I would love to WFR someone. I just renewed my certification this June, I got my EMT in 2014 and my lifeguarding certification in 2010, but I’ve never really been involved in a rescue of any sort. I said this to my FOOT trip co-leader Alex Duncan (class of 2017) as we hiked to Lake Constantine near Mt. Holy Cross. Just idle conversation, blowing off steam as our tripees discussed parties and high school.
The next day, as we lounged around camp, our tripees started calling for us. “Someone’s yelling for help!”
We grabbed the first aid kit and maps and followed the students over some rocks and down a gulley. I felt a bit sick—had one of our students wandered too far? Taken a fall? Had I jinxed us with my comments the day before?
Eventually, we reached one of our students, standing next to an unfamiliar college-aged male. Jay called to us, “They lost their car. I think they’re on mushrooms.”
Simultaneously relieved that it wasn’t one of our students and horrified that we were dealing with something as complicated as drugs, I asked the tripees to go back to camp and keep their distance; we didn’t want to overwhelm a pair of strangers tripping on shrooms.
Alex and I introduced ourselves and then split; he started conversing with the dark-haired, standing “shroomie,” and I knelt next to the redheaded male who was lying on his back in the willows. We eventually discerned that they were Colorado Mountain College students who had taken seven or eight grams of mushrooms, wandered off trail, and then started yelling for help because they were locked out of their car. The dark-haired fellow was shifty-eyed and suspicious of us while the redhead smiled and admired the beauty of nature.
It took us nearly half an hour to shepherd the pair back to our camp where we fed them baby carrots and tried to decide what to do. I explained to the redhead as he repeatedly ran into stationary objects that the trees move, but they’re friendly. His only reply was “Mushrooms… they’re a good thing.”
Our first priority was our nine first-years, but we couldn’t really just tell this pair to beat it out of our campsite. Luckily, two Colorado College juniors were camped nearby and we were able to utilize their knowledge. No one wanted to hike out with them, but we couldn’t keep them at camp either. They had no gear to spend the night, and we guessed that they’d be tripping for another four hours or so—until 9 or 10 p.m.
The two juniors hiked up a ridge to call the ranger station, but found that it had closed an hour earlier. Given no other real option, they then called 911. Meanwhile, Alex and I went back and forth between our tripees and the shroomies. The shroomies sat quietly around camp, one content and the other antsy. The tripees sat in the sun on rocks above, observing with a mix of curiosity, apprehension, and amusement.
After nearly two hours, the dark-haired fellow announced that he and his friend were leaving. Alex and I exchanged a glance, a combination of relief and doubt, and watched the pair amble out of camp.
We had a valuable discussion with our tripees about drugs in the wilderness, laughed a bit, and marveled at how lucky the “shroomies” were that we found them. After a light dinner, we fell asleep early to prepare for our sunrise summit bid of Mt. Holy Cross. Through a tough hike and major wind chill, we watched the sun rise at 14,009 feet, then headed home a day early, worn down from the half-rescue and the hike.