‘I’m going to die’: One man’s horrific ordeal in the California mountains

Waves of sickening pain had turned Kevin DePaolo almost rabid as he lay pinned, bloodied and broken, beneath a five-ton granite boulder on the slope of a remote mountainside.

What was supposed to be a relaxing day of mineral hunting with a friend in the rugged backcountry of the Inyo Mountains in eastern California earlier this month quickly became a nightmarish fight for survival.

DePaolo had been digging in the dirt in the boulder’s shadow when the huge thing suddenly dislodged and toppled over, crushing the young man’s legs before coming to uncertain rest, teetering on his pelvis.

Pinned on his back, head downhill in the dirt, DePaolo faced up the mass of the rock and shrieked in agony as gravity threatened to pull the stone over onto his chest and skull. Thinking quickly, his friend, Joshua Nelson, dug the head of a pickaxe into the dirt and jammed its handle under the looming edge of the rock to brace it in place. Then he dialed 911.

“The weight of the boulder has split his groin wide open,” Nelson said. “If it had rolled any more it would have crushed him to death.”

At one point, through dizzying pain, DePaolo, a 26-year-old rock climber and mountaineer, stared up at the blue December sky and wondered whether he’d make it out from under the rock alive.

“I thought, this is the most stupid tragedy to happen on such a beautiful day,” he said later. “Of all the dangerous stuff I do, I’m going to get crushed by a boulder? That’s ridiculous.”

DePaolo couldn’t have grasped in those early moments how first responders in the valley below would come up with one of the most creative rescues in the history of Inyo County — involving more than 12 ground responders, a U.S. Navy extraction team, a daring nighttime helicopter hoist, and a 30-pound car jack humped into the backcountry by an eccentric Australian auto mechanic.

The high-desert outpost of Bishop rests in the dusty flats of Owens Valley, snug between the Southern Sierra’s sawtoothing spires and the crumbly ridges of the Inyo Mountains to the east.

The area is a hotspot of geologic activity and outdoor recreation — the gateway to Mt. Whitney, the state’s highest point, as well as a launchpad for Eastern Sierra peak baggers and a popular stopover for Pacific Crest Trail thru-hikers. 

Noticeable to any visitor is the prevalence of huge boulders scattered about the valley floor. These house- and bus-sized chunks of granite tumbled out of the slopes eons ago, and many serve as standalone play objects for rock climbers and offroaders.

DePaolo, a mountain lover from New York with long blond hair and wide smile, arrived in town in early December to reconnect with Nelson, his climbing mentor and a Bishop local, and unwind in his favorite setting in the Lower 48. For the past three years, he’s been road tripping across the American West and living out of his van, bagging peaks in Washington and Alaska before heading south to Bishop.

Neither man was feeling up for a tough day when they met on the morning of Dec. 5. DePaolo had recently summited the 13,658-foot Mt. Tom and Nelson was fighting off an illness and nursing back pain. So they opted for a casual backcountry outing to search for stones.

The mountains there keep deposits of quartz, garnets, obsidian and other gemstones and were once favored by prospectors and mining interests. Nelson and other locals have made rock-hounding on public lands a hobby, and it’s one that can reward those willing to hike long distances into remote areas.

“The idea was to use the day as downtime to do something less dangerous, something super calm,” DePaolo said. “It’s good for your mind and relaxing to go hunt for rocks.”

The men settled on a spot 90 minutes southeast of town in the Inyo Mountains, a treeless landscape dotted with standing stones.

Nelson scooped up DePaolo in his SUV with the tools they’d need: pick-axes, shovels, chisels, pry bars and rock hammers.The two drove a dirt road to the base of a high ridgeline, parked and loaded up about 70 pounds of gear between them. Each brought water, lunch, snacks and phones. Nelson brought extra food, spare headlamp batteries and warm layers.

“I don’t walk a quarter of a mile into the mountains without bringing stuff to maybe spend the night,” Nelson said. “It could get windy, it could get cold, you could be there at night. You gotta be prepared out there because you never know.”

At 10:30 a.m., under a cloudless blue sky, they shouldered their packs and set out up a slope of loose scree, without a trail to guide them, scraping past sagebrush. It was quiet and cool, with little wind and no other humans or cars in sight. “It was the most beautiful day ever,” Nelson said.

Ninety tough minutes later they’d scrambled up a pair of gullies to a steep expanse pocked with refrigerator-sized boulders. Across the valley was the Southern Sierra’s sawtooth skyline, dusted with snow. They dropped their packs and began scouring the dirt for minerals.

Eventually they uncovered a seam of quartz and chased it to the base of two oblong boulders the size of washing machines dug into the slope. Pick in hand, DePaolo laid down on all fours and scratched excitedly at a mud hole below one boulder. As he sat up to take a break, the large rock did something strange — it wobbled forward.

“Kev look out!” Nelson yelled. But DePaolo couldn’t clear the boulder’s path.

