Real Survival Stories - Snowboard Misadventure: Last Man on the Mountain (Part 1 of 2)

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Eric LeMarque is a former professional ice hockey player, an Olympian who’s tasted incredible highs in his sport. But in 2004, his life is spiralling out of control. Hoping to escape his demons, he takes a snowboarding trip to Mammoth Mountain. After one run too many, he’ll find himself lost in a sprawling alpine wilderness, where the cold isn’t the only thing that bites… A Noiser production, written by Joe Viner. For more on Eric’s story, read 6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain. 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. It's after dark on February the 6th, 2004, in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. 34-year-old Eric Lamarck trudges across a frozen wasteland. The piercing wind whistles through the branches of the pine trees,

driving razor-sharp ice crystals into his face. Eric is somewhere near the southern foot of Mammoth Mountain, a popular ski resort. In good conditions, mammoths' slopes teem with skiers and snowboarders, enjoying the elegant pistes and panoramic views. But as night falls and the weather changes, this holiday destination turns back into what it once was, a snowbound wilderness of glacial ravines, raging rivers, and sub-zero temperatures. Eric hoists his snowboard onto his shoulders and stumbles forward through chest-deep drifts. A pale full moon hangs in the night sky, dimly illuminating the way in front of him.

Occasionally he stops to look around, hoping he'll spot the lights of a ski lodge or a chairlift. Some indication that he's headed back towards the resort on the eastern side of the mountain and not deeper into the backcountry. It's almost impossible to tell. And now it's snowing and the moon is right above. I can see about 10 feet. I'm cold and I'm continuing to walk in hopes that I'm going to stumble upon Mammoth Mountain. Eric bows his head against the wind and struggles on. But it's tough going. The snow beneath his feet is soft powder.

You feel like a kitten learning to walk for the first time. You go to put your hand down in the snow and it goes up to your shoulder. I was sinking up to my thigh, up to my knee, almost on every step and having to pull my feet out. Despite his situation, he manages not to panic. He's an experienced snowboarder, a self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie. He's used to testing his limits. He assures himself that soon enough he'll be telling this story in a resort bar. a self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie. He's used to testing his limits.

He assures himself that soon enough he'll be telling this story in the resort bar. But just then, out of the corner of his eye, Eric catches sight of something. A flash of grey fur against the white backdrop. He stops in his tracks and scans around, his pulse quickening. There it is again, to his left this time. Another shape scampering over the snow. Eric squints into the gloom. In the darkness, he sees not one, but two pairs of glowing amber eyes. Two pointed snouts curled upwards.

Two rows of gleaming white teeth. Hearing something over his shoulder, he turns to see a third pair of eyes behind him. He's surrounded. Eric suddenly recalls a conversation he had in a bar earlier this week. I went to a bar and was hanging out at the bar and started talking to some guys, and they shared that there was a skier, they were talking about a skier who got lost. He had gotten trapped in the backcountry and was out there for two nights, and they found just his legs, so they were saying, oh man, he must've got eaten by wolves.

Slowly, Eric brings his snowboard round in front of him. He clutches it tightly, shielding his chest as the animals creep closer. Their heads are lowered and their eyes are fixed firmly on him. 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 avid snowboarder and former professional ice hockey player Eric Lamarck. In 2004, the 34-year-old's life is spiraling out of control in more ways than one. Hoping to escape his demons, he takes an ill-fated trip to Mammoth Mountain. Soon he finds himself lost in a sprawling alpine wilderness where the cold isn't the only thing that bites. Equipped with just his snowboard and the clothes on his back, Eric must attempt to find his way back to civilization. But as the days drag on, he'll veer closer and closer to delirium. I felt that death. I felt that darkness.

Not only hovering, but I smelt it. And it was so rank and so disgusting. It was kind of taunting me and laughing. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is Real Survival Stories. Friday, February 6, 2004. It's 10 a.m. at Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort in Eastern California. Friday, February 6th, 2004. It's 10 a.m. at Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort in Eastern California. Inside his lodge, Eric Lamarck rolls over in bed and yawns.

