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Short Answer: Erik Weihenmayer in 2001.The Details:Weihenmayer was born in 1968 in New Jersey, USA. Doctors diagnosed him with retinoschisis when just one year old, with blindness predicted by his early teens. A keen sportsman, he didn’t let blindness slow him down. At age 16, he started using a guide dog. He joined the wrestling team in high school, eventually captaining that team and qualifying for the US Junior Wrestling Championships.Shortly after going blind, I received a newsletter in Braille about a group taking blind kids rock climbing … I signed up. The freedom of attacking a challenge and problem solving my way through it invigorated me and helped me to feel less trapped by blindness …A few years after I went blind at the age of 13, I sent away for a Braille book about Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's ascent of Mount Everest. As I read, I imagined … It was this early seed of adventure that fuelled an ambition in me that would eventually lead to hundreds of ascents around the world.Weihenmayer was a natural at scrambling up rock-faces, using his hands and feet to find holds. His first big mountain was Denali, Alaska in 1995. The following year, he climbed up the technical Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite.In 2000, as part of a team of eight climbers and two Sherpas, he took on the dangerous 6,800m Ama Dablam, near Mount Everest. Due to a snow storm the team had to retreat from high camp. But in white-out conditions they could not reach the lower camp, and had to fight their way back up to safety. After a harsh two days, Weihenmayer made it back to Base Camp. The team notes recorded that he didn’t need constant company on ice climbing and rock climbing. However, on mixed climbing, traversing, and snow slopes, he needed someone near to give information, including tapping on rock and a bell on a teammate’s backpack, but there was no need for touching.I climb because I enjoy adventure, you learn about yourself and the outside world. Climbing just to prove a blind person can do it is shallow. I get a lot of pleasure out of the wind and sun on my face and the feeling of rock under my feet; the same kind of pleasure that others get out of the view.Photo: Erik Weihenmayer (photo credit: Erik Weihenmayer)All of the above led to an Everest attempt in 2001 by Weihenmayer, aged 32:A team of thirteen climbers, eight Sherpas, and Base Camp support arrived at the foot of Everest on the southern side on April 4. Within three weeks they had ported gear as far as 7,100m, to set up Camp 3 on the Lhotse Face. Weihenmayer had to get used to jumping over crevasses; his leg slipped into a narrow one in the Icefall, but he was not injured.There were many challenges I couldn't confront until I went to the mountain, such as the Khumbu Icefall: 600 meters of jumbled up ice boulders - some the size of baseballs, others as big as buildings - constantly collapsing and exploding as the ice expanded and contracted. As I weaved through the labyrinth, I could hear huge ice columns groaning and cracking overhead. My first trip took a miserable 13 hours through a frozen maze, a blind person's worst nightmare. No two steps were alike as I zigzagged over thin snow bridges and leapt over deep cracks onto shifting ice boulders. Eventually, with the help of my team, I made it through the icefall 10 times, working the duration of each trip down to five hours.Making an already dangerous task more difficult, the team also had to lug up heavy camera equipment to shoot a movie of the endeavour. Quora contributor Michael Brown, who’d reached the summit the previous year, was the action cameraman/climber.Having acclimatised to the edge of the death-zone, the team then retreated and waited for a suitable weather window. It was another three weeks before they could retry, finally reaching Camp 4 near 8,000m on May 24. As the sun set, the full team then pushed out for the final summit bid. After 250m the team doctor turned, too exhausted to continue. 150m higher the team leader abandoned, suffering from a chest infection and freezing extremities. At midnight, frigid winds blasted them, as snow lashed into their faces while surrounded by thunder and lightning. They broke trail and affixed rope as they climbed.I worried about how I would function above 7900m, where the brain grows foggy and just taking a step requires monumental effort. I feared that not being able to think, along with not being able to see, would be an overwhelmingly bad combination. However, extreme altitude slowed down my team, so I actually had more time to plant my axe and kick solid steps in the steep snow.Conditions improved, and after 12 hours climbing and now in the early morning light, the first members of the team reached the summit.On the Hillary Step, I finally felt in my element. Similar to Hillary's own description, I wedged myself in a crack, my gloved hands scanning for holds, my one cramponed boot biting the rock, and my other jammed in a cornice of ice. It was 40 minutes later, when my brain was barely in charge of my body and I felt like I was pushing through wet concrete mixed with anesthesia that my teammate lowered his mask, wrapped his arms around me and whispered hoarsely: "I think you're about to stand on top of the world."Cameraman Brown had intended to climb alongside Weihenmayer