Lots of overworked Silicon Valley employees look forward to a two-week vacation in the middle of nowhere, but that wasn’t what Eric Tucker had in mind when he left on June 27 for a five-day solo hike in the Stanislaus National Forest. Thirteen days and several search parties later, he staggered out of the wilderness as his family was beginning to plan funeral arrangements.
“I lost the trail and didn’t realize how rugged the terrain was,” recalls Tucker, ’94, MS ’96, who works for a Sunnyvale software company. As he scrambled through a rocky streambed, trying to get back on track, he removed his pack to slide down steep sections. During one of these descents, he tossed his pack ahead and it tumbled over a 40-foot cliff. While trying to retrieve it, he slipped and fell, spraining both of his ankles and dislocating his shoulder. After lying immobile for five days, drinking from a tiny pool of water, he tried standing up and hoisting his pack. But the pain in his arm stopped him before he took a step. “The problem was, my dislocated arm needed a sling, which I couldn’t make with one good arm,” he says. “My only other choice was to hold the bad arm in place with the good one, which left me no arms at all.”
After more rest and some reinterpretation of his map, Tucker set out for a campground three miles away. By the time he limped into the campground on July 10, rescue efforts had been suspended.
Tucker was driven 50 miles to the nearest hospital and treated. Then, having subsisted for nearly two weeks on trail mix and a handful of energy bars, he did what any sensible person would do—he had a pizza.
