Real Survival Stories - Desert Rescue: Blazing Sun, Twist of Fate

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Worn out by city life, a young travel journalist decides it’s time to reconnect with herself out in the desert. But what should be a straightforward hike soon turns into a very different journey of self-discovery. Claire Nelson finds herself deep amidst the sand, trapped in a gully. None of her friends or family know where she is. How on earth will she be rescued before the elements overwhelm her? A Noiser production, written by Dan Smith. For more on Claire’s amazing story read Things I Learned From Falling. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. Wednesday, May the 23rd, 2018. It's a blazing hot afternoon in California's Joshua Tree National Park. Thousand square miles of arid plains, escarpments, and sun-baked scrub.

In the southern end of the park, the dunes of the desert morph into a rocky lunar landscape. There are spires of weathered sandstone, craggy canyons, and dried-out riverbeds. Here and there, the signs of a neglected hiking trail are just about discernible. It winds its way between house-sized boulders and pockmarked slabs of stone. Not far from the trail, hidden within a sand-filled gully, lies 35-year-old New Zealander Claire Nelson.

She cannot move an inch. It's 32 degrees Celsius. Her tongue sticks to the side of her mouth like Velcro All day, Claire's mind has tormented her with thoughts of ice-cold beverages And I would, you know, visualize these fridges full of bottles with no labels, just different coloured liquids in them

and the condensation that runs down the side of the bottle It was torturous. It was really torturous. Instead, Claire has something far less appealing to hand. Her eyes turn to the yellow fluid sloshing inside her water bottle. She's heard of people surviving by drinking their own urine. She never imagined it might one day be her. Survival instinct doesn't have time to get emotional about things,

doesn't have time to overthink. You just, it's practical. And I needed liquid. I was extremely thirsty. I was, you know, my kidneys were hurting. My mouth was dry. Holding her nose, she picks up the bottle, slowly unscrews the lid, and takes a sip. She manages to keep it down, just.

It may not be refreshing, but it might just keep her alive. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet Claire Nelson, a travel writer who has come to North America to get away from it all. Fiercely independent, she's used to facing life's challenges on her own. When she finds herself desperately injured and trapped deep in the desert,

her self-reliance will face the ultimate test. I remember being very pragmatic about it in the first moment. When your mind has to accept that fact, when your mind's like, OK, you're going to die, it just sets about being very practical. There wasn't space for being emotional at first because it's almost like survival mode kicks in. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is Real Survival Stories. It's around 7 in the morning on May 22, 2018.

Claire is on vacation in Joshua Tree. She's recently been in Canada, traveling. She's flown down here to Eastern California to house-sit for some friends she met back in London, where she used to live. It's exactly the type of opportunity a globe-trotting travel writer seeks out, especially one keen to get away from the mounting pressures of her life. When I had been in Canada, I was facing a lot of the things

that I had been avoiding for a while, which was, you know, the things I think contributed to my spiraling mental health. And when I got to the desert, I felt a real sense of calm. I felt very at ease and very at home. One thing I can always rely on to sort of bring me peace and make me feel at ease and to recalibrate

is to go out into nature and go hiking. Claire turns the key in the ignition of her friend's car and starts to pull out of the driveway. Today, she is planning to tackle the Lost Palms Oasis hike. It's an eight-mile trek. It leads to a spectacular congregation of palm trees hidden deep within a desert canyon. Despite the early hour, it's already pretty warm out. As usual, Claire has packed plenty of supplies.

