A 14-year-old California boy was left in a medically induced coma after he walked off a 120-foot slope while climbing Mount Whitney earlier this month.
Ryan Wach, an adept hiker and mountaineer, and his son Zane, took to the mountain on June 10, and opted for an advanced trail. While it was Zane’s first time on Mount Whitney, his dad told The Independent that he wasn’t worried give his son’s athletic ability and hiking experience.
After completing the hardest part of their trek, Zane started exhibiting signs of altitude sickness, so Ryan began navigating them back down an easier route to the trailhead.
Zane’s altitude sickness started off “not too severe” and included symptoms like nausea and fatigue, his dad said. But things took a scary turn as they were trying to make their way back down the mountain.
“He said he was starting to see things, like hallucinating, which of course worried me, but he was aware of it,” Ryan said. “He said, like those snow patches down there, they look like snowmen, or those green lakes that are in the distance, I see Kermit the Frog and his friends and a few other random things.”
But the dad wasn’t prepared for what happened next as his seemingly sleepwalking son veered towards the edge of the trail before plunging 120 feet.
“He wasn’t, like, making any sudden moves, but, you know, I didn’t trust him,” Ryan said.
“I didn’t know what he was going to do. And he’s big enough and everything. He’s, he’s five nine, he’s he’s not like a little 14 year old. He’s almost 15, so I can’t control him physically, but I, you know, I was reaching the point of desperation where I was trying to fight back tears, and I rub my eyes, and when I open them he’s 10 feet away on the edge,” he added.
“I made a motion to try to grab him, but this time he was too far from me.”
Earlier in the descent, Ryan had encouraged has son to take a nap, hoping that he’d just over-exerted himself and needed a break. While it briefly helped, giving them enough time to reach to a point where he assumed his son would feel better, Zane’s condition worsened.
After about an hour, having reached Mount Whitney’s Trail Camp, the teen began to drag his feet and stopped in his tracks, telling his dad he didn’t want to go on.
“It was weird for him to say any of that. He’s not a quitter,” Ryan said. “It then got worse and more frequent. The point that it became even more concerning was when he admitted he didn’t know if he was dreaming.”
Ryan had to repeatedly tell his son he was not dreaming, while reassuring him they would reach their car in a few hours if he continued moving.
Zane refused to move further and started arguing with his dad that “this was not reality,” Ryan recalled. Thinking he needed more rest, he instructed his son to take another nap since it had helped him feel better previously.
However, he woke up “worse than before” and almost seemed to be sleepwalking, Ryan said.
“He was really, really pushing against me that this wasn’t real and a couple of times during the interaction made efforts to walk toward the edge,” he said.
“I was already quite scared at this point in time. I never encountered this sort of behavior in the mountains or let alone from him, in any any circumstance, from him.”
At this point, several other hikers had passed by, including an EMT who stopped to try and help figure out what was wrong.
Soon after, Zane, having already come close, walked off the steep slope.
Ryan ran down to where he had landed, which he said was about 120 feet below where he fell, thinking he was dead.
“I didn’t see how there would be a way for him to survive it, so I screamed. I was yelling ‘no’,” Ryan said.
When he ran down to his son, he “rolled him over and he grunted – he was still breathing.”
The same EMT who helped earlier immediately started assess Zane’s condition and coordinate rescue efforts. Meanwhile, Wach stayed by his son’s side for six hours until rescue teams arrived and flew him to the hospital.
As of Thursday, Zane remains in a medically induced coma at Sunrise Children’s Hospital in Las Vegas.
“He is improving, he has gotten through a lot of the woods, as you might say. He was extubated today, his eyes were open, but he still has a long way to go,” Ryan said.
Aside from sustaining trauma to his head, the teen only broke an ankle, a finger, and part of his pelvis.
A GoFundMe set up to help the family had raised over $20,000 as of Thursday.
While Zane’s family hopes he will make a full recovery, they are also incredibly moved by all of the help they received throughout the journey.
“I mean, really, a lot of the story is about and his survival is absolutely accredited to all these people being there and either doing their job, or, even more so, doing something that wasn’t their job and just being there to help and go out of their way,” Ryan said.
“He’s a fantastic kid. This is a survival story. This is, a triumphant recovery, is what he will have. It’s not a tragedy.”
