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It's April the 26th, 1976, somewhere over the Sierra Nevada in California.
29-year-old Lauren Elder peers out of the window of a small, single-engine aircraft. She looks down as the forested foothills slowly transform into alpine slopes. The plane shudders and shakes in the turbulence, so light it lifts and drops with each gust of wind. It's exhilarating, but a little scary, like a fairground ride.
Those planes are so tiny that you feel like you're literally out in the air yourself flying. You know, you don't have layer after layer of metal and insulation and everything else between you and the world. So it's that connection that's really exciting. Lauren is in the back seat. In front of her is Jay, the pilot, and his girlfriend, Jean.
Lauren suspects that Jay is showing off a little as the plane swoops and glides through valleys and canyons. Soon they're flying above, or rather alongside, the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra. Lauren takes her camera and snaps the dramatic view. As we enter the higher mountains, there are peaks in every direction and they still are snow-capped and it's really breathtaking. And so in order to get good shots, I do take my seat belt off and
You know, with every little twist and turn through the mountains, there's something absolutely spectacular to see. And so I'm sliding back and forth from one window to the other, taking photos. Despite maintaining a constant altitude, the landscape seems to lurch up higher and higher. They're flown into an area where the mountains rise to 14,000 feet. Lauren glances at Jay, checking for any signs of concern.
but he's relaxed pointing out landmarks and gene seems to trust him entirely lauren tries to calm her own nerves by taking more photos training her viewfinder on the yawning canyon below i look out the window and i what i see is a wall of rock outside the window and he still isn't alarmed he says
Hang on, you know, we're all going to feel a jolt as we clear the crest line because the air is just like a wave. It's going to go up and then down as it flows over the mountaintop. So hang on really tightly. Jay tells them that an even more spectacular view awaits on the other side of this mountain. But Lauren isn't excited. To her, the crest line up ahead looks alarmingly high.
As I look out the window, there's just literally a vertical wall of granite that's very, very, very close. Much too close for comfort, and that's the last thing I remember. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives.
In this episode, we meet Lauren Elder. In 1976, she's 29 years old, an artist based in San Francisco. When she takes up the last-minute offer of a sightseeing flight, she never imagines she'll end up stranded on a mountaintop. As night falls and the temperature drops, Lauren will face a desperate choice: wait for a rescue that might never come or strike out for help alone.
The cold was so exhausting. And I thought, well, I'll never make a second night of it. You're a speck in the middle of this vast wilderness. Are they going to find you in time? Maybe, maybe not. So I thought, well, I'm just going to take my chances and go. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is Real Survival Stories. April the 26th, 1976 is a cloudless Monday morning in Oakland, California. Lauren stands on the tarmac at a private airfield.
She is watching as Dr. J. Fuller, the pilot, pulls the tarpaulin off a Cessna light aircraft. The sightseeing tour is a spur-of-the-moment decision. It should have been her boyfriend taking the back seat in the small plane. But when he had to cancel, Lauren agreed to take his place. The plan is to do a day trip out to Death Valley National Park, a desert area 300 miles southeast, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada. They'll fly in, stop for a picnic, then head home before it's dark.
Up until this moment, Lauren had been looking forward to it. But for some unclear reason, standing here on the tarmac, she suddenly has second thoughts. He's rented a single-engine Cessna from the University of California Flying Club. And he's already busy pulling off the tarp and the stops. And I say, can I take a moment to go into the loo? And he's
The eagerness and excitement I'd feeling suddenly turned into panic. Just it literally stopped me in my tracks. I had this premonition that I should not go. She's not a nervous flyer. She's been up in planes like this before, including with her dad, who's a pilot himself. But wherever the sense of dread comes from, it's hard to ignore. It might have been triggered a little bit
by the realization that it was getting quite windy. So I knew it was going to be a bit of a rough ride.
