brother isn’t reckless. He is calculat-
ing, confident, and experienced—all
of which had little to do with why he
decided to cross anyway. “You were
actively dying,” he told me later. So
he sat down on one of the girders and
scooted across. He ran more than two
miles in 19 minutes. That included the
bridge crossing.
Within minutes of Garrett’s 911
call, Jason Montoya, a Yosemite park
ranger who specializes in technical
rescues for the elite Yosemite Search
and Rescue, was in an ambulance
speeding my way. To be safe, he’d or-
dered a second helicopter equipped
with a hoist to get me out of the can-
yon, plus a team of volunteers to hike
up from El Portal.
Based on the coordinates Garrett
gave to dispatch, Montoya figured
they’d need to fly me out of the can-
yon on the hoist-equipped helicopter,
then transfer me to the rescue heli-
copter, which had a paramedic on
board. Best-case scenario, he thought,
I’d be in the emergency room in an
hour and a half, which might mean
I’d get to keep my leg.
During the busiest times of the
year, there’s a hoist-equipped heli-
copter stationed in Yosemite. But it
wasn’t scheduled to arrive for an-
other week. Dispatch tried its usual
backup, but it was on another call. A
second backup was sidelined with an
oil leak.
Just below Foresta, Garrett crossed
back over Crane Creek on an intactbridge and met the ambulance. A
fallen tree had blocked its path, and
one wheel was stuck in the road’s soft
shoulder. The medics were scram-
bling to pull gear from the truck: IVs,
an inflatable backboard, drugs, and
other medical supplies. Garrett, Mon-
toya, and two medics took off running
with a bag of medical equipment. But
when they reached the burned-out
bridge, Montoya insisted they turn
around rather than scoot across the
girders as Garrett had done.
“We couldn’t take that risk,” Mon-
toya says. Instead, they ran more than
a mile back up the hill they’d just
descended and crossed on the upper
bridge. Then they bushwhacked
toward me across cliffs and through
a half mile of waist-high poison oak.W
hen they arrived, I was
pale and sweating, moaning
in pain. My mom and dad
had been rolling me from my back
to my side to vomit or defecate. My
blood, unable to clot, wept from the
puncture wounds on my ankle. Bruis-
ing, a sign of internal hemorrhaging,
had bloomed to above my knee.
One of the medics, Levi Yardley,
ripped open his medical kit. During
the summer, Yosemite stocks a small
supply of antivenom, but the supply
hadn’t yet been restocked. Instead,
he tossed my mom a blood pressure
cuff and grabbed 1,500 milliliters of
saline, a pill to stop the vomiting, and
fentanyl, a powerful opioid painkiller.104 april 2019
Reader’s Digest