“The next thing I know I took the hit. It felt like a bus crashing into my left leg and my pelvis and it just pile-drived into my body and ripped me apart,” DePaolo said.

Nelson heard his friend scream and dashed down to help him. Both of DePaolo’s legs were pinned under the giant rock, its full weight crushing his groin. Nelson wedged an ax handle under the boulder to prevent it from toppling completely onto DePaolo’s chest. Then he squatted down, grabbed hold of its underside and strained to lift.

Somehow, Nelson was able to pry the boulder up enough for DePaolo’s left leg to slide free. It came out blackened with bruising and split open at the groin. Nelson saw blood, bone, strands of muscle and tendon. DePaolo’s right leg remained trapped under the rock.

“Instantly, I knew we went from zero to one hundred and this was a serious situation,” Nelson said. “I didn’t know the extent of his injuries but I knew we weren’t hiking out of there.”

Nelson tied a shirt around DePaolo’s exposed leg to stymie the bleeding then pulled out his phone and dialed. DePaolo screamed into the thin mountain air.

The emergency call reached the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office just after 3 p.m. An official there raised the local search-and-rescue team, a volunteer crew of about 60 members with an astonishing range of wilderness experience and technical skills.

Among the crew are physicians and teachers; one is an Aussie mechanic who specializes in extracting offroad vehicles stuck on rock trails. Most members are hardened mountain climbers with expertise in wilderness medicine, rope access and high-angle rescue. They’re one of the busiest SAR teams in the state, according to the Inyo County Sheriff’s Cpl. Nate Girardin, the team’s co-coordinator. They’re deployed to between 60 and 100 missions per year, the bulk of which involve helping injured or lost climbers off of Mt. Whitney.

As searchers mobilized, Sheriff’s officials called the California Highway Patrol in Fresno for helicopter assistance. The plan was to airlift two SAR members with medical training to the mountain so they could triage DePaolo’s injuries as soon as possible. At the same time, two more searchers would drive to the backside of the mountain where DePaolo was trapped, with the intent to hike over to him and figure out a way to free him.

By the time the helicopter touched down outside of town, the sun had dropped below the Sierra crest, sucking the heat out of the valley. Nelson had helped cut away DePaolo’s cargo pants and wrapped his exposed left leg in puffy jackets, but the temperature was plummeting and DePaolo had begun to shiver violently on the ground. Nelson built a small fire and fed it with sagebrush to keep his friend warm.

DePaolo never drifted from wakefulness but would pendulum between periods of calm and outbursts of explosive panic. Nelson registered his friend’s extreme pain but had noticed that blood wasn’t pooling in the dirt around DePaolo’s lower body, a sign he took that his friend wasn’t at imminent risk of bleeding out.

At one point, overcome with dread, DePaolo pleaded with his friend to call his mother in New York so he could tell her goodbye.

“Please call my mom,” he told Nelson. “I need to tell her I’m going to die up here.”

Nelson thought for a moment then refused.

“As much as I definitely respected that, I felt at the time that calling his mom was going to stress Kev out and I didn’t want to bring emotion into this,” Nelson said. “It was a survival situation and you need to be as calm as you can possibly be.

“I told him, ‘You don’t need to say your goodbyes because you’re going to live’.”

By the time Nelson saw the headlamp beam coming downslope towards him, DePaolo was in his fifth hour under the boulder’s crushing weight. It was just after 7:00 p.m.

The first searchers to arrive were the two men who’d hiked from the backside of the mountain, about 45 minutes in the dark: the Aussie, who goes by Tim K., and Matt, an engineer and ropes expert. (The Inyo SAR members requested that only their first names be used to spare themselves public attention.) They marched into camp shouldering an unlikely tool that would prove critical in extracting the wounded hiker: a Hi-Lift jack.

The two-foot-long steel ratchet lift weighs 30 pounds and looks like a machine gun barrel. A long hand lever angling up from its base activates an iron claw that climbs up notches on its main shaft. It’s rated to lift, or winch, 5,000 pounds at about an inch per lever depression. Tim regularly uses it when called to dislodge Jeeps and rock crawlers that get stuck in the piles around Bishop. He’s even used it to move large boulders on 4×4 trails.

“I call it landscaping, as a joke,” Tim said.

When the search-and-rescue alert went out, Tim grabbed his jack and volunteered. “We didn’t know exactly what we were getting into but I figured it was something a jack could probably help with,” he said.

Tim and Matt were soon joined by two more SAR members airlifted via CHP helicopter to the top of a nearby ridge. One of them, Isaac, snapped on a pair of latex gloves and began triaging DePaolo. The other, a schoolteacher named Dan, unzipped a bag of gear he’d brought along, which included a cordless hammer drill capable of piercing granite, a set of steel bolt-anchors, four pulleys and a length of 11mm static rope.

Tim, Matt and Dan stood shoulder to shoulder and sized up the situation, roughing out some basic geometry on the spot. They estimated the boulder weighed between 6,000 and 10,000 pounds and was resting on a 35-degree slope. They resolved to build a simple rope apparatus that, aided by the jack, would create enough force to pull the boulder up and away from the injured hiker’s legs.