Sunblock, snacks, a straw hat, basic first aid kit, a mobile phone and digital camera. Plus plenty of water, two one-litre bottles and a three-litre hydration pack. She also has an oversized t-shirt she can pull over her denim shorts and vest if she needs an extra layer. More than enough for a straightforward day hike. She's just about to drive off when something makes her pause. She never usually uses a hiking pole, but it suddenly occurs to her that she may as well take one along. She dashes back into the house to grab one. I just had this really uncanny feeling that came over me, and I still to this day don't understand what that was about, but I stopped the car, went back in the house, and grabbed

the stick. And it was strange that I did that, but I think that's what saved my life. Claire sings loudly to herself as she drives into the desert along empty roads. It being a Tuesday, she hopes the park's trails will be just as deserted. Beneath a giant blue sky,

the parched landscape rushes by, punctuated by twisted, spiky Joshua trees. All around me were just these massive piles of boulders and rocks and sort of rocky hills and cacti. And, you know, the light was hitting everything as the sun came up and everything was kind of glowing golden. And it was absolutely beautiful. And I pulled the car over at that point just to sort of stop and look at it and take it in and be like, you're here. You know, when you're in your office in London, try not to have an anxiety attack.

And now you're sitting in this car here in the middle of the desert and there's no one else around. It's almost 9am when Claire drops in at the visitor's centre close to her chosen trail. She has a brief chat with a ranger there. The Oasis hike is rated moderate and recommended for experienced hikers. He warns her she'll have to clamber over rocks in places. But it doesn't sound like anything too daunting. I didn't consider this hike to be a mammoth undertaking.

You know, it was in the national park. It's a trail that anyone who's visiting can stop by, park up and do it. I wasn't thinking of it in terms of, you know, I'm going into the wilderness and, you know, it's really, really dangerous. Apart from this casual exchange with the ranger, no one in the world knows of her plans. I think a big part of my personality has always been that I'm extremely independent. And I always saw that as a really good thing. You know, I didn't need anybody else. You know, I did a lot of things on my own, particularly things like hiking.

And I'd gotten so used to being on my own and doing things on my own that I got quite comfortable doing that. And in hindsight now, I know that that was, it's not a good thing. It was hyper independence, you know, it's a defense mechanism, really. Claire shoulders her rucksack and sets off into the desert the path is not especially well signed sections of it seem to vanish into the sand occasional side paths split off from the main route cla But Claire is able to use the hiking app on her phone to track her progress. After a couple of hours, the trail turns into a wash, a dried-out riverbed. The incline slowly increases, leading her into a field of increasingly larger rocks.

Soon she's breathing hard, climbing up a switchback hemmed in by huge boulders, some the size of buildings. As Claire rounds a bend, she arrives at a stack of rocks that climb 10 or 12 feet above her. Strangely, here, the trail seems to come to an abrupt end. I reached a point where the trail hit a wall of rock with a big gap in it and then it was a big drop down. This must be the scramble that the ranger mentioned. I just didn't think anything of it. My brain had filed it away just to expect that at some point. And I thought, OK, this is why the trail is marked as moderately challenging. Cool, cool, cool. No problem.

And so then I carried on. The trail disappears under the pile of boulders. okay, this is why the trail is marked as moderately challenging. Cool, cool, cool, no problem. And so then I carried on. The trail disappears under the pile of boulders. She'll just have to pick it up on the other side. She starts climbing, carefully placing her hands and feet into cracks and crevices. Branches and brush graze her knees. Some of the rocks are small and sharp, others perfectly smooth. It's not an easy climb, but the view from the top of the pile is breathtaking, well worth the effort.

In front of Claire, a windswept valley falls away for miles. To her right, a huge wall of red rock rises into the sky. In the mid-ground, there are sandstone steeples and more massive boulders strewn across the expanse. Claire pauses for a drink, gulping down the last of her second bottle. Just the three-litre bag left now. I thought, well, I'll stop and sit here and figure out where I go from here because it wasn't obvious where the trail was you know I'm up on this high boulder there's really only one way which is down and below me I couldn't really see how far down the ground was to the right of me was some more large boulders.

And I thought, OK, well, I guess I'll just have to cross these boulders to get down to the trail. Immediately in front of Claire is a smooth dome of grey rock, the top of a massive boulder. It seems to be the only way across. She stretches out a probing left foot and puts some weight on it, testing the surface. So far, so good.

