “But hiking through this area would be ridiculous and it’s going to put lives on the line.”

Norman said he recognizes that as the weeks stretch on, deciding when it’s the right time to hit the trail again could pose a difficult question—and that different hikers could have different answers.

“The hiking community will be walking a tightrope in the next few months. Should hikers continue their hike? Would it be detrimental to the trail towns? What if there’s an emergency and emergency services are already stretched thin?” he said. “But there are other questions: what if hikers have nowhere to go? What if they’re hiking off war, drug addiction, any number of traumatic events? What if they’re hiking to help?”

One thing Norman is certain of: When hikers are able to come and help, they will.

“I can tell you for a fact that I watched hikers assist trail towns in 2020 and they will do it again in 2024,” he said. “It will not be publicized on Facebook, it will not be filmed, it is not done for recognition, it is done because that’s what hikers do.”

Readers looking for guidance and direction around post-hurricane support can find more information from the . Official trail closures are available on the .Ìę

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You might think features like pools of bubbling acid and hidden booby traps are safely relegated to the imaginary world of Indiana Jones. But in Yellowstone, they’re real. And they’re taking out tourists at a pretty astonishing rate. Just this week, a park visitor suffered third-degree burns after the ground gave way beneath her, dropping her into a pool of scalding-hot water hidden just beneath the surface.

The visitor, a 60-year-old woman from New Hampshire, was hiking off-trail near Old Faithful, the iconic geyser famous for its sky-tickling jet of 350°F steam. She was accompanied by her husband and dog. They didn’t realize how thin the ground was—or what was lurking beneath the delicate crust.

With one misstep, the hiker punched through the thin ground, falling and plunging one leg into the near-boiling water beneath. Her husband and dog remained uninjured. The group was able to self-evacuate to a nearby medical clinic, but the woman was ultimately airlifted to a hospital for further treatment. A from the National Park Service stated that incident remains under investigation. In the meantime, park officials remind all visitors to stay on designated trails and boardwalks.

While this is Yellowstone’s first hydrothermal injury of 2024, it’s not the year’s first close call. Earlier this summer, five visitors accidentally drove their car into a geyser and had to be rescued. Just two weeks after that, a sudden hydrothermal explosion sent hot water and rocks raining from the sky and left panicked visitors running for cover. Some of the stones were up to three feet across and weighed 100 pounds—enough to in the area.

According to the National Park Service, more people have been injured by Yellowstone’s hydrothermal springs than any of the park’s other natural threats. Hot springs-related injuries currently number in the hundreds, and at least by the scalding water. That’s nearly three times as many deaths as those attributed to bear attacks— over the park’s recorded history. Bison attacks happen from time to time, but only two bison-related deaths have been recorded.

In fact, the USGS has called the park’s geothermal springs “.” However, the park points out that not all burns or deaths are the result of accidents. On more than one occasion, an off-leash dog has taken a flying leap into a pool, and its owners have plunged into the near-boiling water to attempt a rescue. Other visitors ignore posted signage to get closer to the water for photo-ops—only to be surprised by a burst of steam.

While burns certainly make memorable souvenirs, the park tends to recommend a distanced selfie instead.

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