all the way and record his efforts. However, the 35 lbs camera drained the Sherpa team who were lugging it upwards. Brown retrieved it and hauled it up the last section, making it to the top ten minutes after Weihenmayer, and filmed the moment.Weihenmayer summed up his feelings on the climb thus:“In 2001, most thought a blind person had no business on the world's tallest peak. But I had prepared for 16 years, learning to feel my way up mountainous terrain using ice axes and long poles. I finally concluded that when other people's expectations become barriers, the best thing to do is to surmount them …In Hillary's day, teams of top climbers were handpicked by prestigious bodies … Today, the door to Everest's slopes has been blown wide open, and some critics speak of the death of great adventures.But Everest's history is the modern world's history, with all its challenges and abuses - and the unparalleled opportunities for human endeavour. To me, it’s perfectly fitting that an adventure which began with elite climbers is undertaken by a blind guy 50 years later. We cannot step back and close the mountain, for retreat would annihilate the modern age's greatest gift to humanity: the freedom of an individual to choose his path.”On his return, Weihenmayer’s achievement earned him the cover of Time Magazine. Time wrote “There is no way to put what Erik has done in perspective because no one has ever done anything like it. It is a unique achievement, one that in the truest sense pushes the limits of what man is capable of.”Photo Credit: Time MagazineBrown’s camerawork resulted in the movie Farther Than the Eye Can See. It won first prize in 21 international film festivals and was nominated for two Emmy awards. Men’s Journal ranked the film as one of “The Top 20 Adventure Films of all Time.”In the years since, Weihenmayer has continued to climb and completed many other extreme adventures, amid philanthropic work. He’s earned dozens of awards, and has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, Oprah, Good Morning America, and The Tonight Show. He also featured on the cover of Outside and Climbing magazines, and has carried the Olympic torch. In 2017, Men’s Journal named him one of "The 25 Most Adventurous Men of the Past 25 Years."I’m not out there doing things to prove that blind people can do this or that. I just love it!

There is, unfortunately, no short cut to losing weight, maintaining strength and awareness, and succeeding in wrestling. It takes hard work and self control.I graduated high school in 2011, and that season went undefeated and won the state championship in Alaska. I was focused on wrestling for the last 3 years of my wrestling career. And each one of those years, I saw increased success, less weight cutting, and had a more enjoyable wrestling season.My freshman year of high school, I was an “okay” JV wrestler. I was part of the team, but looking at the guys who were succeeding, placing at state, and traveling to nationals, I saw leagues between us. It didn’t help that I had no true passion or appreciation towards the sport. After my season was complete, ending without a podium at regionals, I had to deal with some health problems. I had fractured one vertebrae, L4, some time earlier, and was beginning to have halting back spasms. On top of this, I had a gotten a hernia (at some unknown time) that began to increase in size. So near the spring of my freshman year, I had to have hernia surgery. I spent the next couple of months going to school, and coming home, pretty much just to rest in bed.Prior to the end of the school year, my wrestling coaches and a few friends convinced me to attend a week long wrestling camp (COC) in Alaska. I went, and enjoyed the camp. I think that this may have been the time that I started to appreciate the sport as far more of an art form, than most outside the sport do. We worked on technique and conditioning most hours of the day, and got to meet some world class athletes. It was at this camp though, that I realized how much trouble I was in if I was going to be a serious wrestler. I stepped on the scale one afternoon, after a seriously hard workout, to see I weighed in at over 175lbs. I was shocked…. I had wrestled 135lbs just months earlier, and didn’t even have to cut weight to get there.Fast forward to myself arriving home, and the summer being in full swing. I had a part time job, as a dishwasher, but had s lot of freedom and time to do as I liked. Since I’d began to appreciate the sport of wrestling much more, I’d watch old matches, on YouTube and Flowrestling (in its infancy at the time), of some of the best wrestlers in the world. I’d watch their technique and visualize over and over the steps they took; there footwork, body position, speed. I also recognized that I NEEDED to lose weight. So I began running. It started with 1 mile. Then within a few weeks, it was 3 mile runs. Eventually, within a couple months, I was running upwards of 8 miles at a time, often multiple times a day. I’d run to the high school, workout in the weight room there, then run home. I began to become obsessed with diet and nutrition as well. I read what I could on the subject, and ended up learning a lot. I think the first book I read was entitled “Healthy for Life” and was essentially a health book focusing on the glycemic index and using naturally healthy foods to fuel your body for what it