Miracle in the wilderness
Published: December 2, 2005
Every day is a good day for Amy Racina. It wasn’t always that way, but crashing 60 feet into a granite ravine changed her perspective.
Racina of Healdsburg, a seasoned backpacker, was on a solo trip two years ago in the Tehipite Valley, a seldom-visited area of Kings Canyon National Park, which is in the southern end of the Sierra Nevada directly east of Fresno. She was 12 days into a 162-mile trip when she lost the trail she was on. As she carefully crisscrossed down the valley looking for the trail, the ground suddenly gave way and she found herself careering through the air.
“So this is how it ends,” she thought in the seconds before she slammed into a granite ravine.
The fall nearly killed Racina, but the miracle — the first of many — was that it didn’t.
Racina has published a book recounting her rescue and arduous recovery. “Angels in the Wilderness” , is titled for the three hikers who saved her life after they came upon her even though she had been off-trail when she fell in a remote area visited only by a handful of people each season.
Racina, 48, has been backpacking since she was 16. She frequently hikes in the Sierra, logging thousands of miles, many of them alone. She is a backpacker’s backpacker, so obsessive about reducing the weight in her pack that she cuts the edges off maps.
She is a single mom of a teenage son and runs two small businesses — the Everyday Goddess, selling clothing and trinkets at fairs, and selling betting cards to sports pools — out of her home with a determined, no-nonsense personality. So after the fall, she calmly assessed the damage: Her legs were shattered — one with an open wound exposing bone and tissue, and although she didn’t yet know it, her left hip was fractured in two places; her face was badly bruised — a front tooth had been chipped; and her hands and arms were bruised but not broken.
In what she considered a stroke of luck, her pack had fallen next to her in the ravine. She used her limited first-aid supplies to clean and dress her wounds and a sarong she always carried to wrap her right knee, which was now a gaping wound.
She set her mind to the task at hand: survival. She planned tasks she could accomplish: make soup, get water, keep warm. She even read a book she had brought, a historical novel about Aztec culture.
But Racina says her desire to stay alive kept her motivated.
“I had been ambivalent about life at times and been very depressed … but now I knew I really wanted to live,” she said.
“I knew that the chances of anyone coming to my rescue were very remote,” she said.
For three days and nights, she held despair at bay. Although she now believes she was in shock the entire time, she kept herself on a regimented schedule and spent most of her waning energy dragging her limp body a few hundred feet downstream toward where she thought was the nearest trail. The nearest trail head was some 20 miles away.
Every now and then she called out — against all odds that someone would pass by and hear her. On the fourth day, amazingly, someone did. In another of what Racina calls “miracles,” Jake, a man with hearing loss, who was hiking nearby with his wife and a friend, heard her calls. These three — Jake Van Akkeren, his wife, Leslie Bartholic, and their friend Walter Keiser — are the “angels in the wilderness.”
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