Volcano climber cheats death Ill-prepared, Ewing student barely survives

Monday, March 03, 2008 By ROBERT STERN Some people make mountains of molehills.

Ten days ago, a 20-year-old college student from Ewing thought he could do the opposite, and it nearly cost the aspiring civil and environmental engineer his life.

Hiking alone and ill-prepared that Saturday, Walter A. Nonemaker made a bid to reach the crown of North America's fifth-highest peak, an active Mexican volcano that towers 3.4 miles above sea level.

Nonemaker didn't realize just how high he had to go.

Mount Popocatépetl's summit at 17,930 feet rose from relatively modest slopes, but from his perspective it seemed easy enough to conquer in a day's journey on foot.

"He had e-mailed me to say that he was taking a hike," said his mom, Krista Nonemaker, who worried that her oldest son would be in over his head.

"Right away, I was thinking, I hope he's going to go with somebody," she said.

But Walter Nonemaker set out for the hike alone. To the relief of his mom and dad, Walter S. Nonemaker, back home in Ewing, he cheated death but only through a mix of good luck and a plucky will to survive.

Nonemaker thought he'd make it to the volcano's peak and back down to the nearby town from which he began his trek -- San Nicolas de los Ranchos, almost 10,000 feet below the summit -- before nightfall. He was wrong.

"This is Walter. He's kind of crazy in a way. He doesn't seem to be afraid of anything," Krista Nonemaker said. "He thinks he's invincible in a lot of ways."

A FORBIDDEN ZONE

Without much mountaineering or climbing experience, Walter Nonemaker didn't anticipate the life-threatening oxygen deprivation, dehydration and subfreezing temperatures he would face as he closed in on the summit.

He did not lug water with him and wore nothing warmer than shorts and a hoodie on his journey up the volcano, which is about 38 miles southeast of Mexico City.

And he said he didn't learn the volcano was officially a forbidden zone until after his ordeal. Mexican authorities have deemed it off-limits to climbing since 1994 because of Popocatépetl's frequent rumblings.

Nonemaker climbed to within 900 feet of the top, by his estimates, only to pass out there from altitude sickness late in the day on Saturday, Feb. 23.

Sometime after dark, he regained consciousness but was starved for oxygen, warmth and energy. He recalls shivering as snowflakes spewed from the sky and an icy wind seared his skin and lungs.

Nonemaker said the mercury plunged from about 70 degrees during the day at lower altitudes to about 15 degrees in the dead of night up there near the rim of Popocatepetl's steam-belching crater, where altitude sickness stopped him cold.

Exhausted, thirsty and gasping for breath, he decided there was no way he could try clambering down the mountain before morning in such low temperatures.

"The worst thing about that night was the wind," he said. So he curled his 6-foot, 200-pound frame as best he could into a ball inside his hoodie. He cupped his hands in front of his face to warm the frigid air piercing his lungs.

And he built a little wall of rocks to lean against and minimize his exposure to the elements.

"I was right on the side of the slope. I was afraid that if I lay down, I would tumble," said Nonemaker, who attends Oklahoma State University but is in Mexico this semester as part of a student-exchange program with the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla.

HARD FALL

Around 6 in the morning on Feb. 24, he decided that staying put where he was above 17,000 feet was no longer an option.

But he stumbled on his very first step on the journey back down the mountain because he couldn't feel his feet from the cold.

"All my appendages had frozen," Nonemaker recalled.

He tumbled, by his account, about 175 feet down the rocky, ice-scarred terrain of the gravelly slope.

"When I landed, I was unable to move," he said. Although he didn't break any bones, Nonemaker's hide was no match for the volcano's, which tattooed nasty scrapes and lacerations into his legs, back and hands.

"I expected to die for about an hour," he said. Then, he felt the sun warming him and restoring a bit of his energy. He grabbed a folding knife that he had carried with him and cut parts of his hoodie to use the material as makeshift gloves.

Then, his face to the mountain and back to the tree line and valley far below, he resumed his descent. It was a slow and agonizing scramble stabilized by his hands and arms.

He couldn't trust his unstable ankles to carry him yet. Nonemaker finally descended to Popocatépetl's tree line, which rings the volcano at about 12,500 feet -- 1 mile below its crest -- at about 4 p.m. that afternoon, about 27 hours after having climbed to the tree line on his ascent.

Eventually, he regained his footing and limped along a dirt path that led away from the route he had taken on his way up.

Rather than retracing the steps he took on the ascent, Nonemaker hoped the branching path would bring him to civilization and medical help sooner. He lucked out.

THE WAY OUT

Around 6 or 7 p.m. that Sunday, he chanced on a climbers' outpost in a mountain pass called Paso de Cortés, set in a valley that separates Popocatépetl from its sister giant to the north, the 17,126-foot Mount Iztaccíhuatl.

Battered, parched, still cold and stained with dried blood, he reached a hut-like building and managed merely to beg for water from the people inside.

"When I got to the door, my throat was so dry for having gone (almost) two days without water, all I could say was, 'Water, please,' (in Spanish) in a hoarse voice," Nonemaker said.

After drinking two liters of water, he explained his misadventure to his rescuers, including paramedic Guillermo Vidales Reyes.

"He was very lucky" to have survived the previous night, said Reyes, a seasoned mountaineer and co-founder of a mountain guide company, HG Mexico, that specializes in getting clients to summit Mexico's tallest peaks.

Reyes, who was at Paso de Cortes after coordinating an expedition up Iztaccíhuatl that weekend, said the night temperature atop the neighboring 17,000-plus peaks was even colder than Nonemaker had described it, probably down to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Nonemaker was hypothermic when he reached Reyes' camp at about 12,800 feet, said Reyes, who has climbed to the top of Popocatepetl more than 80 times in his career (but not since the mid 1990s) and often without supplemental oxygen.

But rapid ascents to such great heights without bottled oxygen are potential killers to those who have not taken their time to gradually acclimatize their bodies to the thinner air at ever-higher altitudes.

Nonemaker learned that lesson the hard way.

His rescuers drove him to a hospital, where he had surgery for torn ligaments in his right ankle and spent five days undergoing treatment and recovering from his wounds, some of which will take a while to heal, he said.

He considers himself lucky to have survived and doesn't feel an urge to make a second attempt at cresting Popocatepetl.

"I don't really feel a sense of personal pride about going back up," he said in a telephone interview Friday from his hospital room at the university hospital in the city of Puebla, Mexico.

"The biggest lesson probably for me," said Nonemaker, who was released from the hospital later on Friday, "is that life is too short and too fragile to think about things that don't really matter."

Submitted on 03/05/2008

Submitted by: George Desser
Reference: The Times (of Trenton NJ) 3/3/2008

Copyright © 2008 DarwinAwards.com

Chip said:
Definitely Keep: Honorable Mention
Thansk for the story, George! This is one of the most awe inspiring Honorable Mentions I have read! What was this one thinking? A 17,000 foot ascent in shorts, a hoodie and nothing else? Wow.

Bruce said:
Definitely Keep: Honorable Mention
That's quite a detailed article, and an excellent example of why you should so some research and preparation before tackling such a trek. It probably didn't occur to this guy that a 17,000 foot ascent equates to 3 miles, which is a pretty significant climb. Thanks, George!

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