needs to do. I built my life around being healthy, being fit, eating healthy, and learning everything I could about a sport. That year I came into the wrestling season under 140lbs, and wrestled 125lbs. Admittedly, cutting that far was miserable, but I saw my first success on the mat, placing 5th in state.The next year, I got a job about 15 miles from home. However, I didn’t have a car… so I got a bike. I began biking to work, everyday, and quickly found that cycling was far more of a workout than I’d ever gotten through running or any high intensity lifting workout. I continued running as well, but began cycling on the weekends, along with my daily commutes, and honestly found a love for the bike. I’d spend an hour a day or so working on strength, by doing simple core exercises, push-ups, and pull-ups. Nothing complex, nothing time consuming, just basic body weight exercises. Spending the time to do this, accompanied by an active lifestyle, and a conscious of what I put into my body, literally transformed my body.The next two years I wrestled 135lbs, as I had my freshman year, and both years I “cut” very little weight. I found that maintaining my weight within about 5lbs of my weigh-in weight left me so much more energetic, and happy within the sport. I finally arrived at my senior year and was relatively unstoppable within the State. I didn’t get beat once that season, and wrestled to win a State Championship, which had been my goal for the last two years.I share my story to explain that there is no greater success, in any sport or in a life without competition, than to build a life that is active, balanced, and consistent. There is no secret to becoming an amazing athlete other than consistency. Learn the sport, build an active lifestyle, and pay attention to what you put into your body. The success is everything to come after that. I no longer wrestle, but I am a passionate cyclist, and I still am very conscious of my diet. Wrestling taught me how important this passion is, and I will forever be grateful to the sport for that.

The worst day of my life was the one that dashed my hope of finding my dad alive in the Sierra Nevada Mountains after he'd been missing for three weeks on a solo backpacking trip.On July 22nd, 1991 a backwoods fisherman – also on a solo trip in this extremely remote area of Inyo National Forest 200 miles southeast of Yosemite – found my dad's remains in a treacherous stretch of the Kern River aptly named Hell's Hole. His adventure was cut short, too, as he tied up his kayak and hiked 12 hours to a ranger station to alert the local search and rescue team and then lead them back to the precise location.The tragedy was nearly compounded when the helicopter used to recover my dad's body almost crashed while trying to hover over the location and allow the recovery team to rappel down the cliff to the river.This was not the ending I had anticipated when my aunt and I flew from Chicago to Reno, NV and drove to Bishop, CA to find out where my dad was and why no one had heard from him since June.Topographic image of Hell's Hole in the Golden Trout Wilderness, Tulare County, CA. Between each of the dark brown lines is 400 feet of elevation change.In 1991 email was still a few years away from being commonplace, and my dad didn't have an answering machine, so when I called him on July 13th (as we had arranged in our final conversation a few weeks prior), I just assumed I had missed him. A few days later I spoke to one of my aunts and she mentioned that she hadn't spoken to him since the end of June. We agreed he must have spoken to my grandmother because he always called her before and after his major backpacking trips. My aunt called back the next day to say that no one in the family had spoken to him for three weeks.I had just graduated from UCLA on June 15th, and a few days after the ceremony at Arthur Ashe Stadium my dad, my grandmother and I took a weeklong cruise from Vancouver to Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. He was really excited about the two-week "Search for 1,000 Species" trip he had planned with a group in Yosemite at the end of July. He had brought the itinerary to show us how they would bisect the park, learning about its flora and fauna. Fortunately, he had also mailed the itinerary to his sister, and it had the phone number of the organization leading the trip. Thus began three days of phone calls to California trying to track him down.My college graduation brunch at Beau Rivage in Malibu. My dad is holding a copy of Polonius' speech to his son Laertes from "Hamlet", which he read to me. Polonius is killed shortly after giving his son parting advice, including "neither a lender nor a borrower be", "to thine own self be true", and my favorite, "those friends thou hast and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel". I've violated the first two many times and suffered for it, but the last has proven my saving grace.I'm named after my dad, so when I called the backpacking company running the Yosemite trip and told them my name, the woman on the phone said, "Oh, John! Good to hear from you. We were surprised when you didn't make it to the start of the trip.""Oh, shit," I said and explained the reason for my call. The woman said that there was a second meeting place where several other participants were scheduled to join the trip in progress the next day. So maybe