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This episode is brought to you by Honda. When you test drive the all-new Prologue EV, there's a lot that can impress you about it. There's the class-leading passenger space, the clean, thoughtful design, and the intuitive technology. But out of everything, what you'll really love most is that it's a Honda. Visit Honda.com slash EV to see offers. It's midday on Saturday, February the 7th, 2004. In the frozen heights of the Sierra Nevada mountains, California, all is still.
After a week of extreme blizzards, the entire range lies submerged beneath deep flurries. Only the tops of the tallest pine trees are visible, their lower branches slumped beneath the powdery drifts. In this silent void of snow, fog, and ice, nothing stirs. Well, almost nothing. At the bottom of a gully, a fast-flowing river of crystal-clear alpine water cuts a course between two snowbanks, and in the middle of it,
34-year-old Eric LeMarc battles against the freezing current.
I'm just scrambling to the side to try to get out of there because my foot's getting twisted. I was up to maybe my waist in water, and I'm just trying to get to the side and get out of it and make sure that I've got my board and everything else with me and not to get pummeled by those rocks that I was getting pulled into as the water was shoving me forward. Clinging to his snowboard, it's all Eric can do to stay upright.
My board falls perpendicular and it yanks me down the river and I'm getting hit in the shins with rocks and it's hurting. He tries to stop himself by digging his feet into the rocky bed, but the torrent keeps sweeping him along. And the further downstream Eric goes, the closer he gets to the real danger. Above the churn of the river is a distant rumbling drone.
The sound of the raging 80-foot waterfall that lies just around the corner. On this occasion, fortune favors him. In the nick of time, the current carries Erik within reaching distance of the bank. Hands grasping, he's able to haul himself out of the water. He collapses in the snow. A second or two later, he would have been swept over the precipice, and that would have been that. But he doesn't have time to dwell on this close call. Another life-threatening problem is staring him in the face.
Eric is soaking wet in the mountains in midwinter. Hypothermia was on the cards before he fell in the river. He may have escaped drowning, but if he doesn't dry off soon and freeze to death... 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 return to snowboarder and former ice hockey pro, Eric Lamarck. After getting stranded on a remote section of California's Mammoth Mountain, Eric made a fateful decision. He strayed out of bounds of the resort and into the backcountry in search of a mountain lodge that he believes is close by.
My teeth were chattering so hard I was worried I was going to break them. You know, with the wind chill, it was probably, you know, negative 15 to negative 20 Fahrenheit. And it's not just external factors that Eric must contend with. As a recovering drug addict, he's battling the demons of withdrawal. He's already spent one night stumbling through the wilderness without a map or a compass. Is he headed back towards civilization? Or is he venturing deeper and deeper into the world?
into the unknown. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is Real Survival Stories. Early afternoon on Saturday, February the 7th, Eric sits shivering on the riverbank, staring down at his soaking wet clothes. He needs to dry out or he's as good as dead. Eric racks his brain. He thinks back to the night before this whole misadventure began. As luck would have it, he happened to read a book about surviving in the wild.
In the book, I also saw that if you do get wet, you could take your clothes off and you can hang them in the trees to dry. But also if there are rocks, rocks retain heat, wipe the snow off the top of the rocks and lay your clothes out flat. And I did that. I stripped practically naked and all I had was my sports socks and my boots on.
grabbing myself between my legs and keeping my hands as warm as possible, my gloves, my hat, my goggles, everything is off. And I'm just kind of doing this fire dance kind of thing. I'm dancing around and trying to keep myself warm and rubbing myself and shaking and dancing and moving and even making noise in hopes that somebody is going to hear me or something. His half-crazed jig.
goes on for two whole hours. When he can't stand it any longer, he puts his clothes back on. They haven't dried out completely, but it's the best he can do. Next, he tries to take stock of his surroundings. The heavy fog is limiting his visibility. He can't see more than 30 feet in any direction. Snowflakes whip around his head, caught in swirling eddies of wind. Eric believes he's in a valley that runs parallel to Mammoth Mountain's southern ridge.
