Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Foster City native honored for Mount Whitney rescue efforts

"helping rescue three climbers after they fell 500 feet down a steep stretch of Mount Whitney...

There were intermittent streaks of blood down the mountain for hundreds of feet.

The first woman Wu got to was on the ground with her boyfriend standing over her. She drifted in and out of consciousness, her face covered in blood. She was spitting up blood and coughing. Her eyes were completely swollen like grapefruit, Wu said.

Wu was in shock himself, but his medical training kicked in. He and the boyfriend repositioned her so she was parallel to the slope and that seemed to help her breathe. Wu had no idea what her injuries might’ve been; she wasn’t lucid enough to effectively communicate how she felt and he couldn’t cut through her clothing because it was so cold and she was lying on ice.

Her lips had turned blue and she was shivering so Wu wrapped her in spare layers he brought and was able to warm her up. Wu then proceeded to examine her entire body, checking for a reaction to the pressure.

“Our main concern was brain swelling, but there wasn’t much we could’ve done to mitigate that,” he said.

He performed similar procedures on the other woman. Her right thigh had swollen to the size of a watermelon, Wu said, and he was worried her femur had snapped. Such a break could cut the femoral artery, which means bleeding out in seconds...

They later found out that one woman was in her early 20s and suffered severe head trauma. The other woman, who was in her mid-30s, sustained spinal, hip and leg injuries, possibly a broken hip and spine. Wu didn’t think she was paralyzed.

He heard that the first woman began tumbling after she slipped and the second woman attempted to glissade down the mountain to help, but lost control. The three fell at an approximate elevation of 13,000 feet and finally came to a stop at an elevation of about 12,500 feet."