A man hiking in the Colorado mountains is lucky to be alive after he was separated from his mountaineering group and spent the night lost while the wind howled and freezing rain poured down.
The man, who has not been identified, was with a group of work colleagues and they left him on his own while he tried to push on to the summit of Mount Shavano. The mountain is almost three miles high and is located about 150 miles from Denver.
On Facebook, the Chaffee County Search and Rescue said they responded to a call last week on Friday night about a lost hiker. The whole group started out as 15 who started up the mountain at sunrise. The event was a work retreat, but only some of the climbers planned to go all the way to the summit. The lost man was one of them, and he unwisely chose to go it alone when others did not want to join him.
The man made it to the summit at 11:30 that morning, but became disoriented on the way back down, according to rescuers. He tried to leave himself a trail of “breadcrumb” by marking the way as he ascended by leaving some of his personal effects in a field of boulders. But when he made his way back down he found that someone had picked them up.
As he made his way down, the man found himself on an unstable incline made of loose pieces of rock, and that’s when he knew he had gotten lost. The man sent text messages to he coworkers, who advised he go back up and try to pick up the trail again.
By 4 p.m. the hiker sent additional texts saying that while he found the trail, a storm with freezing rain and huge gusts had spun up. It was then that he lost his cell connection and became disoriented.
Rescue teams started looking for him at 9 p.m. but could not find him all night in the blinding rain and unsafe climbing conditions. A helicopter could not spot him either.
The search started up again on Saturday morning, and to everyone’s relief, the man was able to get through on 911 and the search team found him in a gully. The man said he had fallen almost two dozen times on the steep sides of the mountain, and the last fall put him down permanently.
He was taken to the hospital and evaluated for treatment, but no further details are available.