If that's true, then the nearest place of safety is Tamarack Ski Lodge, perhaps only a few miles east of his current location, at the far end of the valley. He sets off, walking in what he hopes is the right direction. After a while, the terrain steepens. Anticipation builds. In his mind's eye, he can already see the lights of Tamarack twinkling down below. But by the time he reaches the top of the hill, several hours later, the mist has only thickened in the early evening gloom.
Spending another night in sub-zero temperatures is clearly far from ideal. On the other hand, he doesn't want to risk venturing on blind in the dark. Erik scrambles up a rocky ledge and carves out a ditch in the snow. Then, with the last of the failing light, he sees something in the distance that gives him hope. Through a gap in the fog, Erik is convinced that he can see the outline of a chairlift. It must lead down to the lodge.
It's just across the valley, on the crest of a wooded rise, no more than a few hours on foot. At that time at dusk, I'm like, oh, I think I see the top of the lift at Tamarack up there. So I'm like, all right, well, I guess it's going to be two nights and tomorrow I'll get out of here. Overnight, Duncan's Pumpkin Spice Coffee has sent folks into a cozy craze. I'm Lauren LaTulip reporting live from home in my hand-knit turtleneck that my nana made me.
Mmm, cinnamony. The home with Duncan is where you want to be.
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Sunday, February the 8th. Eric wakes at dawn to the sound of a piercing wind. In his condition, in his still, damp layers. The fact he wakes at all is something. He sits up, snow clinging to the bristles of his unshaven face. He scours the valley for the chairlift that he spotted the night before. But in the cold light of day, all he sees are windswept trees. No chairlift. He must have imagined it. It is a crushing disappointment.
but he must force himself to stay positive. He has survived another night on the mountain, and sleep has restored some energy. Energy he'll need to walk to Tamarack Lodge, which must surely lie just a little further on. Erik clambers to his feet. Reaching his hand inside his jacket, he pulls out his Ziploc bag, the bag that used to contain his stash of crystal meth. Yesterday, Erik made a momentous decision. He's getting clean.
He dumped his remaining drugs and replaced them with something far more precious. He brings the bag to his lips and drinks the now liquid snow he's been melting overnight. Then he sets off, walking into the mist. But after just a few steps, he becomes aware of a dull tingling inside his boots. He reaches down, squeezes his ankles. They're completely numb. Eric sits down on a nearby rock and starts untying his bootlaces.
And so I started to pull my sock down and as I rolled it around to the bottom of my foot, it stuck. And I'm like, is this frozen to my feet? And so I put my hands on there and I feel sure enough, the socks are frozen to my feet.
So I hold my feet for a little bit and I slowly kind of take it off. It's quite painful. And as I take the sock off, yeah, I had ripped about two and a half inches of skin off the bottom of my feet with the sock. And the very first thought was you're going to lose your feet. They were black. They were orange. They were purple and they were already swollen and soaking wet.
In that moment he is nearly overwhelmed with despair, but he thinks about his family, his parents. He owes it to them to persevere.
I vowed at that minute that I was going to do anything I could, that I was not going to die on that mountain, and I was not going to have them put me into a box. I said to myself, regardless, these feet are going to take me out of here. I don't care how painful it becomes. So that was my inspiration. And then from that moment, a mantra came to my mind. It became, help yourself, help yourself, help yourself. Whispering his mantra.
Eric forces his frozen feet back into his boots, and he stands, lifts his snowboard onto his shoulders, and peers around. He knows he needs to travel northeast, but without a compass and with clouds blotting out the sun, he has no way of telling north from south. An idea occurs to him. He turns on his MP3 player and switches it to FM radio mode. He holds the device at different angles, reasoning that wherever the signal comes through the strongest,
is the way back to civilization. Gradually, the fuzzy chatter of a local radio station cuts through the static. I put the radio on and pointed it in a direction, you know, that it came in the most clear, and that's the direction I took. With frostbite setting in below his ankles, walking is harder with every step, so he snowboards wherever possible, letting gravity share the burden.