he'd gotten delayed and would show up there."I'm sorry," she said when I called back the next day, and she asked me to let them know he was OK when we reached him.My dad was well aware of the dangers of hiking and camping in very remote areas. A few years before this he broke his leg and spent 18 hours hobbling out to civilization, and on another trip he carried to safety a man who had a heart attack on the trail. He encountered wildlife on a regular basis and wrote a hilarious account of the time he witnessed a bear cub inadvertently run into the path of a huge black bear that wasn't happy about being surprised. My dad told me that experienced mountaineers understand that they are no match for the power and vagaries of nature, and that a freak storm has hastened the end of many an expert outdoorsman.These were risks he was clearly willing to take, and I think this quote by John Muir (one of his favorite writers) captures at least part of the reason:"Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”My dad certainly endeavored to bring his considerable faculties into vigorous, enthusiastic action.A commodities trader in Chicago when I was a kid, Dad would take my brother and me on an annual trip to see him in action in the open-cry "pits", where dozens of intense men (as virtually all were) would yell out prices for things like pork bellies and bushels of "December wheat", make hand gestures resembling gang signs, and scribble their trades on thick cards bearing their badge letters.Three years after my parents' divorce in 1984 my dad moved to Los Angeles and quickly became an avid naturalist. Two years later he moved to Bishop, a town of 3,800 in the eastern Sierras 200 miles northwest of Las Vegas, in order to spend more time hiking and less driving.Mt. Tom, the peak nearest Bishop, CA. My dad had a view of this from his kitchen window. Not to shabby for a $400/month apartment above a garage.After learning that my dad hadn't made it to the Yosemite trip, I called the Bishop police department and they sent an officer over to his apartment to see whether anyone was home. He wasn't and his car was gone, so they asked for his license plate number to add to the missing person's filing. I just happened to have a photograph with the license plate handy. The last time I'd seen my dad we had met in Santa Monica for breakfast at our favorite diner (where the waitresses all still knew him by name and teased him about leaving them for "a bunch of rocks in Bishop"). I had a few shots left in a Kodak Star 110 whose film I wanted to get developed, so I had snapped a picture of him standing next to his red Suzuki Samurai.After 24 hours of the California Highway Patrol not turning up any leads and my having called every single ranger station in California, we knew it was time to go west and find him. The optimist that I am, I pictured myself in a search and rescue helicopter spotting him and helping evacuate him to a hospital where he'd recuperate from whatever injury had kept him from making it out. Another close call but a great story we’d all tell for years at family gatherings.How off base I was. First, we had no idea where my dad had gone on the solo trip prior to Yosemite. He took most of his trips in California – about half the time with a group and the balance alone – but also took trips to Nevada and had completed a 7-day outdoor survival skills course in Boulder, Utah. This course included taking grueling, surprise 4-hour hikes starting at 2am (which in the retelling sounded more like forced marches to me, replete with him vomiting from exhaustion but insisting on completing the exercise), eating grubs (no, not "grub" – grubs, the thick, worm-like larva of certain beetles and other insects) and learning to start a campfire with a bow fire drill, as the Iroquois did. My dad's characteristic persistence in learning this last skill earned him the nickname "5 Days", the amount of time it took him to master it.Part of the bow drill my dad made. I always thought that he spun the stick between his palms, but a quick search today turned up the link below that shows how it really works – and explains the piece of rope I found with it.But never mind the roughly 360,000 square-mile tri-state area he'd been known to frequent. Even once we got into his apartment and found a line at the bottom of his exercise schedule that read "June 29 - to Blackrock" and narrowed it down from several possibilities to the Blackrock Trailhead in the Golden Trout Wilderness in Inyo, it could have taken weeks of searching to find him in just the few square miles he might have hiked through. (I'm leaving out a lot of frustrating details to focus on the highlights. For example, getting into my dad's apartment to look for clues to his destination wasn't easy, as between the time I called from Chicago and when we arrived in Bishop, his landlord had a change of heart regarding protecting my dad's privacy.)The sheriff hadn't taken the time to explain the realties of a search effort when we first met with him. Or perhaps he was just trying to be encouraging to a son and sister of someone he knew from experience was most likely long gone and might never be found. He said, "As soon as we have an idea where he is I'll mobilize the search and rescue team." But my mind was not receptive to anything other than the outcome I'd envisioned. When the sheriff then asked whether