And then I thought about the practicalities. I thought, I'm miles from home. There's no public transport available. I'm going to look perfectly stupid saying to them, I don't think this is a good idea. I don't wish to go. Because there was no reason to not have confidence in him. I just had this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that it was not a good idea. But I just suppressed that intuition and said, okay, here we go.
Lauren gathers herself, walks back out through the hangar, and climbs into the rear seat of the plane. The aircraft is already vibrating, ready for takeoff. Dr. Jay Fuller is 36, a respected local veterinarian and the boss of Lauren's boyfriend. He exudes a quiet confidence that lifts Lauren's spirit somewhat as they taxi to the runway. Jay's girlfriend, Jean, turns in her seat and smiles. She seems quite at ease.
She was quite a bit younger than he was, at least 10 years, I think. Very lovely, a bit shy. And I don't know if that was due to the age difference, the fact that we were both a bit older, or if that was just her nature at the time. I didn't know very much at all about her. We had all been on one group sailing trip some months before, and she was rather quiet during this time.
the lead up to the flight. She was along for the ride, I think. And I think he was excited to take her on an adventure and show her what a fun guy he was. It's quite bumpy.
And so that all by itself is both exciting and scary. And I'm looking at the farmlands that are newly planted stretching out beneath us and being really quite excited that we're off the ground and going. With her pre-flight nerves forgotten, Lauren takes photos of the incredible landscape. After an hour or so, they've passed the great Sequoia forests and are sweeping through the granite gorges of Kings Canyon National Park. Lauren shivers.
She should have worn a thicker coat. She's dressed for a spring trip to the desert. Light jacket, vest top, woolen skirt and knee-high boots. She pulls on the hat that she threw into her bag at the last minute. They've been in the air for about two hours when Jay calls out that they will shortly be crossing the approaching peaks of the Kearsarge Pass. Lauren's ears are popping. She can barely make out what he's saying. She leans forward and tries to identify the pass for herself. All she can see in front is a towering wall of granite.
But Jay still seems confident. He points out a tiny dip in the mass of mountains. That's where they're headed. He has the map in his lap. It's a map issued by the Federal Aviation Agency. And there are these purple dots indicating the route.
The Sierra Nevadas is strongly north-south, and we've been following an east-west canyon. The canyon forks into two other canyons, left and right, that look very similar, and he heads to the right. He doesn't realize he's made an error. I don't realize he's made an error. In fact, he's made several errors.
In fact, Jay has only 213 hours of flight experience and just 46 hours flying an aircraft of this type. Lauren doesn't know that this is a particularly challenging section of the High Sierra, with the tallest peaks in the contiguous United States. She doesn't know that the Cessna, with its single propeller, will struggle to gain altitude when met with downdrafts in the thin, turbulent mountain air.
She has no idea that no flight plan was filed with the California Flying Club before takeoff, and that no one knows where they are. But the real error, the fatal error, turns out to be the navigation. Instead of the left-hand canyon highlighted on the map, the plane veers to the right. They are now headed for a deep basin ringed by a series of peaks that are jaw-droppingly high.
It's only when we get into this box canyon that we suddenly go, "Oh, oh." The crest line is above us, not below us, as we anticipated. So it's at that point that things get hairy. I look out the window and what I see is a wall of rock outside the window. And he still isn't alarmed. He says,
Hang on, you know, we're all going to feel a jolt as we clear the crest line. The engine winds as the plane banks steeply, trying to clear the crest, and then Lauren's world goes black. This is a paid advertisement from Rocket Money. Do you ever stop to think about how much you're paying in subscriptions each month? It's probably more than you think, but that's where Rocket Money can help.
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Lauren opens her eyes. She's still sat in the backseat of the Cessna.
But as her vision clears, she sees the sides of the plane are crumpled inwards. A light flurry of snow enters through the broken windows. She glances to her right. The aircraft is resting right on the mountain ridge. Her eyes focus on the pilot's controls at the front. The plane's altimeter is smashed, but the needle reads 13,200 feet. Jean is slumped forward in her seat. Jay is sat upright in his, still holding the yoke, the steering mechanism.