He's still out of bounds of the ski resort, but only separated from Tamarack, he hopes, by a single, low-lying ridge. If he continues along the valley floor, eventually he should reach a place where he can cross over. He slogs on for hours through the frigid haze, from morning into the afternoon. All the while, doubt gnaws away at him. What if he's headed the wrong way?
Then, at about 3 p.m., the fog suddenly lifts, revealing his surroundings. It was like a magic hand came out of nowhere and scooped out the sky, and it was a bluebird day. It practically blinded me with the sun shining upon the snow, and it was way too bright. But I saw the back of Mammoth, and then I go...
And I kind of point at Mammoth and I kind of bring my hand down and I'm like, "Oh my god, I'm one ridge too far to the south." Disoriented by the blizzard on that first night, Eric must have wandered at least ten miles in the wrong direction, away from Mammoth Mountain. Although he's now headed the right way, he's much farther from the lodge than expected, and lying ahead of him is a monstrous ridgeline soaring up into the sky.
He stares up at the hulking mass of snow and rock towering 4,000 vertical feet above him. To reach safety, he will have to conquer this colossal edifice and whatever else lies beyond it. He feels a sudden, crushing sense of loneliness. Craving the sound of another voice, he reaches for his MP3 player again. Selecting a song by the rapper Eminem, he cranks up the volume, headphones pulsing. Eric begins the arduous trek up the ridge.
He isn't ready to quit yet. I started to listen to some of the Eminem music, I'm a Soldier, over and over and Help Yourself. And I probably said it 25,000 times, you know, or something crazy 10,000 times. The incline towards the summit gets steeper and steeper. On multiple occasions, Eric sinks into the snow up to his waist. But he plows on through the afternoon and into another evening.
One excruciating step after another. Night begins to fall on his third day on the mountain. And I hear the wind coming and howling and screeching, and it hits the board, and the board flips and knocks and hits me in the head as I'm like behind it. That's how strong the wind was. He digs a trench in the snow, curls up inside. But this time, he positions his snowboard between himself and the gale, a makeshift wind block.
I must have fallen asleep at some point in time because when I woke up I was encased like a coffin with snow. And that freaked me out. I was freaked out that I was being buried alive. Erik claws at the snow above his head. A few seconds later, he emerges, breathless and panting, to find another overcast morning. It's Monday, February the 10th, his fourth day in the wilderness.
But having just escaped his coffin of snow, Eric is ready to prove to the mountain that he isn't done yet. That instant drove me and I started running up the mountain like I'm getting off of this thing today. Being so exposed and so vulnerable that it's burying me alive already that I was not going to let it break me and I used that as inspiration. Eric scrambles furiously up the mountainside.
He uses his board as a pickaxe, driving it into the soft snow, heaving himself upwards. "I would stab my board, I'd pull me up. I'd stab my board, I'd pull me up. And so I'm just expanding a tremendous amount of energy here." After a few hours of frenzied activity, inevitably, Eric's energy starts to wane. At one point, the compacted snow suddenly comes loose beneath him, sending him sliding back 20 feet down the slope. It takes him another hour to make up the lost ground.
but he grits his teeth and retraces his steps. The entire day is taken up by the relentless monotony of the ascent. With the light fading once again, Eric comes across a small cluster of evergreens. He's totally exhausted. He'll have to stop here tonight. At this higher altitude, the wind is even more savage. When Eric starts digging tonight's shelter, he piles loose snow on top for added insulation. He knows that the deeper he can get,
the warmer he'll be snow is an insulator as you go down under six to eight to ten inches snow insulates and it stays at 32 degrees as eric stacks more powder on top of his shelter he wonders if there isn't a more efficient way to gather snow he glances up the mountain a crazy notion forms in his mind i look up the hill and i'm like that looks like an amazing run
And so I hike up about a football field and I ride down and it was epic and I push a wall of snow up into my snow cave, like surround it. After three days without food and given the miserable condition of his feet, it's remarkable that Eric even has the stamina to snowboard. He might come to regret it later, but for now he's going to enjoy this fleeting respite.
