Re: [Philmont]: Dehydration Warning

August 17, 2004 E-mail story Print

Running dry
 A desert oven like the Grand Canyon can quickly turn hikers and runners into
'heat zombies.' Hydration mistakes can kill.

 
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HIKING

HEAT STROKES

DEHYDRATION

DEHYDRATION HIKING HEAT STROKES

 
By Christopher Reynolds, Times Staff Writer

It's nearly noon, and the morning's hikers scramble out of the baking inner
canyon, wheezing and dripping. In a room a few hundred yards from the South
Rim, supervising ranger Marc Yeston touches a green pen to a wall map and traces
a long, wriggling path. Then he makes a triangle.

Here, he says, is the spot where they found Margaret Bradley, a 24-year-old
University of Chicago medical student and marathoner.

Just three months before, the 115-pound Bradley had finished the Boston
Marathon in a few ticks over three hours, a solid performance in temperatures well
over 80.

"I focused on keeping myself hydrated," she told the magazine Chicago Athlete
afterward, "and not letting the adrenaline from the crowd make me do
something stupid."

But last month, when she and a companion decided to try a 27-mile trail run
in a single day, that caution was missing. A cascading series of
miscalculations, say rangers, turned this scholar-athlete into the Grand Canyon's first
dehydration fatality in four years.

Telling her story, rangers look to their feet, grope for words, trail off in
midsentence. She was younger than most of them, and probably fitter. And now
all that was left was an excruciating lesson in miscommunication and
biochemistry.

Serious challenge

In a single hour, a hiker in desert heat can easily lose a liter of moisture
through sweat — maybe, some experts say, as many as three liters (a liter is
slightly more than a quart).

Without water, write authors Michael P. Ghiglieri and Thomas M. Myers in
their book "Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon," dehydration, hyperthermia and
exertion in the canyon can "turn people, inch by inch, into heat zombies…. Kids
and young adults seem to run at full function in the heat, sweating
appropriately and seemingly going strong, but abruptly, when dehydration kicks in, they
crash quickly and often unexpectedly. And die."

Those threats are compounded by the shape of the land: Mountains rebuff the
unfit and unprepared in short order, but the canyon — "the upside-down
mountain," locals say — begins as a pushover, all downhill trail and mild temperatures
at 7,000 feet. For decades, with signs, brochures and newsletters, rangers
have struggled to make hikers understand the challenges that wait below.

These challenges are serious enough that the park created a special
Preventative Search and Rescue unit seven years ago after a flurry of dehydration and
heatstroke cases in the canyon. Most summer days, rangers station themselves a
mile or two or three down the busiest trails, chatting up hikers as they pass,
checking to see if fitness and water supplies match their itineraries.

But it's a tricky job, because rangers can't watch every trail and a ranger
can't order a hiker off the trail for seeming unprepared. And at least once a
day, says supervisor Bonnie Taylor, somebody defies her warnings and heads on
down.

"Our job is not to harass them," Taylor says. "Our job is to understand that
they understand the situation here."

Critical errors

Before she headed to college in Chicago, Bradley was raised in Falmouth,
Mass. She hadn't spent much time in the desert. But she wasn't easily daunted.

At the University of Chicago, she had earned a double degree in biology and
Earth sciences, then went on to med school. She played violin in the university
symphony and worked summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods
Hole, Mass. And as a runner, putting in up to 90 miles a week, she'd competed in
Division III national championships and earned all-American status.

To prepare for the canyon, she ran in the hills around Flagstaff for a few
days. She also found a running partner, a Flagstaff man in his late 20s or 30s
with whom she shared a Chicago connection. On July 8, they agreed to take on
the canyon.

Rangers interviewed this man. They say they are not accusing him of
wrongdoing and have refused repeated requests to identify him, citing his privacy and
saying Bradley's family asked them to omit his name from public accounts. (A
Freedom of Information Act request by The Times is pending.) Bradley's parents
declined to comment for this article.

At least part of the tale, however, can be gleaned from rangers who were
there. By Park Service accounts, the runners began their day about 9 a.m. at
Grandview Point, the highest spot along the canyon's South Rim, where the trail
head is 7,400 feet above sea level, nearly 5,000 feet above the river.

Here is where the two runners made their first mistakes. They set off nearly
four hours after sunrise, several hours later than rangers advise distance
hikers to begin on summer days, and they were traveling dangerously light.
Bradley's companion had four liters of water. She carried fruit, three protein bars
and just two bottles of water (about 1.5 liters). They carried no maps, and
Bradley apparently had no flashlight or headlamp.

