Hiker rescued after falling from an Adirondack mountain peak on a wet, winter night
Forest rangers successfully rescued an upstate New York hiker who survived a freezing night on a rugged Adirondack mountain peak stuck above a cliff after she slipped and fell hundreds of feet from the summit.
'I thought I might have frozen to death. There were winds up there of 45 miles per hour,” veteran hiker Hope Lloyd said Wednesday of her recent ordeal.
Lloyd, 46, was hiking solo the day after Christmas when she lost her balance near the summit of South Dix Mountain around 5:30 p.m. Lloyd and state rangers said they slid hundreds of feet on steep snow and down a slippery rock slab. She headed straight for a cliff, but was stopped by a small fir tree.
“That's the only thing that saved me,” Lloyd said in a telephone interview. “If I was a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right, I wouldn't be here right now.”
According to Ranger Jamison Martin, conditions were treacherous on the 4,000-foot mountain, one of the Adirondack High Peaks, with heavy rain and areas of deep snow and slick ice. Temperatures were in the low 30s (around zero degrees Celsius) at the summit, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of Albany.
“It's basically what we call hypothermia weather: wet, cold, just the mix of those things. It's a bad combination,” Martin said in a video describing the rescue.
Lloyd is an experienced hiker who has climbed all 46 Adirondack High Peaks twice. But she was exhausted and felt it was too dangerous to move from her spot as she might slip again and slide towards the cliff. Even with her headlamp, it was too dark and foggy to see anything. She called for help.
Lloyd had an emergency blanket and kept moving in place as much as possible to combat the cold.
Martin and another ranger reached her at 1:30 a.m., about eight hours after her fall. They gave her warm fluids, food and dry clothing and soon helped her back to the trail. They reached her vehicle at 6:30 am
The South Glens Falls, New York, resident suffered some scrapes and bruises, but realizes it could have been a lot worse.
“I feel extremely grateful. Extremely grateful,” she said. “I just want to hug everyone.”