Snow Cave successfully bolstered and with a little color restored to his cheeks, he crawls inside and rests his head on the frozen earth. He suddenly realizes that tomorrow is Tuesday the 11th, the day he is due in court. Just knew that my parents were going to be worried this day because I wasn't going to be showing up to appear in court, you know, the very next day. My teeth were chattering so hard I was worried I was going to break them.
I was actually putting some of my jacket into my mouth so that I would, I was at least as they were chattering uncontrollably, it was a piece of material that it was hitting. With the wind chill, it was probably, you know, negative 15 to negative 20 Fahrenheit.
I remember kind of crying out on that fourth night, you know, give me some help. I was asking my mom, you know, to send me some help. I was asking my stepmom to send me some help, my dad, my grandparents. Desperate for more insulation, during the night Eric staggers from his shelter, starts ripping pine needles and bark from the trees. He stuffs the coarse vegetation between his jacket and bare skin. Then he crawls back into his cave and curls himself into a ball.
It's Tuesday morning. Emerging from his shelter, Eric is blinded by the sunlight reflecting off the snow. The fog has cleared overnight. Squinting, Eric tilts his face toward the sun. It's just beginning to thaw out his frozen limbs. As his eyes adjust, Eric assesses how much of the ridge he still has left to climb. During yesterday's frenzied burst of energy, he managed to cover about two-thirds of it. It may be another 1,500 feet to the top.
But at this stage, it remains to be seen whether he has the energy to make it, let alone to descend the other side. You could start to feel your body eat itself. I was in such good shape, I didn't have much fat on me that, you know, it was starting to feel very uncomfortable and my skin was very tight. Drinking water, to me, I always feel very flexible and fluid and I felt very stiff.
not having enough water. You know, the few ounces that I would drink, you know, every, maybe two, three times a day was not enough to maintain the amount of energy that I was putting out to replace it. Eric grabs a handful of cedar leaves from one of the nearby trees. He shoves the foliage into his mouth, forcing it down, chewing quickly, trying to ignore the rank taste. Then he shoulders his snowboard, cracks on.
Soon the sun is setting yet again, but the ridgeline still seems so far away. Eric stops and peers back down the slope. He has barely traveled 300 feet all day. This was probably the first night that I was very disappointed. I was embarrassed with my athleticism. I was embarrassed that I only was able to move this far. And as much as the thought came in my head, like, you know,
Are you going to be able to do this as quickly as that came in? I let it out just as quickly. Quitting was not an option. Whether I had to crawl or do whatever I had to do, I was not going to die on that mountain. I was like, this is something I put myself into. It's something I'm getting myself out of. You're getting to the top.
and you're gonna, you know, get off of this mountain tomorrow, tomorrow." And it was always tomorrow. And, you know, that's what kind of bummed me out that fifth night is that I had said tomorrow already four nights previous. - For now, all Eric can do is rest and rehydrate. Lying in his latest shelter, he reaches inside his jacket for the Ziploc bag, but as he pulls it out, he realizes that he forgot to refill it with snow after his last drink.
There isn't a drop of water left. He has no choice but to turn to the only source of hydration available. I peed into the Ziploc bag that I had of what, you know, I had left to urinate. And I put some snow in there, which melted it down and drank it, you know, just about as much as I could. It was quite disgusting and bitter. He lies back down and tries to rest. He turns on his MP3 player.
now down to its dregs of battery, and switches the radio on. The crackly sound of human voices lulls him into sleep. It's dawn on Wednesday, February the 12th, day six. Yesterday's blue skies have vanished, replaced once again by a damp, freezing fog. The top of the ridge might as well be a million miles away. It seemed massive to me, and it seemed like I had...
set goals and achieve them and set them and achieve them, but I just had nothing left to almost carry me to the top. He is determined that today will be the day he reaches the summit, but his exhausted mind is soon playing tricks on him. On top of everything else, Eric is suffering from the effects of meth withdrawal. I had a very spooky encounter, you know, with that wispy kind of spirit of death laughing in my face.
