Hi, it\u2019s Tracy again.\u00a0 I got back to Austin Sunday night and have been delinquent in finishing this post to relay the news from Jim and Eddie.\u00a0 On Thursday, after Eddie made what seemed to be an excellent recovery from a brutal first day on the trail, he had another bout of altitude sickness followed by a sleepless night (he told me he spent 9 hours lying in his tent with his eyes open).\u00a0 Things got worse on Friday morning when they set out on the trail and Eddie had a pain in his chest as they climbed.\u00a0 For those of you who don\u2019t know Eddie, he has an aortic aneurysm that was diagnosed several years ago.\u00a0 He has been under the care of two of the top aortic specialists in the US (he keeps them on each coast\u2014one at Cornell and the other at Stanford), and has continued to run ultras, hike 14ers, and generally behave like a mountain-goat, with strict adherence to few hard-and-fast rules set by these doctors.\u00a0 They include such things as keeping his heart rate and blood pressure below certain levels, and slowing down or stopping the minute he experiences chest pain.<\/p>\n
Eddie has always been a Teflon man with an iron constitution and [insert choice of additional “indestructible”-type metaphor here], but his survival of a rattlesnake bite a couple of years ago inflated those perceptions even further:\u00a0 Eddie was out in Briones (or nearby east-bay trails) on a run by himself, when he felt what he thought was a stick snapping against his leg as he stepped on it—but then when he looked down, he saw the fang punctures.\u00a0 He walked calmly all the way back to his car\u2013I want to say it was three miles\u2014and then drove himself to the hospital, where he spent several days in intensive care and required 49 vials of antivenin (seven-times the volume \u201cnormally\u201d needed for treatment).\u00a0 First, they thought he would die, then they thought he would lose his leg, then they thought that even if were able to keep his leg he might not be able to walk again\u2026and then he ended up with a not-so-bad scar.\u00a0 I digress, but that\u2019s the gist of the resilience thing with Eddie.\u00a0 His friends tend to take for granted that he can do anything (as we try to keep up), and forget that he has a real heart condition to which we need to pay attention.<\/p>\n
So anyway, back on the trail, the guys slowed their pace and Eddie\u2019s chest pain subsided, but then along came another pain, and this time it was during a downhill segment when he was maintaining a lower heart-rate. So he blew the whistle, threw the flag, and gave himself a red card.\u00a0 Jim got him packed up and on his way back to the ranger station at Tuolumne Meadows.\u00a0 Then, after many many hours and a series of rides on shuttle buses, Amtrak and BART trains, and a taxi (all of which by Eddie\u2019s own account had to undergo intensive fumigation treatments after his rides), he made it back to Walnut Creek late on Friday night.\u00a0 Eddie is fine and all is well.\u00a0 He is planning to head down south this week or next, and will meet Jim at Lone Pine (the closet town to Whitney Portal) at the end of the month when, if all goes roughly as planned, Jim will emerge from the wilderness.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Jim is now armed with the SPOT, which he has renamed \u201cEddie\u201d and to which he now talks to keep him company.\u00a0 He started out on his solo tour on Friday and made it through Lyell Canyon and over Donohue Pass, and camped Friday night near Island Pass and Banner Peak.\u00a0 Google Earth has some good photos of the area<\/a> linked to the satellite map (I took the SPOT coordinates and dropped them in).\u00a0 Here’s another one.<\/a>\u00a0 Of course there is no snow right now, but these pictures are a nice placeholder while we wait for the real ones. Speaking of SPOT, it is still being spotty, so don\u2019t worry if it looks on the map as though nothing is happening out there (e.g, Saturday).\u00a0 Jim is making great progress and all is well.\u00a0 This entry is already too long, but I will post a catch-up tomorrow with highlights from the past couple of days.<\/p>\n Congratulations to Eddie for making it through a rough but beautiful abbreviated trip, and cheers to a second early retirement by the original Man of Leisure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi, it\u2019s Tracy again.\u00a0 I got back to Austin Sunday night and have been delinquent in finishing this post to relay the news from Jim and Eddie.\u00a0 On Thursday, after Eddie made what seemed to be an excellent recovery from a brutal first day on the trail, he had another bout of altitude sickness followed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jmt-trip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions\/185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skelmo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}