Slowly, she transfers her weight and steps up with her right foot. But as soon as she does, she starts to slide. Slowly, at first. Then faster, down towards the boulder's edge and the drop below. But as soon as I put all my weight onto it, my foot slips. And there's nothing to hold on to. I've got my hiking stick in one hand, my backpack's on my back. I'm trying to grab at the rock with my free hand.

There's just nothing to grab. And so everything slows down. You hear of that happening. You hear of everything going in slow motion and something really bad's about to happen. And I remember my brain saying, you know, this is going to hurt. So I was trying to brace myself to be hurt because I didn't know where I was going to land. I didn't know how far down I was going to fall. I just knew that it was about to happen. And it's kind of like brace, brace, brace. And then I hit the ground. You're a podcast listener,

and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-B-S-Y-N dot com. Claire lies on her back in the dirt, dust swirling around her. Pain rips through her legs and hips.

Taking short, sharp breaths, she looks up at the perfect blue sky and the tower of rocks she has fallen from, looming 25 feet above her. Just next to her is another huge overhanging boulder, rounded at one point like a thumb. At her feet and to her left are clutches of smaller rocks and rubble, through which she can just about make out the trail. She seems to have fallen into a small, sandy gully, landing in a space not much bigger than she is. Somehow, she missed all these other obstacles on impact. Though, right now, it's hard to see the upside. I'm trying to get up, but my body's just not working. I remember in that moment being like, oh, you've shattered your pelvis.

And it's funny to think that the word shattered was what came to mind. But that's exactly how it felt. Like things were moving. Pieces of bone were kind of moving. If I try to move my body at all, I could feel them shifting, and then this excruciating pain again. And I was stuck there, just lying on my back. I couldn't get up, and I couldn't move.

Claire reaches into her shorts pocket and pulls out her phone. No signal. She presses the emergency call button anyway. Nothing happens. With shaking hands, she taps out a text message, which comes back as undelivered. She opens the map function on her phone to check her location. At least the GPS still works. But any relief is quickly dispelled. I looked at my GPS at that point and, you know, there's my maps that I downloaded,

there's the little dotted line of the Lost Palms Oasis trail, and then there's the little blue dot that's me, and I was like, wait a second, I can't be there. And I wasn't even on the trail. I'd come off at least a mile back.

She cries out, her voice rebounding off the rocks before dissipating into the desert void. There's no one to hear her screams. And then once that reality had set in, all the other realities came with it. So it was like, oh, I've seriously injured myself. I don't have any phone signal. I haven't told anyone where I was going.

No one's expecting me back because I'm house-sitting in a strange country. You know, it was just all these things kind of hit me at one go. And then that was when I was like, well, it like you're going to die and it's funny like I think when your mind has to accept that fact when your mind's like okay you're going to die it just sets about being very practical and it was almost reassuring. There's a sense of calm and that level of decisiveness. Still managing to think clearly, Claire starts to assess her condition and situation. She can't move from the waist down, but she can wiggle her toes. So she's incapacitated, but apparently not paralyzed. Her backpack has landed a few feet away. It contains her water and other hiking gear. She can't reach it. Claire looks around. There, on a lip of rock just above her, is her hiking pole. the one she's so nearly left at home she grabs it

then she reaches over and hooks the pole onto the backpack dragging it across the ground she opens it up so okay i've got sunscreen i've got my first aid kit i've got this t-shirt i've got a map of the park i have my hat you know just just figuring out what i've got this t-shirt, I've got a map of the park, I have my hat, you know, just figuring out what I've got and then what I can use. And, you know, basically I had to problem solve. First thing she has to deal with is the heat. She has three litres of water left, which she can ration. But where she has landed, she's caught in the direct glare of the sun, which is only going to get more intense. She's losing moisture through sweat with every minute. It's like 11 o'clock in the morning, getting up to the middle of the day.