He turns to look at Lauren. On his bloodied face is an expression of utter confusion. It's deadly quiet. It's deadly quiet. And I'm doubled over and I'm looking down at my right shinbone because it's been exposed by a gash. And I look up and I see Jay's face. He's turned around to speak to me and it's all covered in blood that's dried. And I realize, oh, there's really been an accident.
Everything's coming out in little tiny details that are sort of adding up to this big, big sense of this is really serious. Jay has an open wound on his head. His eyes are glassy and distant.
He says, can you get out? Can you move around? And I need your help getting Jean out of the airplane for some reason. He feels like he needs to remove her and get her down on the ground. So you sort of do a body check when something like that happens. And my immediate sense was, ow, my arm really hurts. It's swollen and I might have broken it, but I can function. And I think...
Basically, I'm okay. You know, I've got cuts, but I don't have a sense of being mortally injured. When I get out to help him... Lauren's right. She's broken the large bone in her forearm. But other than that, she's been extremely lucky. She forces open the aircraft door, and the frigid mountain air hits her full in the face. It's only when she clambers down and steps back that she understands exactly how likely she's gotten off.
The wrecked plane teeters on a 45-degree slope wedged into loose rock and scree just 20 feet or so from the summit of Mount Bradley, a summit they so nearly cleared.
The plane broke in half at the wing section. Well, it didn't break in half, it bent in half. And they were sitting in the... They had seatbelts on, but the force of the impact threw them against the dashboard of the plane, which is a very vertical kind of construction. So they took the full impact. I was in the back seat, and in a much more padded seat.
No sharp metal, no seat belt hanging on. Lauren helps to get Jean out of her seat. She's in a bad way. And we lift her out and it's apparent that she's been quite severely injured. She had something wrong with her spinal cord and/or vertebrae in her neck. I don't know what.
And so I sit down and sort of brace this very steep slope. And so to keep from moving down the slope, you have to sort of keep bracing yourself. And so I stick my heels on the slope and hold her between my legs and cradle her head on my lap and try and hang on to her, loop my arms under her armpits. And she's convulsing and quite seriously cut up.
I keep calling her name and trying to talk to her, but she can't speak. She can make noises, but she can't articulate. Jean's feet are bare and turning blue. She'd been wearing flip-flops for the desert. Lauren takes off her own socks and puts them on Jean. That's about all she can do for her right now. They need to act fast. Lauren fires a series of questions at Jay, but he's confused, totally shaken up, and struggles to answer.
And I think he's going around in circles trying to figure out what to do. And I said, well, try a radio for help. And he said, well, the radio is not working. And I say, well, do we have an emergency locator? And he says, it's not, I don't think it's working. I said, well, do we have blankets that we can put on her? No emergency blankets. Do people know where we are? Well...
"Uh, no." "Have you filed a flight plan?" "Well, no. I was in a hurry." "Are they expecting us back tonight?" "Well, yes. I have to pick up my daughter from the caregiver." "Who else knows? My boyfriend expects us back by dark." And I suddenly go, "This is really dire." There's no first aid kit. There's no tinfoil blanket, mylar blanket. Nothing. It went from bad to worse very quickly.
Lauren leaves Jay and Jean for a moment and climbs the short distance up to the very top of the mountain. She wants to know exactly where they are and what they're dealing with. At the summit, she looks down the eastern slope. And we were about 50 feet short of the actual edge. And it is, it's like a razor edge.
Coming from the west, you're gradually, gradually, gradually going higher, but once you get to the crest line, it's a vertical drop on the other side down to the first desert valley. So it's actually a good thing that we did valley flop on the west side because if we'd gone over the crest, we would have just tobogganed down the east side and gotten smashed to smithereens.