>From Grandview Point, the two headed down an unmaintained, waterless path
built by a prospector about 100 years ago, descending 2,600 vertical feet in just
three miles. From there they planned to descend farther, then follow the
Tonto Trail across the notoriously hot and shadeless Tonto Plateau, about 1,000
feet above the river. Then they'd climb back out on the busier South Kaibab
Trail, which tops off at 7,000 feet.

It's unclear why they thought they could do this route in a day, or where
they expected to get water. "Not recommended during summer," says the Park
Service's free trail guide. "No water."

"This would be a two- or three-day backpack trip with a lot of planning,"
says Yeston, who served as incident commander. "And the optimum time to do it
would be fall," adds Ken Phillips, the park's search and rescue coordinator.

The dicey distance, the scant supplies: Is this the kind of hubris that could
afflict any gonzo hiker or runner? In runners' chat rooms, speculation has
been divided between those who see this as rare bad judgment and those who see
it as an all-too-common mistake that happened to wind up more dramatically than
most.

"It doesn't make sense … but people do it all the time," one runner wrote.

In the first seven months of this year, park personnel have carried nearly
200 hikers out of the canyon by helicopter, most of them suffering from
"environmental causes" — exhaustion, dehydration, sometimes water intoxication, which
happens when hikers drink plenty but fail to take in salt to help keep their
electrolytes balanced.

Among runners, there's always a temptation to carry as little water as you
can get away with, because it's heavy. A single liter weighs more than two
pounds. If they followed the canyon rangers' recommendations of one to two liters
for each hour on the trail, every runner and hiker on a four-hour excursion
would set off with eight to 16 pounds of water on board.

But if your starting point is the Grandview Point trail head, it doesn't take
long to realize the rangers have a point. For every 1,000 feet in descent,
canyon veterans say, the temperature is likely to rise 3 to 6 degrees. At the
river's edge that day, the high would be 105.

Boiling point

By 3 p.m. they were in trouble. Bradley's companion couldn't run anymore. He
stopped, overheated and exhausted, and curled up in the shade of a bush to
rest. In six hours they'd covered about 12 miles, with 15 still to go. Now the
temperature was over 100, and their water was gone.

As a hiker heats up, says Yeston, "the body is going to start to divert blood
to the parts of the brain that are more basic. The parts of the brain that
you might have used to make nuanced decisions about your situation — they're
compromised. Long before a person seems drunk or delirious, they're already going
to have a subtle loss of fine motor coordination and critical thinking … and
even difficulty referencing past experiences."

The two made a fallback plan, rangers say the companion told them later: He
would stay put, and Bradley, the stronger athlete, would go on.

This, rangers and others say, was another big mistake. Hikers almost always
fare better by sticking together. But in a short life, Bradley had learned to
outrace common expectations.

"She was incredibly tough mentally," says Paul Peters, owner of the Universal
Sole running-shoe store in Chicago. "Really intense but always smiling."

Bradley, who lived near the store, joined its running team last fall as part
of her training for the Boston Marathon. She'd join in for burgers and beer
after Monday-night fun runs of eight or 10 miles, and she'd hang out at the
store during her rare idle hours, always angling to learn some new training
techniques from the other serious runners who worked there. She'd run hard in a 5K
in New York on a Saturday, then do an 8K in Chicago the next day.

"No matter what the conditions, no matter what was going on, she would go out
and try to win every race she ran," Peters says. When he heard about what
happened in the canyon, he adds, "I could definitely see her pushing herself
beyond what anybody else would have done, in terms of not stopping until her body
just gave out."

Now, instead of following the Tonto Trail to the South Kaibab Trail, then
heading up and out as the two had planned, Bradley would look for help and water.
She would follow the Tonto to the South Kaibab, but turn downhill toward
Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the canyon. That meant 11 more miles.

Without a partner, she did what she was exceptionally good at: She persisted.

Fatal assumption

In the early hours of the next day, Bradley's companion woke alone and
parched on the Tonto Plateau. But it was cooler now, and he felt well enough to make
his way toward the South Kaibab Trail. He believed he saw the tracks of
Bradley's Reeboks, according to rangers.

Near the intersection of the Tonto and Kaibab trails, he was saved: A U.S.
Geological Service employee, who was carrying a satellite phone, spotted him.
The USGS employee came to his side, found him suffering from exhaustion and
dehydration, and used the phone to get a ranger's directions to an emergency
supply of water cached nearby.