And I'm lying in this sort of a circle of very high boulders exposed to the sun is sort of bearing directly down on me. So I had to find a way to protect myself from the heat and the sun. So, OK, I need to get sunscreen on my body. You know, reapply. And I use my hiking stick to apply it to my legs. So I was covering the end of the hiking stick with the SPF and then like I had SPF 50 as well so it's pretty good stuff and then applying that to my legs and then I was trying to cover my legs with the mat and holding it down from these little breezes that were coming

through with my stick I put the t-shirt on over the vest that I was wearing and then yeah just tried to figure out ways to protect myself from what was happening in the very moment. It's a start. A general rule of thumb is that a person can go around three days without water but here in the desert death could come far quicker. Just 20% loss of body water can be fatal. As severe dehydration takes hold, the blood thickens. Organs fail one after the other. First the kidneys, then the liver. But chances of survival can vary from person to person, and psychology has been known to play a big part. For now, the best thing Claire can do is to occupy herself with small tasks.

She decides to record a message for her loved ones. Rather than drain the battery on her phone, she reaches for her digital camera. I thought to myself, if I don't make it out of here and someone finds me, they should know what happened. So I left a message that was just to, that one was to say that I'm much, you know, how sad I am about what had happened,

to tell my family and my friends that I love them. Just the self-conscious act of speaking out loud is comforting. Before she realizes it, Claire is imagining being back at her friend's house, safe and sound, laughing about all of this. You know, I'm not going to lie, I felt a bit silly doing it. I thought, am I, and this is very much the type of person I am, I felt like, am I being a bit too dramatic? You know, I still felt like maybe in this situation I'm overreacting. It was just a just case there and part of my brain I'm going, you know what, it's fine.

I'm going to get out of here by tonight and I can delete this off my phone and my camera and no one will ever have to know it was being so silly and dramatic. It's mid-afternoon. After hours lying in the dirt in excruciating pain, burning under the California sun, Claire's mood has soured. An acrid odor is now filling her nostrils,

a mixture of sweat, sunscreen, and urine. The fall has thrown her bladder into shock. First of all, I didn't want to be lying there in a pool of my own urine. I just thought one, it's not comfortable. Two, it could cause some sort of skin problems.

But I also didn't want to attract animals. Snakes, vultures, coyotes. She's not sure if her smell will attract them or not. But now, feeling the need to go again, she'd rather not take the chance. She looks at her empty water bottle. Too awkward. Then she picks up an empty pot of painkillers. I'd taken the last two paracetamol, which, you know, didn't really do a lot, I must say. So I had this empty little jar and it was so tiny that I was able to kind of to wean into that and then tip it into my water bottle.

And so that was sort of another task to set myself, to keep myself busy. The hours pass. It's nearly 8 p.m. now. The sun has finally crept behind the overhanging boulders. But after the initial relief of escaping the heat, the cool evening breeze soon sets her teeth chattering. The temperature tumbles to maybe five degrees Celsius. Inside her rucksack is a plastic grocery bag. Claire tears a hole in each bottom corner.

With her teeth and fingers, she teases away at the plastic, crafting an extra pair of shorts, an extra layer. She uses her hiking stick to hook the plastic shorts over her right boot. The bag tears open, so she makes do with laying the tattered material over her legs. For extra warmth, she hugs her rucksack close, then slips her arms inside a t-shirt. But lying there, under the starry sky, sleep proves elusive.

Every sound makes her jump. She read somewhere that 200 South Californians get bitten by rattlesnakes each year. She peers into the black, squinting at a long shape on a rock. She turns on the torch on her phone. The beam hits the rock's end. Nothing. There's not a lot of hope to cling to in the dark at night. There's nothing there. No one's going to be coming by.