Drowsily, the 34-year-old opens his eyes and checks his alarm clock. He immediately sits bolt upright. He's overslept. He rushes over to the window, pulls open the curtains. Dazzling sunshine bounces off the pristine snow, where skiers and snowboarders are already carving through the fresh white powder. The sound of their joyous whoops and cheers drifts down off the slopes. Eric can't wait to get out there and join them. It's his last day here on Mammoth Mountain, and he doesn't intend to waste a minute of it. It's just fantastic. It's gorgeous. The base altitude of Mammoth Lakes itself is at 9,000 feet,

and then when you go to the base resort, you're at 10,000 and it goes up over 11,053 feet, I think it is on the top of the summit of Mammoth. And it's just one of those places where you've got two and three mile runs per run and you can traverse the mountain in the back of it and not ski the same run from eight to four on any given day as eric pulls on his socks he scolds himself for sleeping through his alarm today is more than just his final day on the slopes it might be his last day of freedom before he returns to the troubles waiting for him at home. Eric lives four hours away in Los Angeles, where he teaches ice hockey for a living.

Up until a few years ago, he played professionally. He was drafted into the National Hockey League by the Boston Bruins at the age of 17, later went on to represent his country. I played nine, ten years professional ice hockey. One of the highlights was that I got to play in the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway. I also played in 94, 95, and 96 in the World Championships, and that was probably the best hockey that I played on bigger ranks with the highest, you know, skilled players in the entire world. After reaching the pinnacle of his sport, injuries forced Eric into an early retirement in 1998. He went into coaching before briefly working for a sports equipment manufacturing firm. But the former Olympian struggled to adjust to civilian life.

He couldn't hold down a job. Rootless and drifting, Eric eventually fell in with the wrong crowd, spending all night partying in the LA hills. That's when things really begin to spiral. I went down that national progression of, you know, started to smoke marijuana, let in just a little bit of cocaine,

and then into a meth addiction in 2003, which carried me into 2004. I would sniff a couple of, you know, keys, you say, you know, if you were to use it kind of like a spoon up my nose, smoke a little bit of marijuana and drink some alcohol. And that was kind of my diet for the day. Eric has always been drawn to extremes. He doesn't do anything by halves. He managed to maintain an active lifestyle, keeping fit by coaching junior hockey and spending hours in the gym. But his substance abuse eventually alienated him from his family and friends.

I was snowboarding, surfing, playing hockey and going to the gym and teaching hockey, if you could believe it, holding it together to be able to be talking to parents and advising them on their children and their education. But it's kind of scary, you know, because there's so many functioning addicts that are out there and they think that they have it all going together and they have it all together. And that's the trickery of drugs is it gives you this euphoric and sense of empowerment at first, but it brings you down to the lowliest of places. A few weeks ago, Eric hit rock bottom.

The police found him asleep behind the wheel of his car with a bag of meth in his lap. He was arrested on possession charges and spent two nights in jail. A date was set for his arraignment next Thursday. Eric intends to plead guilty. With his day in court looming, he's decided to give himself a few days in the mountains to clear his head before facing whatever punishment is coming his way. When he returns to L.A. tomorrow, he's determined to start getting his life back on track. I was smart enough to understand that I was putting holes in my brain and started to research on how to break this addiction and how to get some help. And I planned this to take this one trip and then come back and get clean with my parents.

And I had a whole plan of how I was going to get myself healthy and, you know, back sober 100%. After oversleeping, Eric rushes to get ready for the slopes. Despite the sub-zero temperatures, he dresses light, pulling on just his waterproof outer shells, a long-sleeved T-shirt, thin gloves, and a woolen cap. I knew that I would warm right up and I could warm myself up within pulling myself into my jacket.

I wasn't concerned about being cold on the lifts or being cold at all. I just wanted to feel loose and free. Eric stuffs a few essential items into his pockets. A bottle of water, an apple, his MP3 player and a cell phone. Then he grabs his board and heads out for the slopes. By eleven o'clock, Eric is sitting in a chairlift, climbing up the mountain.

