A chance meeting leads to dramatic rescue near Glacier Peak
SULTAN — If this was the end for Katharina Groene, she wanted her family in Germany to know she was sorry.
“I apologized for being so stupid, and that I risked so much,” she said.
Her messages could not get through. Cell service is nil at Mica Lake, a glacial pocket beneath 6,300-foot Fire Creek Pass.
Groene, 34, of Munich, had crossed 2,500 miles of dirt, rock and ice on the Pacific Crest Trail since May 9. She was within 120 miles of Canada when she awoke Sunday to a whiteout of heavy snow, deep in the Glacier Peak Wilderness. Her shoelaces were so frozen it took an hour to pry the eyelets open and force her feet in.
At times, Groene waded through waist-deep powder. Her toes turned purple under wet socks. She had no gaiters, no satellite beacon and virtually zero experience in the wilderness, other than the past five months, when she’d been using an app on her phone for a map. She assumed she’d die before she reached Stehekin. Or if she did make it, she might lose a foot or a leg to frostbite.
She ate snow and sang songs to herself, to make sure she could remember the words, as proof she wasn’t losing her mind from dehydration, hunger and cold. She screamed names of people she knew.
One name was Nancy Abell, a hiker she’d met a week earlier on the edge of Lake Susan Jane, south of Stevens Pass.
Abell, a Sultan local, had paused at the lake Oct. 22, to explain to a group of Arizona hikers why the fire they’d built two feet from the shore was illegal at high altitude in the Cascades, where so many dazzling, fragile places have been loved to death. In the middle of her lecture, Abell saw Groene bounding along the lake wearing a pink jacket and a 40-pound backpack.
Groene may have been the last northbound thru-hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail. Abell offered her a ride to a trail angel’s home in Baring. She tried to warn Groene not to finish, not this time of year in Washington, with bad weather moving in.
Abell couldn’t convince her. Groene hitchhiked to Leavenworth and set out again Oct. 24. As the forecast worsened, Abell alerted search and rescue Monday morning.
If not for the chance meeting, a Snohomish County sheriff’s helicopter team would not have known to go looking for the missing hiker. They would not have seen her footprints in the fresh powder around 2 p.m., and would not have spotted Groene wearing a green tarp and a pink jacket, beaten up by a blizzard, but alive.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/hiker-lives-to-tell-of-her-dramatic-rescue-near-glacier-peak/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=dadb7e18ae-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-dadb7e18ae-228635337
= new reply since forum marked as read