The mountainside plunges thousands of feet straight down to the desert floor. But once the initial shock at the starkness of their situation passes, Lauren looks again and begins to recognize some landmarks. And I got looked down and I go, oh, oh, that's the Owens Valley. I know where we are, roughly, because there's a state highway 395 that parallels the east side of the Sierras connecting Los Angeles with Reno, Nevada.
And I think, oh, oh, we're right near civilization. It looks like it's, you know, 10 miles away. It's a glimmer of hope. Who knows how they'll get off the mountain, but at least they're not too far from help as the crow flies. Lauren returns to the plane. Jay is leaning against a crumpled door. He's still conscious, but his face is blank.
And I said, "I think we need to start a fire because the sun's beginning to go down and the temperature's dropping. Do we have matches? No. Does the battery on the plane still work?" Lauren has an idea: the cigarette lighter from the plane's dashboard. Luckily, it's still functioning. And I start burning anything I can get my hands on. There's a handful of maps on the plane and we think, "This isn't going to work. It's absolutely not going to work."
At that point, I noticed that there's a dribble of gasoline leaking out of this little spigot on the wing of the airplane. And so I start emptying out beer bottles as fast as I can and collecting gasoline. We take turns doing that and get a little fire going in the rocks. And it's just a matter of constantly throwing out small amounts of engine fuel and
which burns instantly, but we do have a fire going. And I notice that the rocks are being warmed by the fire, and so I start stacking the rocks up into a pyramid so that we have a little radiator there. And we take turns tossing gas onto the pile. Jay tries to help her, but he's disoriented, and his speech is slurred. As the last daylight fades, Lauren's energies are split.
If she fails to keep the fire going, it'll all freeze. At the same time, she needs to encourage Jay to try to fix the radio. And then there's Jean. They check on her periodically, but she's critically injured. And when she stops responding, it's clear she doesn't have long left.
There's been a tacit understanding between us that we can't do anything for Jean, really. So she's nearby and we're kind of keeping an eye on her, but there's nothing we can do to comfort her any further. And it takes both of us to maintain this fire. And he's becoming more apathetic. Just before nightfall, Lauren goes back over to Jean, but she's not where she left her. She's nowhere to be seen.
They search the crash site, scouring the slope and calling out in the darkness, but she has vanished. Eventually, they return to the fire. Did Jean have another seizure and roll down the mountainside? Did she come around and stumble off into the night? There's no way of knowing. One way or another, she is gone. As the freezing night closes in, Loren tries to keep Jay awake and engaged. He has become quiet and sullen.
I keep trying to energize us. It takes a lot of energy. I'm a terrible singer, but I said, we're going to sing together. And I pull out every folk song and spiritual I can think of and try and get him to sing. And he won't even keep the hood up on his jacket. And I keep going over there and bundling him up. So really, I have become the one in charge and the one sort of
keeping us moving forward. He participates a bit, but not much. And I don't understand it, and it's really annoying. So it goes, hour after hour after hour. Lauren cannot know that Jay is suffering from serious internal bleeding. And in spite of the fire, he's losing body heat fast. So I was caretaking for him as well as myself. And I'm sure he blamed himself and was crippled by guilt.
So there was this role reversal that went on. I expected him to be the authority and the medical person who knew what to do. And in fact, he was really fairly helpless. And he was slipping away. Night wears on, and the temperature plummets well below freezing. Before long, they're pouring out the last drops of gasoline. As their fire begins to sputter and flare, the darkness threatens to swallow them up. But once again, Lauren is able to keep despair at bay. She switches back into survival mode.
A wind comes up and it blows out the fire. Suddenly pitch black, there's no heat. And I think, oh God, this is it. And then I realized that we've got this substantial pile of hot rocks. And I start transferring these heated rocks into the tail section of the airplane and said, come on, we're going to get in and we'll stay warm in there. And it was actually quite comfortable.