we had access to any of my dad's dental records, my aunt said she'd call and get copies of his x-rays. The need for this went completely over my head.The reality is that had the fisherman not stopped where he did when he did, we never would have found my dad and that would have been immeasurably worse. I am very grateful for knowing, but I’ve also wrestled for years with my dad’s need to take such risks. But that is a topic for another day.Aerial view of the Kern River at Hell's HoleSo when we found that note indicating where my dad had gone, I said to the sheriff, "OK, let's go find him." He replied that he couldn't send a team out in the dark and said the best thing to do was to get some sleep and head down to that area first thing in the morning. It took me hours to fall asleep because I kept picturing my dad stranded somewhere in the wilderness, wondering whether anyone would ever find him.We got up at 6am and drove about 3 hours down to Inyo National Forest. We didn't have a cell phone back then, and I put several hundred dollars on a calling card that week calling from pay phones to update our family back in Chicago and trying to coordinate with my younger brother, who was in LA looking to find a bus to meet up with us. I called the sheriff in Bishop to check in and he reported the second major break in the case: my dad's car had been located, and it was in fact at the trailhead we had deduced from the note. He gave us the name of a forest ranger station to go to for more information.Back into the car and another few hours of driving. Mountain switchbacks in the Sierras offer breathtaking views of beautiful scenery, but they get tiresome when you're on a mission like this.As we pulled into the ranger station I had a deep sense of foreboding. I had been thinking about how injured he must have been to not be able to make it out. Was he not able to walk at all? Had he suffered a fall? My dad was decidedly not one to climb peaks ("I collect memories, not patches," he said), instead preferring long hikes and overnight camping in really remote areas with beautiful scenery and opportunities to practice his aboriginal tool making, animal tracking and wildflower identification skills. However, I'd had a dream a few weeks before that he had jumped off a cliff and committed suicide, so I think that was starting to seep into my awareness, even though I had dismissed it at the time as akin to other fanciful dreams.Kennedy Meadows. My dad began his last hike about a mile from here, and I took this photo in 2006 on the 15th anniversary of his accident. Notice the wildflowers in the foreground. My dad loved to catalog them, and the sheriff who led the recovery said that the flowers in the area where he was hiking when he fell were reputed to be amazing (not many people made it back there, for obvious reasons). The location where they found him was right in the middle of two trail ends along the Kern River. They end because the canyon walls are so steep. We assume my dad had climbed up to cross over from one to the other. How and why he fell remains a mystery.When we walked into the ranger station I saw a female park ranger at the desk and it was clear that she'd been crying. This was not a good sign, and I felt my chest constricting. Thus, too, began a phenomenon I was to experience a lot in the coming months: first accessing my tragedy through other people's expressions of how it affected them. Clearly, it was too overwhelming to truly and fully feel it myself at the time, and even 22 years later I'm still working through it (which is my primary reason for writing this; the other being the potential to help someone else make some sense of their own grief).This vicarious processing was most cathartic when friends and family told me how they missed my dad and the ways his death touched them personally. Of course my dad's family was devastated, and we spent a lot of time bonding over this. My dad's youngest sister was the one with me on the search mission, his middle sister went with me to pack up his apartment after the funeral, and his oldest sister accompanied me on an ill-fated and semi-dangerous but ultimately very funny attempt to retrace some of my dad's last hike (also a story for another day).But seeing my mom's parents – who had known my dad since he was 17, thrown a shotgun wedding at their house three years later (they were old school: not pleased yet highly pragmatic), watched him struggle to support our family and try to measure up to both his father's and father-in-law's stellar (and very public) career successes, and indeed still loved him like a son in spite of my parents' divorce – seeing their grief at my dad's death was incredibly moving and, in this odd way, comforting.Two of my heroes: my grandfather and my dad in the '70sThe ranger had been anticipating our arrival and told me that the local sheriff asked that I call him when we arrived. She got him on the phone and he told me that a fisherman coming down the Kern River had reported finding a body."What do you mean, 'a body'?" I asked. He said that it appeared to be the remains of a hiker with a large backpack, but the fisherman was leading the search and rescue team back to the site so they could extract the person and bring him to the coroner's office for identification. He asked us to drive to Porterville (a town on the western side of the mountain range, about 