Those invincible days of yore ~ March 29, 2006

David Heiller

Editor's note: This column was written after he presented the readers of the Caledonia Argus the long article he wrote for Backpacker Magazine.

I’m back to the present and the land of the living, after a four-week hiatus down memory lane.

A lot of people commented on my adventure in the mountains 33 years ago, which I reprinted in this space.

Some final thoughts: I was having lunch last week with a couple of colleagues. One man asked me how I could not have known about the possibility of bad weather, a snow storm.

David and the kids on our 1998 backpacking trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.

I stammered a bit; and the other man, a backpacker himself, said it simply: “We’re flatlanders.”

That was part of it. It’s one thing to be in a snowstorm in Houston County. Granted, it’s not flat here by North Dakota definitions. But there aren’t many snow storms in which a healthy 20-year-old man could not wade and tromp through to get help in rural Caledonia.

The mountains were another world. I had climbed 6,500 feet in elevation and hiked 30 miles. Some of that was very steep. It was physically impossible for a person to walk through that country after three feet of snow without snowshoes, which I didn’t have.

“And I was 20,” I said. “I was invincible.” Remember those days? It was a long time ago, but there was a time when I felt there was no physical task, within reason, that I couldn’t accomplish. I bet a lot of people feel the same way.

“Why didn’t you just turn around and go back the way you came?” my colleague asked. There again, I had to admit that I could not physically do it. The trail was obliterated and steep. The best way out was the other side of the mountain.

David, in the hospital after his rescue.

The other comment I have received was how lucky I was to survive. That’s true. The luck extended beyond Yosemite National Park. I had hitchhiked from Brownsville to Oregon, then down the West Coast to San Francisco, then east to Yosemite, That’s not exactly a safe thing to do either.

In fact, that was the fear that crept into the hearts of my mother and other family members. They hadn’t heard from me in a month. I had written to Mom from the park the day before my final adventure, telling her I would soon be hitchhiking to Phoenix to spend Thanksgiving with my brother Glenn and his family. When Thanksgiving came and went, she feared the worst.

I’ll never forget the phone call I made home from the hospital bed after I was rescued. She probably remembers it too, although we don’t talk about it. We’re good Germans!

I’ll never forget my mountain experience either. “You definitely cheated death.” my brother, Danny, wrote to me recently. That’s not something you take lightly.