And plus it's just, there's animals out there. And that was the thing that was really terrifying to me was, was not knowing what was going to come out. Like your fear does really weird things to your brain and the dark does really weird things. So it was just a, it was a very, very long night, probably the longest night of my life. The sun rises a little before 6am. Pain still courses through Claire's lower body,

but at least there are no more sinister nighttime shadows. When the sun finally did come up, that was when I got this new massive boost of hope. And I remember thinking at the time, oh man, I've survived the night. This is crazy. Today someone's going to come by. I'm going to get rescued. And this will just be a crazy story. But as the temperature starts to climb, relief gives way to renewed fear.

The heat is sapping fluid from her body faster than she can replace it. Claire has less than a liter of water left. There's no signal on her phone. Still, she can't help checking for messages to see if her social media apps will magically reconnect. It's 8.51am when she watches the phone's screen finally fade to black. When the battery finally died, I realised that I'd still been holding on to some hope that it was going to help me in some way, that maybe, you know, it could still ping a signal, you know, that a signal might somehow come floating through the desert and, you know, someone could ping a signal or, you know, that a signal might somehow come floating through the desert and, you know, a message would get out, something. And so when the phone

died, it was another thing that was working against me and, you know, another little thread of hope had just dissipated. She screams with all her might. But it soon dies as a dry rasp in her throat. All I could think about was the heat. It just sort of sapped me of energy.

I couldn't think of anything else. It was horrible. It was agonizing, and I kind of got a bit desperate during those hottest hours. Given the state of her pelvis, Claire's been doing her best not to move. But her desperation gets the better of her. She grabs her hiking stick and slides it under the right side of her hip, where the bones feel more stable. Maybe she can roll herself into the shade. I thought I'll try and turn myself over like a car jack, you know, and pull it up.

But, you know, I don't know how far off the ground I got. I would sort of guess maybe an inch or two at most. And then the bones on my left side of my pelvis started to shift again. And the pain just was straight back to the moment the moment of the break and it just shot through my body eyes my head was spinning and I thought I can't try this because if I make myself pass out with the pain I don't know that I'll come around again and I think deep down I knew that even if I got onto my front I was gonna be able to pull myself out so I tried that but then I was just flat on my back again.

The hours drag on. Claire holds up her hat to shade her face until her arm aches. But then, as she glances around yet again at her belongings, an ingenious idea occurs to her. Once again, a trusty hiking stick comes through. She uses a hair tie to secure a small branch to the handle. Then she drapes the tattered plastic carrier bag over the top. It's a DIY sunshade of sorts. To pass the time, Claire picks up her digital camera and records another video for her loved ones. Given that none of her friends or family know where she is, it doesn't feel like she's being overdramatic now. Looking back, it was like, oh, that was an outlet.

That was a way for me to feel not so isolated it was a way for me to feel like that somebody is listening that I'm seen and I'm heard in a situation where that was very much not the case I got really angry I was really mad at myself a lot of things and I sort of raged against myself for a bit you know you I called myself an idiot and was like you you should have you didn't tell him where he was going I can't believe you put yourself in this situation I was so angry rage regret and the relentless heat are pretty much all Claire can think about for the remainder of the day by late afternoon with only a few gulps of water left and the bottle of urine lying next to her, she knows what she has to do.

It really wasn't a difficult decision. You know, survival instinct doesn't have time to get emotional about things, doesn't have time to overthink. You just, it's practical. And I needed liquid. I was extremely thirsty. I was, you know, my kidneys were hurting. My mouth was dry. So I took a couple of sips of that and found, yeah, I can keep it down.

And so once the water ran out, I was drinking my own urine. And then that became another task. And so that was it. It was what I kept thinking of in terms of input and output. You know, it became something that I had to do. But it tastes exactly as you think it tastes. And when you're that thirsty, you really don't care. The sun rises on Claire's third day in the desert.