You know, I felt that death. I felt that darkness not only hovering, but I smelt it. And it was so rank and so disgusting. You know, it was kind of taunting me and laughing.
And, you know, I started to cuss and swear and say, you know, you're not real and you're just a figment of my imagination or the spirit of the drugs that I was putting in my system. Because when you use a substance on a habitual basis, you become dependent on it to help wake you up and to help give you energy to push through for the next day. Time seems to warp and speed up. Lengthening shadows stretch out in front of him as the sun sinks lower in the sky.
But then, peering through the mist up ahead, Eric sees the steep incline leveling out. He's almost made it. Just a few feet away from the top of the ridge. In that moment, it is actually an overwhelming thought. Eric suddenly stops in his tracks. Even though I made it to the summit this day, I was afraid now to look over because I didn't know if I had enough energy to go on.
Once he crosses this ridge, he might only be a single snowboard run down to safety. But what if he's made another mistake? The disappointment might kill him. He just can't bear to find out, not right now. Even though he's mere feet from the top, he makes the decision to dig himself into yet another snowdrift. He just needs to rest for a moment, to steel himself.
I must have fell asleep probably around 3:30 or 4 o'clock that day. It was still light out. I woke up the next day, it was light, and I was like, "I just need a little more sleep." It was almost like I had to prepare myself to finish the race. - Sunlight filters through the clouds. Eric stares up at the sky, dazed and lightheaded. It's daytime, but what day is it? He has no idea how long he's been asleep.
Eric looks down. One of his boots is missing. He can't remember where or when he lost it. Nor does he feel much concern. He feels completely detached. I looked and I was barefoot on one of my feet. And the other foot was kind of frozen in the boot with no liner. You know, this was now a pretty grave situation.
and there was a tremendous sense of confusion. He'd better have a look for the missing boot. But when he stands up, his legs buckle beneath him. Eric fumbles with his MP3 player, seeking those human voices on the radio. The device is almost completely out of battery, one blinking bar remaining. He manages to tune into a local news station. He hears the presenter read out today's date. It's Saturday, February the 14th. That makes this day eight.
Ski Patrol has called in the National Guard to do a body recovery for 34-year-old Eric Lamarck, who's been lost or stranded out now for over a week.
For the last eight days, he has been completely isolated, but now he is wrenched back into the land of the living. With a sudden burst of clarity, Eric toggles the dial on his radio, tuning into a different frequency. Maybe the search and rescue team will somehow detect his signal. It's a long shot. One last desperate gambit. Makeshift radio in one hand, snowboard tucked under his arm, Eric limps the final few feet up to the summit. His legs tremble,
His vision blurs. He hits himself, a sharp punch to the jaw, anything to give himself a boost of energy. Then he hears something. And I literally took five steps out to continue my hike, and all of a sudden I hear... He feels it before he sees it. A blast of wind and powdered snow driven by whirling propellers. He shields his head with his hands and lowers them slowly.
A National Guard Black Hawk helicopter rises from behind the ridgeline. There's been a couple of movies that I've seen where they're survival movies and when the character gets rescued, they fall to their knees and kind of throw up their hands in gratitude. And, you know, that's definitely what I did. It was extremely overwhelming. And you don't really realize what people mean to you when
when you don't get to see them and you don't know if you're gonna get to see them again he squints up as a national guardsman descends from the helicopter on a rope in his reflective silver suit and mask he looks like a character from a science fiction movie the next instant the guardsman is standing over eric checking his vital signs he put a thermometer in my mouth and didn't tell me at the time
That was 86 degrees. And usually if you fall under 88 degrees Fahrenheit as your core body temperature, you're at risk for having your organs seize. But then he kept asking me my name and I didn't know it, but he was trying to gauge my mental status. He kept saying, are you Eric Lamarck? Are you Eric Lamarck? Are you Eric Lamarck? And finally I said, yes, I'm effing Eric Lamarck.
