Grieving doctors reveal how daughter, 19, died after setting out unprepared for winter hike

The 19-year-old daughter of two New Hampshire doctors was sadly unprepared for winter weather conditions when she attempted to scale the top of one of the state’s mountains last month.

Emily Sotelo had started hiking just two years ago, but had already summited 40 of New Hampshire’s 48 peaks over 4,000 feet, a popular target that has long drawn hikers to the White Mountains. But she tragically died in November while trying to climb all the mountains, and her body was discovered three days after she disappeared, on what would have been her twentieth birthday.

Emily, a college sophomore, had almost no winter hiking experience, and authorities say she had none of the essential equipment that would have prepared her for the brutal conditions that eventually killed her: temperatures between 5 degrees and below. zero, and wind. gusts up to 95 mph.

Her parents, psychiatrist mom Olivera and gastroenterologist dad Jorge Sotelo, are now considering launching a nonprofit foundation in her memory that includes recurring themes from her life and the lessons of her death: the Emily M. Sotelo Foundation for Safety and Persistence. .

They also shared heartbreaking details of Emily’s final outing in a bid to help prevent other hikers from suffering a similar fate.

Emily was determined to complete her quest for the 48 Mountains by her birthday.

According to Fish and Game Lt. James Kneeland, Sotelo was not carrying any of the essentials that officials recommend for day trips, even in summer.

He had no map, compass, or matches. No flashlight or headlamp, though his parents said she used her phone for light and had battery backup.

In her backpack, she had granola bars, a banana and water that likely froze too soon, Kneeland said.

He was wearing long underwear but only light pants and a jacket. She had heated gloves and a neck warmer, but she didn’t have a hat.

His shoes were for trail running or trekking instead of the insulated boots that are recommended for winter.

“I often refer to them as a glorified sneaker,” Kneeland said. Low on the ankle, without ankle support. Probably what happened is, when you start drilling into the snow and brush, they get blown away.

In late fall and early winter, it’s not unusual for hikers from southern New England to arrive in New Hampshire unprepared for snowy peaks, Kneeland said.

Sotelo’s story, he said, is a reminder to other hikers to not only be prepared, but to be ready to return.

“Those mountains, as we say, are going nowhere,” Kneeland said.

His walk had started on Sunday, November 20. She had planned to walk alone for three days, have her mother join her on Wednesday, and celebrate with dinner at the grand Mount Washington Hotel.

She told her mother that she had checked the weather, just like her mother, but that she only saw the forecast for where they were staying in Franconia.

‘It was cold, but… I didn’t know anything about mountains or anything else. It didn’t look bad,’ said Olivera Sotelo.

The couple bought food that afternoon, and Emily did some homework before setting her alarm for 4 a.m. The next morning, her mother dropped her off at a trailhead at 4:30 a.m., with plans to pick her up for eight more hours. afternoon.

At 5 am, Emily texted a list of what she wanted for lunch: quinoa, chicken, papaya, coffee, and water. By 11 am it was snowing lightly and Olivera sent a text asking how the hike was going. There was no answer.

The temperature was in the low single digits when search and rescue teams headed for Mount Lafayette that afternoon, and wind speeds remained between 40 and 60 mph overnight.

On Tuesday, searchers found some of Sotelo’s belongings and possible footprints in the snow, but it took them nearly two hours to travel 900 feet, crushing small ice-filled trees and sinking knee-deep and even waist-deep in snow.

A helicopter picked up more tracks, but it was getting dark and the search was called off for the day.

On Wednesday morning, three crews approached the area from different directions, and shortly after 11 a.m. one of them found Sotelo’s body near the head of Lafayette Brook, ¾ mile from the trailhead.

Kneeland believes Sotelo lost track of the road when the wind and snow began to blow and he died trying to get out of those conditions.

“I’m not sure we’ll ever really know the true story,” Kneeland said.

Dad Jorge said the thought of his patients miraculously recovering kept him hopeful during the search, but mom Olivera said she knew Sunday night her daughter was probably dead.

‘I knew. I am a medical professional,” she said. “People told me to hold out hope, but I knew better than that.”

“Emily had a lot of persistence, but you have to balance that with confidence,” said her father, Jorge. ‘You have to run one day to fight another day.’

Emily was good at everything: music, math, art, track. But in a life lit by ambition and determination, she’s also been good to others, whether it’s providing hospice care for a pet gerbil or running a reminiscence therapy project for nursing home residents.

She volunteered at a Navajo reservation school and worked to reduce drug abuse at Vanderbilt University. She was a trained EMT who wanted to become a public health focused doctor.

At her daughter’s funeral, Olivera described Emily as “a shooting star, so bright and bright, that had burned out so quickly.”

In an interview at the family’s home in Westford, Massachusetts, she said her daughter was determined to make the world a better place.

“But I would do anything to get her back even without that shock,” he said.

Olivera, who named her eldest daughter after Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, enjoyed creative writing growing up.

Since Emily’s death, she has been reflecting on a tale she wrote as a teenager about a mountain in her father’s homeland of Croatia.

“It was my fascination with something so big, so beautiful, so generous, but then at one point the elements changed and it became a beast,” he said. The story was about her own fear, she said.

“It was about how beautiful that mountain is, but how terrifying it is, and how it can swallow a life,” he said.