50 miles north of Bakersfield) and hopefully they'd have more information by the time we got there.I remember staring up at the beams in the ceiling of the ranger station and thinking, "This can't be Dad he's talking about; it must be someone else." I'd read about tragedies like this, and my family had been through some rough times, but this just wasn't the kind of thing that happened to me.Needless to say, it was a long drive to Porterville, and my aunt and I tried to keep each other's spirits up by reasoning that there were probably hundreds of hikers in this area and it could very well be someone else. We agreed later that neither of us would have made it through that day alone, and we're forever bonded by the searing experience.Still, odd thoughts kept popping into my head, such as: if my dad is in fact dead, am I supposed to drop the suffix from my name and use his? My brother later reported being compelled to get some new socks while he was waiting to hear the outcome, because the last time he'd seen him Dad had said his socks were ratty. (Which brings up another aspect to all this that I won't go into here: the immediate aftermath of my dad's death and the long-term ramifications, including my consciously but unsuccessfully trying to avoid taking my dad's place in caring for my brother, who around this time began exhibiting behavior that many years later was finally diagnosed as schizophrenia and treated.)The other aspect looming in the background for my family during these awful few days was that this was not the first tragic loss of a young man – my dad was 43, younger than I am today – our family suffered to the mountains of California.My dad's oldest brother was 21 when the Marine helicopter he was riding in hit a power wire apparently not shown on the map the crew was using and crashed. I first learned who JFK was when I was about six, from reading a framed letter that hung on the wall in my grandfather's study: the President offering condolences to my grandparents on their loss and thanking them for their son's service to his country.Portrait of my dad's brother Joel in his Marine dress uniform.Joel was a larger-than-life figure in our family, a legend whom my cousins and I grew up knowing only through tales of his many and varied exploits, such as his gymnastics championships and ability to walk up a flight of stairs on his hands, his piloting of fighter jets on the West Coast, and his charms with the ladies (as one example, he went to high school with the actress Ann-Margaret and dated her as she began her Hollywood career).Joel's death was evidently felt beyond our family, as well. My cousin recently ran into Brian Doyle-Murray at a golf club, and having heard family stories of our dads growing up with Brian and Bill in Kenilworth, IL, introduced himself. (The inspiration for the movie "Caddyshack" was Indian Hill Country Club, where the Murray brothers, Harold Ramis and my dad and his brothers caddied as teenagers.) Nearly fifty years later, Brian was still moved by my uncle's tragedy and told my cousin that he had named his son after Joel.My dad was 15 when Joel was killed, and a cadet at Culver Military Academy, a boarding school in Indiana. Whenever he spoke about his brother it was in reverential tones; clearly this was a devastating loss for him and for the family.But Joel's untimely death wasn't the first either. It followed by about two years a cousin, Barry, being killed in a Navy plane crash – also in the mountains. Just before leaving on our trip to Alaska that June, my dad, my grandmother and I had lunch with Barry's widow, whom my grandmother had kept in touch with through the years. She spoke about her husband as if he'd only been gone a few months, and it was an incredibly poignant meeting.I love the Golden State and the Sierra Nevadas are incredibly beautiful, but they clearly appear to have it in for Packels who take the road less traveled.It was about 10pm by the time my aunt and I got to Porterville. When we called the coroner's office they said the team had recovered the body but were still in transit. We checked into a motel then went to a diner and tried to eat but couldn't. Back at the motel, the phone rang at 11:45 and I answered a call from the coroner.He said he was sorry to inform me that a backpack was strapped to the hiker's remains and it had my dad's name in it.I fell to my knees and my gut seized up as the tears began to pour.Me looking down toward Hell's Hole at the end of a 3-day trip in 2006 to retrace my dad's last steps. It was my third attempt to do so and I learned from the previous aborted trips to do it right by hiring an experienced guide this time.Related links:The search & rescue team that recovered my dad. In lieu of flowers at his funeral we asked for donations and raised $15,000, which we split between this SAR and the Yosemite Fund. (But we got a lot of flowers, too.)Tulare County Sheriff's Department Search & RescueBlackrock Trailhead, where he parked his car and started his final hikeInyo National ForestBlackrock topo mapPage on TrailsFlora & Fauna | Yosemite | Oh, Ranger!Fire starting with a Fire DrillA course similar to the one of the many my dad took7-Day Field Course | Boulder Outdoor Survival School | BOSSI'm not positive, but this looks a lot like the road along 9 Mile Creek that you drive from CA 395 to get up to Blackrock.Driving in the Eastern Sierras