And he said, "All right, here's what's going to happen." The guardsman explains to Eric that he's going to be hoisted up into the chopper and flown to a nearby hospital. Eric nods, only half comprehending his rescuer's rapid-fire instructions. Before stepping into the harness, he tries to pick up his snowboard. He can't face leaving it behind. And I went to grab my things and he goes, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't take that." And I'm like, "Yes, I can. That thing saved my life."
In his semi-delirious state, he even suggests to the guardsmen that he rides down the mountain and they pick him up near the bottom. Wisely, the guardsmen ignores this suggestion. He signals to his colleagues, "Bring him up." A few moments later, Eric is sitting strapped inside the helicopter, watching his snowboard shrink to a tiny dot on the mountainside before vanishing from sight. From the air, he sees Tamarack Lodge at the bottom of the valley. He was so nearly there.
If he hadn't been picked up, he would almost certainly have perished. But he'd made it so far under his own steam. Eric is flown to Mammoth Hospital at the base of the mountain. He is rushed to the emergency room and hooked up to an IV drip. The doctors cut him out of his frozen clothes to assess the extent of the damage. It's clear from their faces that it is severe. But Eric isn't going to worry about that yet. As he lies in his hospital bed, wrapped in a thermal blanket, he receives his first visitors.
I look and the door was open and my parents popped their head in. And I was like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. And my mom and dad just went, they put their hands up and they just, it's okay. Everything is going to be okay. Before they consider Eric's frostbite, the doctors must get on top of his dangerously high fever. It's been brought on by the gangrene. After doing that, they transfer him to a specialist unit in L.A.,
It's here, a week later, where a surgeon delivers the inevitable news. Eric's legs are beyond saving. He was expecting this, but it still hits him like a ton of bricks. I started just to swear at the walls and started to demand God if he was real or if Christ was real.
And at that lowly point, I think my heart was so open and so receptive to something that I could believe in that from that moment on, I started to learn what that relationship would look like. And fortunately, as I pressed in and drew close to God, God definitely drew close to me. And I started to find a bit of peace back.
It was probably six to seven weeks after I had been in the hospital and I got to finally stand up on my own with a walker on one foot. But it took over a year until I got both prosthetics. Eric works through his rehab program stage by stage. Needless to say, there are many difficult moments.
Days when he's overcome with regret and anger at himself for the decision he made to stray out of bounds on Mammoth Mountain. But as time goes on, he tries not to dwell on the past. Instead, he looks towards a brighter future. In the years to come, he'll deal with his addiction, get married, and have children. He'll even take up snowboarding again.
I'm also getting nationally certified to become the first bilateral amputee national ski patroller. And I'm looking forward to becoming a, you know, emergency medical tech and an outdoor emergency technician in helping people and keeping them safe on the mountain and spotting some areas that could be, you know, hazardous to the people that are going out with their families and enjoying it. But the process
It keeps getting better. I would be lying and I wouldn't be human to say that some days are, you know, I don't feel like putting them on. I feel like throwing them through a window. And some of the bigger mountains that I faced were going through all the stages of loss and change. And that took years. I think the hardest one out of all of those larger mountains that took me years
you know, 10 years to become the man who I am today is I had to learn how to forgive myself for making such horrendous choices in knowing better. That was quite difficult learning to forgive my own self. In the next episode, we meet Nick Ward. The young English sailor is chasing a lifetime ambition as he competes in one of the world's elite yacht races. But out at sea, he and his crewmates find themselves caught in a once-in-a-generation storm.
For hours, they'll fight together, side by side. But after one wave too many, Nick will be left to face this life or death struggle alone. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. Listen to Nick's story right now by subscribing to Noisa Plus. You'll get every episode of Real Survival Stories a week early. Hit the link in the episode description to get started.
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