Volunteers climb overnight to reach climber stranded on Sierra Nevada ledge

Powerful winds blocked hoist; team ascended by headlamp instead

A climber scaling the Mendenhall couloir, a gully on the face of Laurel mountain in California’s Sierra Nevada, found himself stranded on a 6-inch ledge more than 10,000 feet above the ground on Saturday after veering off the established route by accident.

The Mono County Sheriff Search and Rescue Team, a volunteer organization, took on the operation after the Mono County sheriff’s office alerted its members to the stranded climber. The route is steep, with portions of potentially destabilizing loose rock, and the section the man had been traversing had no route markers, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

In a Facebook post, the volunteer team described what happens when a climber strays off-route on that terrain. “Traveling off-route quickly leads to increasingly vertical, un-protectable 5th-class terrain with no viable means of continuing either up or down,” the volunteers wrote. “With thousands of feet of vertical exposure below, any fall would almost certainly be fatal.”

After the sheriff’s office alerted them, the volunteers searched for two hours in the dark without coming across the man, the New York Times reported, until at last a voice in the distance became audible. The climber was alternating his weight between each foot, which rescuers read as a sign his legs could be cramping. “It was determined that, without intervention, a fatal fall was increasingly possible if the subject remained in place overnight,” the team wrote in its post.

A helicopter hoist was not viable because of powerful winds. The team chose to ascend by foot instead, operating through the night using headlamps for light.

Mitchell Quiring, one of the rescuers, told the Chronicle that the night ascent was unnerving. “It was incredibly dangerous and a little scary moving around in the dead of night – everyone’s operating on pure trust,” Quiring said. “It’s navigable terrain during the day but it becomes unnavigable at night.”

Once the team reached the climber and saw his position, leaving him in place overnight was no longer an acceptable option, Quiring told the paper. A rescuer reached the man from overhead and attached him to a secure rope system to prevent a fall.

The operation wrapped in the early hours of Sunday morning. The climber has not been publicly identified. Quiring told the New York Times that the man’s perseverance mattered to the outcome. “He did not give up, and that is really one of the biggest takeaways from this,” Quiring said. “This could have been a very different story if he didn’t push through the adversity.”