This was about 7 a.m. Friday, about 22 hours after the trail run began, and
it could have marked the beginning of a campaign to find Bradley. But "nowhere
in that conversation did we get information that he was a runner, that he'd
crossed the Tonto, or that there were two of them," says Yeston. (The USGS
employee declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Apparently, the companion had come to believe that Bradley had reached
Phantom Ranch. Somehow — and the rescue rangers shake their heads at this — the
runner hiked out of the canyon (with the phone-bearing USGS employee as his
guide), held conversations with a commercial guide and a trail crew worker, and got
a ride back to Flagstaff, yet never transmitted the idea that his partner
might need rescuing.

Through the trail crew worker, he did send a message to Phantom Ranch for
Bradley, explaining that he'd abandoned the hike and would leave her car at the
South Kaibab Trail head on the South Rim. But that information alone set off no
alarms; rangers and Phantom Ranch staffers hear several times a day from
separated hikers rearranging their plans.

Meanwhile, Bradley's family had planned to meet her on Friday afternoon in
Flagstaff. When she didn't show, the family reported her missing to Flagstaff
police and rangers between 1 and 4 a.m. Saturday, setting off a flurry of phone
calls to local lodgings.

By now it was about 18 hours since Bradley's companion had encountered his
USGS rescuer. But still, nobody in authority knew the whole story.

That moment of horror and recognition didn't come until about 6:30 a.m.
Saturday, when Bradley's brother reached her trail companion by telephone. The
companion then called the park's dispatcher at 6:50 a.m. — "and now," says Yeston,
standing by the map — "all the dots connect."

Trapped

Within 90 minutes, the Park Service had 20 people on the case. Within five
hours, a Park Service helicopter crew had spotted a body at Cremation Creek, 200
to 300 feet below the Tonto Trail. Before he was rescued, her companion kept
descending on the trail and must have passed within 500 vertical feet of
Bradley. The pilot brought the chopper closer to see if the roar and rotor wash
would rouse her. Nothing. Margaret Bradley was gone.

"She was in a sleeping position, using the pack as a pillow," Yeston says. "A
fetal position."

A red visor lay near the body. An uneaten protein bar, not much good for
hydration, was in her pack. The rescue team pronounced her dead at 2:25 p.m., says
Jeremy Thompson, forensic examiner for Coconino County, and estimated time of
death at 12 to 24 hours before that. The USGS employee with the satellite
phone had run into her partner about 31 hours earlier.

After an autopsy, the medical examiner classified the cause of death as
accidental "dehydration due to environmental heat exposure."

Given the way light and heat bounce around in the depths of the canyon,
rangers say, the temperatures that Friday at Cremation Creek could easily have
reached 120 degrees. Like many thirsty, desperate and often delirious hikers over
the years, Bradley had apparently decided to leave the trail and blaze a more
direct route to the water.

"When all that stuff comes over you, and you realize you're approaching what
you've read about … it's an almost overwhelming disorientation," says Michael
Olson, a longtime triathlete and marathoner from Flagstaff. Olson, 39, says he
has made the 23-mile rim-to-rim run half a dozen times, always in October,
and would never touch a Grandview-Tonto-Kaibab itinerary in the summer.

Leaving the trail, Bradley had descended two dry waterfalls and then a
20-foot "pour-off" cliff without injury, only to find a 50-foot cliff waiting next,
reports Tom Clausing, the park's emergency medical services coordinator, who
was among the first to reach her body.

"She slid into a natural terrain trap, from which there was no climbing out,"
Clausing says. She wound up about 500 feet above the waters of the Colorado.

Clausing wonders whether it was day or night when Bradley made those
decisions. The South Kaibab Trail, he says, is nearly visible from the area where she
must have left the Tonto Trail. If she'd stayed on the Tonto for another mile,
Clausing says, she'd have hit the South Kaibab Trail, where a Park Service
telephone waits and foot traffic is thick.

"She'd have run into 100 people the next day," Clausing says.

Later, rangers retraced the hikers' paths, alert to possibilities of
deliberate wrongdoing. They found "not even a hint of it, and we looked hard," Yeston
says.

Bradley's death, with its long list of improbable contributing circumstances,
resonates differently for many of those who worked to prevent it.

"This was a very tough one for us … a preventable tragedy," says Phillips,
the search and rescue coordinator. "Two athletes, and the one that's more fit is
the one that ends up dying."

The next morning, 13 days after Bradley's death, ranger Bonnie Taylor is
working a preventative rescue shift on the scorching Bright Angel Trail.

In the space of an hour, Taylor will gently, or bluntly if it seems
necessary, urge several hiking parties to trim their ambitions or drink up on the spot.
Young and old, men and women, kids and couples, fit and flabby: She
approaches them all. She likes to start by asking where they're from, because it hardly
matters how they answer.

"Nobody," she says, "is from anywhere that's this hot."

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Received on Mon Aug 23 08:23:47 2004