Below him, stretches of pine forest are crisscrossed by sweeping ski runs, the snow neatly ploughed into a sparkling white corduroy. This is what winter sports enthusiasts call a bluebird day, when the weather is clear and sunny after an overnight snowfall. In fact, it's been snowing heavily all week, with severe blizzards leading to the closure of certain sections of the mountain. Today is the first day since Eric's arrival in Mammoth that the entire resort is open. As he surveys the landscape, his gaze wanders away from the groomed runs and over to the thick drifts of virgin snow piled up around the fir trees.

Eric's an off-piste boarder. He gravitates towards unmarked stretches of the mountain, deemed too extreme by most. Behind his reflective goggles, his blue eyes flash with anticipation. Today's conditions are perfect, the kind of snowboarding he loves. When you're up above the tree line and all you see is a giant expanse, you have such a great appreciation for just what you're looking at. And being at a higher altitude, the air is thinner and being able to breathe in and you can actually smell the snow, you can smell the trees, is quite stimulating to the senses, to say the least.

As Eric shreds through the snow, he inhales the crisp alpine air deep into his lungs. He drops down cliffs and launches over cornices, snowy overhangs molded by the wind. He soars through the air, momentarily weightless, before landing smoothly in the fluffy powder below. I really enjoyed the balance of being out there, finding myself floating. You know, my feet were pretty much everything in my whole life.

They took me to places that I never thought were possible. And the floating sensations and flying sensations and defying gravity and in the perfect conditions of powder as you're snowboarding down, you don't hear anything. And I used to listen to music sometimes, but sometimes I would not like to listen to music because I'd like to hear just the snow, you know, the dust off my board as I was turning. Snowboarding for me was, while you're doing it, you can't think about anything else or you will mess up and you will fall or hurt yourself. So nobody can get you up there.

You may be going through life and problems and issues and something is weighted on your mind. But, you know, on the mountain was my tranquil space. 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. It's about three in the afternoon. Eric is riding the chairlift back up the mountain when he notices the conditions starting to change around him. All day it's been nothing but blue skies and bright sunshine. But now, brisk wind is blowing in from the east, slowly wrapping the mountain in a cloud of freezing fog.

The mountain closed at four, and it was about just before three o'clock, and I was taking chair 23 up, which is a pretty crazy chair that goes up the face of a double diamond, you know, up at over 11,000 feet. And I kind of looked, and I saw the storm that was there at the east, it turned and started to creep back onto the mountain.

So I said, okay, well, I guess it's gonna be an early day because I know when that happens, ski patrol will usually start to close off certain sections. By the time Eric emerges at the top of the lift, the weather has deteriorated further. Members of the ski patrol, dressed in bright red jackets, are shepherding the remaining skiers and snowboarders back down towards Main Lodge. They have to shout to be heard over the wind. But their message is clear. The mountain is closed in the face of an incoming storm. Eric's heart sinks.

He isn't ready for the day to be over. He watches the ski patrol ushering people down the piste. Then he glances in the opposite direction, to the entrance of a closed run. Usually, I was always wanting to be the last guy off the mountain. And after a full day of snowboarding, I would stop and I would take it all in and then have my last calm run. And so in my typical way that, you know, doing what I wanted when I wanted, I kind of disobeyed them. I went down the section that they had already closed as I I wanted to finish on this specific run called Beyond the Edge and Dragonback. It's a run that

I had never done before and so all of these things were kind of preludes to what was about to happen. Ignoring the ski patrol's warnings, Eric plunges over the lip of a cornice, dropping 30 feet into a challenging double black diamond run. With music now blasting through his MP3 player, he barely notices the storm building around him. As he descends the mountain, however, conditions go from bad to worse. Soon all Eric can see through his goggles is a swirling mass of snow and ice. It's now 4pm. The sun has dipped behind the mountains to the west and daylight is dwindling.