You know, we put warm rocks between our feet and warm rocks between our thighs and then our armpits and huddled up inside the tail section. Every few minutes, all through the night, Lauren prods Jay to keep him conscious, to make sure he's staying as warm as possible. But he's increasingly delirious. By the time dawn is creeping over the mountains, he's in a state of distress. He starts to struggle more.
and fuss and say, "I've got to get out of here. I've got to get out of here." And he's hurting me because he's thrashing around and I can't see his face and I can't see his expression. I can just feel him struggling and I said, "Che, stop it. Stop it. Stop it. You're hurting me and it's useless. We need to stay here and stay quiet and try and stay sheltered."
And he keeps fussing and he gets very, very quiet. And I don't think anything of it. And then I think he's too quiet. And I feel, you know, reach up and feel for a pulse and there isn't one. And then I pull myself up and, you know, test for breathing and see that he's gone. It's just after daybreak on Tuesday, April the 27th, 1976.
Inside the wrecked plane, Lauren lies beside Jay's body. She is distraught, exhausted, and entirely alone. I had a certain degree of hypothermia, and it makes you dozy and kind of la-di-da. And I thought, well, I could just drift off, and that would be quite lovely. And at that point, I had almost like a vision of my mom and my grandmother coming to me and saying, no, you're not doing that. You're not, no, not yet.
It was like my mother and my grandmother between them, my perception or vision of them. They were like my cheerleading team that hadn't given up on me. We were connected somehow, psychically. And they were saying, get yourself out of there. Pull your socks up. Get going. Lauren forces herself into action. She takes Jay's socks, puts them on, and climbs out of the plane.
now that the sun's coming up over the next range of mountains out in the desert. I mean, it's glorious. And more than anything, I was able to get warm. I could sit in the sun and get warm and consider what to do next. So I knew that I was not going to make it through a second night. I knew that there would be some kind of a search since we hadn't come back. But I couldn't trust the fact that they would find us in time.
Lauren scrambles back up to the crest of Mount Bradley to examine the eastern slope once more. Below her is the deepest-lying valley in the US, and beyond that, the fringes of the Mojave Desert. But if she could somehow get down and get to the interstate highway, then she might find help. She looks again. A dried-out streambed runs along a canyon and out of the mountains. That could work.
But to get there, she'll need to climb down maybe 3,000 feet of near vertical incline. Deep snow covers the highest parts. But here and there, there are protruding boulders, stepping stones. Lauren starts connecting them in her mind, plotting a route. It looks to me that it's feasible to kind of zigzag my way down the slope by traveling from one set of boulders to the next. Taking action is less depressing than walking.
just sitting here and waiting and hoping and contemplating whether or not to let myself go. I thought, you know, if I blow it, I blow it, but I'm going to try. At around 7 a.m., Lauren begins her descent. Even an experienced climber with all the gear would find it extremely challenging. Lauren is wearing high-heeled boots and a woolen skirt. She'll just have to improvise. I developed this traversing method. There was an ice crust that had formed overnight,
On the surface of the snow, it was a couple of inches thick, and it was just enough to hold my weight if I punched through the crest. So I was going on all fours. I'd punch, punch, punch, punch, kick, kick, punch, punch. And I would zigzag from one group of rocks to the other down the face of this nearly vertical bowl. After a few hours, she reaches a 100-foot drop. Had there been more snow this year, this would be a raging waterfall. I had to...
to climb down these waterfalls, really. But they were dry waterfalls. Had the snow been running, spring melt, as it should have been, I never would have made it. Never. But luck was with me. She takes off her boots, tucks the socks inside, and drops them over the edge so that they land on the ledge below. She's going to need all her fingers and toes to do this.
I'd had one or two lessons from a friend in how to rock climb, where you're just hanging on with your fingernails and your toes to any little outcropping you can find, and you work your way down like that, heart and mouth. In some places, there were tree branches lodged in the crevices, and I could use that as a ladder.
