Shattered Air: A True Account of Catastrophe and Courage on Yosemite's Half Dome by Bob Madgic

Author:Bob Madgic [Madgic, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 1580801307
Publisher: NBN_Mobi_Kindle
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

ON SATURDAY, JULY 27, 1985, as the Rice, Hoog, and Cage parties, along with other hikers, tramped toward Half Dome, another tragedy was unfolding just to the south.

Kings Canyon National Park, which borders Sequoia National Park, is only forty miles from Yosemite as the crow flies. It took John Muir several weeks to travel there from Yosemite Valley with a pack mule named Brownie. His purpose was to locate groves of giant sequoia trees, an effort that eventually led to their protection from timber mills. Today the drive from Yosemite Valley to the lower reaches of Kings Canyon takes three or four hours.

James Wunrow, twenty-seven, who worked on a park survey crew in Kings Canyon, left early that Saturday morning for a day hike by himself. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going; nor did anyone see him leave, including the ranger who at 7 A.M. opened the Roads End Permit Station at Cedar Grove, located at the eastern end of the canyon. Wunrow must have started up Bubbs Creek Trail before the ranger arrived, aiming for the high country.

In 1984, while trimming trees for the Forest Service in Superior National Forest in Minnesota, Wunrow had touched a live power line and received a severe shock. Ever since, he had been prone to intense headaches. His co-workers and supervisors in Kings Canyon found Wunrow to be extremely introverted and often depressed, even disoriented at times. Wunrow wasn’t a skilled or knowledgeable outdoorsman. He took only day hikes, always alone, and stayed on maintained trails.

The weather pattern that week had been consistent—warm, clear mornings followed by a buildup of midafternoon storm clouds, then an hour or two of heavy rain and some lightning. On that particular Saturday, however, thunderheads began building earlier, around midday. By one o’clock, a severe thunderstorm had moved east from Kern Canyon into the Bubbs Creek drainage. At one thirty, Wunrow was hiking back when, about four miles from the Cedar Grove trailhead, a violent thunderstorm swept in, producing high winds, drenching rains, fierce hail, and frequent lightning bursts. He was on a moderately forested hillside at sixty-three hundred feet in elevation, about three hundred feet below the ridgeline and up from the gully where Bubbs Creek flows. Wearing only a T-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap, Wunrow donned a long-sleeved wool shirt that he had wisely brought along. He hurriedly searched for shelter and spotted a rock formation just off the trail. On the side of the formation away from the trail was an opening formed by two boulders and covered by a large stone slab—a small, cave-like structure about five feet wide, four feet deep, and two and a half feet high. He crawled in and lay down to escape the downpour.

Around ten the next morning, a woman backpacking up the trail saw Wunrow’s boots and part of his day pack sticking out from the rock shelter. Only someone ascending the trail could have seen them. But she assumed that the person inside was napping, so she continued on.

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