“We kinda looked at each other’s stuff and said, this’ll probably work,” Tim said.

Dan grabbed the power drill and drove two bolts into the boulder: one on the underside near DePaolo’s torso, the other atop its crown. Tim positioned his jack in the dirt near DePaolo and carabiner-clipped it to the low bolt. He’d do the prying, one slow inch at a time.

Dan and Matt then traversed the mountainside to an enormous granite stone 30 feet away and drilled two more bolts. Then they rigged a rope from the top bolt on DePaolo’s boulder to the massive anchor stone and fashioned it with pulleys and a special knot designed to multiply their exertion and create mechanical advantage.

The machine was set: When Tim cranked the jack, Dan and Matt would haul on the rope to pull the boulder sideways onto a makeshift foundation of melon-sized stones the men had placed on the ground next to DePaolo.

At about 8:10, Nelson and Isaac crouched down on either side of DePaolo and each grabbed an armpit, ready to pull.

“You ready to load up?” Tim called.

“Tension on the rope!” Dan yelled back.

Tim ratcheted the jack up a notch while the two rope haulers heaved, but DePaolo wouldn’t budge. Two notches: his leg was still caught.

On the jack’s third click, the men ripped DePaolo clear of the rock and laid him in the dirt. He shrieked in pain. Isaac knelt down to triage the left leg and groin.

“All I wanted was to get out from under that boulder,” DePaolo said. “But then as soon as they got me out, I was in agony.”

More SAR members hiked in bearing supplies — sleeping bags, snacks, tea — to keep DePaolo comfortable. They gauzed up his wounds, fed him Tylenol and packaged him on a field litter. But as he lay screaming on the ground, no one was sure when they’d be able to get him off the mountain. 

The CHP helicopter wasn’t cleared to perform a night extraction, and the message coming from officials in the valley below was that DePaolo would likely have to tough it out until first light, a disheartening prospect given his condition.

An urgent request from the Sheriff’s office broadcast through the state Office of Emergency Services reached the U.S. Navy’s air station in Lemoore, south of Fresno. At around 9:30, a four-man flight crew there loaded into a 65-foot tactical helicopter called a Sea Hawk and flew east over the Sierra.

Though the crew specializes in nighttime hoists, this one would be tricky.

The plan was to drop a crewman at the site, lift off while the man loaded DePaolo into a steel litter, then return to hoist them both up. They’d have to bring the bird close — within 30 feet of the rocky terrain — so rotor blade clearance would be tight against the steep mountainside. And there was concern that loose soil and rocks stirred up by the rotors could limit visibility or, worse, blast DePaolo or the SAR members on the ground with shrapnel.

“We knew if we deviated, we could potentially push survivors or the rescue team off the steep surface,” said Navy Lt. Shagore Paul, the SAR mission commander who piloted the helicopter.

“We had to be right on target,” said Lt. William Zell, the copilot.

Cruising over the dark, desolate valley, the pilots spotted the SAR team’s headlamp beams on the mountainside from five miles away. As the helicopter approached, the SAR members doused the campfire, slid a pair of sunglasses onto DePaolo to shield his eyes, then retreated uphill to stay clear, and watched.

The aircraft arrived deafeningly loud and blindingly bright, whipping up the air and dirt as it hovered over DePaolo. A crewman from above appeared on the ground next to the wounded man and the helicopter lifted off. As he took DePaolo’s vitals and loaded him into a steel litter, DePaolo remembers thinking, “This guy looks younger than me!”

The flight to the hospital in Fresno took 45 minutes. There, DePaolo was rushed from the helipad to the trauma unit and then into surgery to repair a ruptured femoral artery in his left leg. That’s when he finally called his mom and gave her the news — that he was in a terrible accident but that he’d be okay.

His pelvis is fractured in two places. He’ll need skin grafts on his blackened left leg, which took the brunt of the boulder’s impact before he and Nelson managed to pull it clear. But his right leg, which was trapped under the boulder, has nerve damage but is mostly fine, and DePaolo can sit upright. He will walk again — but possibly not for at least a few months. 

A week after the incident, on a phone call from his hospital bed, DePaolo’s spirits were high. He said he was definitely re-evaluating his tolerance for risk, but also that he couldn’t wait to get into nature again. He’s got more peaks on his climbing list and plans to meet a buddy at the Grand Canyon — maybe next year.

He attributes his good fortune to Nelson, who cared for him through the ordeal, and of course the devotion and resourcefulness of the Inyo SAR team.

“They were so professional, so calm,” he said. “Those dudes are a bunch of badass angels.”

Depaolo’s day with Nelson was supposed to be an easy excursion where he could reflect on a few recent close calls he’d had in the mountains.

“I’m just happy I get to keep living and keep walking and keep my legs,” he said. “It’s a miracle.”

Reach Gregory Thomas: gthomas@sfchronicle.com