My confidence is with every little, you know, advance, my confidence builds, my confidence builds until, you know, I get halfway down and I go, oh my God, that's a 50 foot drop. Now what? But Lauren just keeps going, one toehold at a time. Filled with adrenaline, she barely notices the pain from her broken arm. In fact, despite everything, what she really feels is excitement.
I've been brought up to trust myself, to trust my judgment, to trust my physical abilities, to know where my limits were. And I'd spent most of my childhood, you know, roaming around the countryside pretty much unsupervised with a horse or a bicycle or a friend or a canoe or whatever. And I trusted my instincts and I trusted my abilities and I knew where my limits were.
I thought, "Well, all right, I did that. I can do the next one." I was actually having a good time during part of it. I was so full of adrenaline. I could have flown. By early afternoon, after five or six hours, Lauren has navigated down several thousand feet. She's cleared the hardest section of the descent. But that effort has taken its toll. She hasn't eaten and, aside from a few gulps from a stream, she's barely drunk anything since yesterday morning.
Adrenaline will only take her so far. As the gradient eases, at least she no longer needs to rock climb. But as she picks her way through rocky crags and slides down scree slopes, her head is spinning. I got to the bottom of the vertical bowl. That's when it started, partly because I had the freedom to stand upright, not use my hands to hang on for dear life. And that's when I had the first one. It was a silhouette like a Christ on a cross.
And then I went blink, blink, no, no, no. No, no, not there. Well, there, but not there, you know, because I began to feel like some of the hallucinations had a spiritual dimension to them, that they were there to kind of, they were apparitions to encourage me. And there were other ones where I went, no, that's wishful thinking. You're hoping that you're going to see a house. You're hoping you're going to see a road.
Lauren's pace slows. She has to force herself to trust even the ground beneath her feet. Realistically, she needs to make it down to the desert by sundown. But at the same time, rushing would only increase the risk of an accident. So it's one careful step at a time. It's around 7pm. The setting sun casts a warm orange glow on Owens Valley. Lauren's walking barefoot. At one point or another, after taking them off for a moment, she lost her boots. She's not sure when.
Thankfully, the ice and scree of the mountains is leveling out into the dust and scrub of the desert floor. Now she just keeps taking the next step, heading for the horizon and the string of lights along it. If they're real, they could be car headlamps on the highway. And I went, "All right, I'm going to trust that that's a freeway, not a hallucination." And I had crossed a jeep trail and I said, "I'm just going to follow this jeep trail and it should take me out to the road."
And I completely miscalculated the distance because the desert's flat and you don't have any reference points. No trees, no telephone poles, no nothing. You have no idea how far something is. But what was I going to do? And so I decided just to keep moving. Finally, at around 10 p.m., 14 hours after leaving the crash site, Lauren reaches the lights. They are real.
And it's not just a highway. She's actually emerged right on the edge of the small desert town of Independence, California. And lo and behold, I'm right on the outskirts of a little town with a motel right there. Uh-huh. Great. Uh-huh, Beth. The telephone. I've made it. She staggers up to the motel, overwhelmed with relief. The end is finally in sight. Except it isn't.
And I go up and knock on the door and this guy comes out of his TV trance and looks at me like the cat's brought in a mangled mouse. Because that's probably what I looked like. I sort of, you know, tried to clean myself up. But it was a lost cause. I had so much greasy soot and blood that I looked afraid. Lauren can barely speak, but she manages to ask to use the telephone.
She tries to explain that she's been in an accident, that she needs help. You can see his eyes getting bigger and bigger and he said, "No, I'm sorry, I can't help you." And I said, "Well, can you suggest someplace I could go?" And he said, "Well, there's a motel at the other end of town."
So I limped down to this other motel and went through my little song and dance again. I've been in an accident. I need help. Could you give me a telephone? Let me charge a call. I want to talk to my family. I've been in an accident. I'm all right. Don't panic. I just need to make a phone call. And he said, I don't know, girl. I don't think so. I guess we're all full up.