But no renewed hope accompanies the dawn this time. Quite the opposite, in fact. It just felt so hopeless. I was going through the stages of grief. You know, I started out really angry, and then I was in denial, and, you know, I'm not going to die, I'm not going to die. You know, then moved into bargaining with myself and with the universe and just being like, please, just let me come out of this. And by day three, it was like a hit sadness.

And it just, you know, all the things I wasn't allowing myself to feel, I finally didn't have the energy to keep pushing them down. And so they came to the surface and it was the grief of the people I'll never see again and the life that I'm not going to live. Claire is so dehydrated that her tears come almost as a surprise. She tries to catch them so that she might drink them. It just made me realize how much I wanted to live and how much I wanted to do with the time that I was given. And that I hadn't expected it would be that short. Long, sun-drenched hours tick by.

By the end of day three, Claire is lying stock still, completely calm, staring up at the sky as the sun sets again. She is now simply waiting for the end. That night, that third night, I moved into the fifth stage of grief, which was acceptance. And I think the crying was sort of the step I needed to go through to get to that sense of acceptance. And I thought, well, you know what?

If this is where I die, then there are worse places and my bones will just become a part of the desert. And something about that felt really reassuring. I think being in that moment, there's nothing left to be afraid of. Dawn on day four in Joshua Tree National Park, Friday, May the 25th. Claire is still clinging on after 90 hours in the desert. I woke up on the fourth morning and I was surprised I was still there. I'd fallen asleep that night in that great sense of peace

and I didn't actually expect to wake up. But I was there and I was like, oh, I made it through again. And this time it was Friday morning so I thought well I had to sort of sense maybe people would be buying the weekend but even though even though I had that little thread of hope to hold on to physically I was just I was it's just my lowest ebb I didn't have any any energy there. Claire switches on her camera. It's almost out of juice now. She peers into the lens. Her face is sunken, lips cracked. Each syllable is an effort. I love you, she manages to utter, just as the camera dies. Total isolation now. Still wracked with pain, Claire drifts in and out of consciousness.

Occasionally, in the distance, she hears things. Figments of her imagination, voices, a siren wailing. It's just her mind playing tricks on her. When she hears the growing thrum of a helicopter, she knows better than to get her hopes up. But then a loud male voice comes reverberating through the canyon over a loudspeaker, and Claire's eyes snap open and then I had the voice come again the voice was obviously coming from the helicopter I had the voice announced that they're looking for a missing hiker so I kind of had another boost then of adrenaline and I start waving my

sunshade around and I'm shouting and i can't even see where this helicopter is i don't know where it is and then it just i heard it get quieter and quieter and then it was it was gone again and i thought well that's that was close the sound disappears hope receding with it. But then it comes surging back. And then a little while later, I heard the helicopter again. And I heard the voice come again, and then this time I heard them say my name. I thought, I need to make my sunshade bigger.

So I put everything I had on it, you know, put my T-shirt on it, put the plastic bag up higher, I put the hat on top of that. I heard the helicopter come back again and this time I was ready for them. Calling on her last reserves of strength, Claire waves the makeshift flag and screams as loud as she can. Then I hear them say my name and they say, we see you and we're going to come and get you. And that was it. That was the moment that I kind of, I had been so convinced that I was going to die.

And then I kind of went into shock because I was like no I'm not going to die and I wasn't prepared for that I really wasn't prepared for that it takes another agonizing hour for two men in khaki to scramble down to her they are Manny and Eric deputies from the Riverside Sheriff Aviation Unit they simply cannot believe their eyes that after four days in the desert, Claire is alive. They said they're looking for a missing hiker, but they're expecting to find a body because that's a lot of what they do is they're finding bodies.

And then when they got there, they were just like, we can't believe you're alive. And they didn't have the equipment to get me out. One of the officers later said to me, he said, I took one look at you and I was like, she's never walking again. So they knew it was serious. They call for backup. The California Highway Patrol will fly in to assist. While they wait, Manny and Eric supply Claire with bottles of water.

