A 25-year-old woman visiting from Berlin, Germany required rescue when she slipped down a steep cliff on Mount Marathon and became too scared to continue down.
Rescuers got a call around 3:15 p.m. when the woman, hiking with a friend, got stuck halfway up the 3,022-foot peak. She was uninjured, just frightened.
Patti Foldager, a resident of Seward and employee of the hospital located at the base of Mount Marathon, gets calls like this a couple times a year. She usually talks climbers down the steep cliffs.
In this instance, authorities launched a helicopter to drop off rescuers at the peak of the mountain. They repelled down to the pair and assisted them off the mountain. The hikers were safe and sound at the trailhead around 11:20 p.m., about 8 hours after the ordeal began.
Foldager said people misjudge the mountain’s terrain by associating its trails with the name. But unlike the “roads” a typical person would associate marathon with, the trails on the mountain are steep, rocky and border hefty drop offs.
Read the story here.
Recent Comments