And I remember that there was a very old, decrepit hotel that looked like it might have a light on. And so I went in there and there was an elderly couple at the desk who were a bit hard of hearing. And I'm trying to shout, but at that point I don't have the energy to shout. Lauren can see that they're scared. She can't get the message across. And then, just when things couldn't get any worse, the town sheriff walks into the room.
The sheriff bursts into the room and I think, oh great, now they're going to take me to jail. You know, call the authorities, there's a vagrant woman running around our little town. She's going to make trouble. But in fact, the sheriff believes her and he wants to help. Finally, finally, she is safe. He knew that there'd been a search and he knew against all odds that there I was as a survivor of this thing and somehow I'd made my way down it.
The sheriff drives Lauren to the hospital in the next town along. The doctor who stitches the gash on her leg tells her that she has mild frostbite in her feet and her arm is fractured. Several of her teeth will need to be capped. But the hospital staff, along with Lauren's father, a former navy pilot, are just staggered that she made it out of the sky and down that mountain in one piece.
Well, my dad came up the next day and he'd gone to bed that night thinking I was a goner because he'd certainly seen enough plane accidents in his career to think, well, the odds are against her surviving. My mother, who had a much deeper spiritual practice, absolutely believed that I was alive. And I felt like we had some sort of a bond there.
throughout the whole ordeal anyway. But he's the one who showed up first. Greatly relieved. While Lauren is reunited with her family at the hospital, an Air Force helicopter lands near the crest of Mount Bradley, near the Cessna. Jean, tragically, as they suspected, didn't make it. They find her body 120 feet down from the plane. It seems that in the darkness, she had rolled down the mountainside. Jay is still in the wreckage, his hair dusted with snow.
The county coroner will later tell Lauren that a ruptured spleen and internal bleeding had hastened his death from hypothermia. Some time later, Lauren also discovers why the people of Independence reacted to her with such fear. It turns out that many of them believed she was part of the notorious cult, the Manson family.
It was a very small town and it was the very biggest thing that had happened to that very small town in a very long time. When the Manson family was arrested, they were living on a ranch to the east of this village.
When they were brought into town, only he was charged and put in the town jail. And the girls were just left to roam around the town, wild-eyed and barefoot. So some people thought, oh no, they're back again, it's another cult. We thought we'd seen the last of them, but here's another one. But in the coming days, some of those who turned Lauren away come to visit her in hospital, asking for forgiveness. She doesn't hold a grudge.
I think I continued to be generally optimistic rather than pessimist. It definitely reaffirmed that there's a spiritual dimension to everything. I mean, I could easily become quite cynical afterwards, particularly when people didn't help me. Even at the time, I sort of understood their reservations and their caution and their unwillingness to help.
Today, Lauren has had decades to reflect on the accident. She pinpoints the emotional and spiritual connection she felt with her mother and grandmother as something that kept her going and kept her safe. Like I do believe that there are other levels to reality than the ones that we experience day to day. I had an experience that was a gift in terms of being able to refer, when things get really tough, I can always refer back to this experience and go,
Yeah, there's a bigger picture. There's a bigger picture that we may not always be aware of, but it's there. That there are multiple dimensions to reality and that there isn't just one story. And sometimes we're privileged to be able to see beyond the veil. In the next episode, we meet London firefighter and amateur mountaineer Dan Acqua. In 2020, he swaps the intense heat of his day job for the extreme cold of Mont Blanc.
He and his climbing partner Matt begin a multi-day ascent. But when a fall down a crevasse leaves Dan badly shaken, their progress will grind to a halt. And with a fierce storm closing in, a grim truth begins to take shape. If Dan can't get himself down the mountain, his partner might have to leave him behind. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. Listen to Dan's story today as a Noisa Plus subscriber.
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