She pours the cool liquid over her skin and lets it fill her mouth. The deputies urge her not to drink so fast, but she can't help herself. She gulps down bottle after bottle. By the third, her tongue has started to swell like a sponge. At last, the other helicopter arrives. They brought a stretcher over and without any painkillers, they had to lift me and roll me onto the stretcher, which I immediately was like, no, no, no, no, no.

But, you know, I'm torn. I want to get out of the desert. I couldn't bear the thought of the pain, but I had to sort of, yeah, I had to deal with that. Maneuvering her onto the stretcher, they zip her into a bag, leaving only her mouth and nose exposed. Then a tug from above and she's plucked from the earth, being hoisted out of the gully.

Claire is flown to a hospital in Palm Springs where she finally gets some pain relief. The morphine's starting to kick in and I've been wheeled into the intensive care unit. And they pull a curtain around me and put me on a drip and start cutting off my clothes. And, you know, all this is going on around me. And then someone hands me a phone and says, oh, it's your mum. I've never been more confused in my life. In my brain, I was thinking I had to get in touch with my friends and family.

My family's back in New Zealand, my friends are all over the place, but I need to let people know what's happened. I didn't think that people already knew what had happened. Not only do her loved ones know what's happened, it is they who helped save her life. Friends around the world had noticed Claire's unusual absence from Instagram. Natalie and Lou, the people she's been house-sitting for, had tried to contact her. When they got no reply, they'd asked neighbors to check on her at the house.

In an extraordinary moment of serendipity, they'd found one of Claire's notebooks. On one page, it contained a short, scribbled note to self, mentioning a plan to hike the Lost Palms Oasis Trail. They'd raised the alarm. Soon after, the park authorities found Claire's abandoned vehicle and the search began. Everyone was just in connection with each other, you know, across the world. While I'm lying out there thinking that no one knows where the hell I am or what's going on. No one even knows that I'm missing in terms of what they did. It's embarrassing to admit that, you know, I was saved because I wasn't posting on Instagram. And yet at the same time, it took me a while to realize the poignancy of that.

There I was lying in the desert and thinking, oh, my biggest regret is that I wasted so much time, you know, on just scrolling through social media and being on the internet and being on social media too much. And the fact that it was the only way people figured out I was missing just shows how detached I had been from communicating with people. So that was a real wake-up for me. Claire's shattered pelvis requires metal plates. She's also injured her ankle and broken a toe. But all in all, she's able to make a good recovery over the coming months.

The January after the accident, I went back to Joshua Tree and finished the hike. It was just something I knew I had to do because, yeah. And just having that as a goal, I i think really got me through my recovery as well the experience gives claire a new perspective hard gained wisdom that she tries to incorporate into the everyday which in a strange way was exactly what she was hoping to find when she came to north america that became the all-encompassing challenge for me, you know, throughout the entire time was to kind of, there'd be ebbs and flows of feeling completely despondent and grieving for a life that I was never going to finish.

And to also fight that and say, no, I'm going to get out of here. This isn't it. This is not going to be it for me. And so it was a constant battle. And I had to keep that hope going. That has to be the thing that saves us at the end of the day is hope. And you need to find it in anything that you can. I'm still a human being. I'm still a flawed person. All I can do is take those things that I learned and take that perspective I was given and and then try and keep growing with it all the time and I think as it's taken me a while to

kind of realize that and just to allow myself to still be me to just you know a slightly more evolved version. It was just the irony of it, really, is that those are the things I was trying to unpack when I set off to go to Canada. And I got them, I just didn't get them in any way how I thought I would find them. They kind of found me. To be continued... But in 2019, an idyllic father-son fishing trip turns, in an instant, into a harrowing nightmare. Micah will find himself adrift, in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the night,

with his little boy clinging onto him for dear life. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. You can listen to Micah's story right now as a Noisa Plus subscriber. To be continued...