Trees appear out of nowhere, their branches whipping at his shoulders and tearing at his clothes. He has to slow down to avoid a collision. At the end of it, which I wasn't expecting, there was a giant flat section, almost like a giant bowl, that as I rode, it just, all of a sudden, I rode, I rode, I rode, I rode, and I slowed and slowed and slowed and slowed, and all the fun had come to an instant halt. The mountain has leveled out into a huge, flat area. Eric's momentum wasn't enough to carry him through to the other side. Instead, he's come to a standstill. And I kind of sank in the snow.

You go to put your hand down and it goes up to your shoulder. And so I unstrapped and I started to walk left, you know, dragging my board behind me and packing it down sometimes because I was sinking up to my thigh, up to my knee, almost on every step and having to pull my feet out. Way in the distance, in the fading half-light, Eric can just make out the faint glow of a snowcat grooming the main runs. He must be near the bottom of Mammoth's easternmost slope. But even though he's still within the bounds of the resort, Eric knows the maintenance vehicle won't venture out here.

It's too remote, too inaccessible. He decides he will keep walking until he comes across a marked piste. Now it's starting to snow, now it's starting to get windy, now the mountain is closed. And I circle back on myself, staying left the entire time, looking for a couple of runs under chair nine that I knew that would take me to safety, to Eagle Lodge, where then I can get down and walk two, three blocks to my condo that I was staying at. Eric pushes on through the foul weather.

He still hopefully can get back before nightfall, but he'll need to hurry. Keeping the mountain on his left-hand side, sooner or later he's bound to reach a marked run. But traversing the unstable terrain is incredibly difficult. It isn't long before Eric is panting heavily and sweating under his alpine jacket. With the snow blowing horizontally into his face, his walking in a straight line is a tall order. After trudging for nearly two hours, Eric stops in his tracks.

There, zigzagging into the gloom ahead of him, are footsteps. His footsteps. He's been walking in a giant circle, and he's right back where he started. It's now after 7pm. Above the clouds, above the snowfall, night is drawing in. This is drawing in. This is getting serious. There's little chance of finding his way back now. He needs help. Fortunately, as an experienced backcountry snowboarder,

Eric never goes anywhere without one essential piece of equipment. So to communicate on the mountain, most people used two-way radios where we could go to a frequency and have a call name and speak to each other. And then it also had an emergency component where you can call for help if needed. Eric reaches into his chest pocket where he always keeps his radio, but the pocket's empty.

You can't believe it. Muttering obscenities under his breath, Eric flips open his cell phone, on the off chance that he has service. No luck. It was negative two degrees Celsius on the mountain this afternoon. A bitterly cold day will soon turn into an even colder night. But Eric isn't panicking. Not yet. Instead, he formulates a plan B. He decides he's going to climb as high as he can up the mountain, then snowboard back down, only faster than before. Hopefully, the momentum will carry him across the flat section and out the other side so i hiked back up as much as i could it took me about an hour and a half two hours

to an area that was steep enough and i launched off again now it's dark now it's snowing and i'm trying to stay look at the ground where inside of my tracks to make quicker turns so that I have more momentum. And all of that effort took me about an extra football field, 300 feet. And again, I was stuck. And so I'm like, all right, well, I guess I'm going to, you know, hunker down, go into the trees, dig out some shelter, make a fire. And, you know, this will be a good story. Even faced with the prospect of spending a night on the mountain, Eric manages to stay upbeat. He's used to putting his body through extremes. It's past nine o'clock.

A shaft of pale moonlight penetrates the clouds, illuminating the ground in front of him. Eric pulls his thin jacket tighter to his body. He hikes up into the trees where he should be, partially sheltered from the elements. Once there, he sets about building a fire. At least he should be able to stay warm. I started to rip and shred my hat with my teeth and rip up my t-shirt and then gather whatever kind of dry pine seeds or needles that had fallen onto the ground and I scraped off a little bit of bark. And so I had this beautiful little teepeed fire. Eric goes to take his fire lighter from his inside pocket.

But as he does, he makes another painful discovery. Turns out it's not just his radio that he's left behind. In his haste to leave the condo, he also forgot his lighter. I always made sure that I had those two essential items, the ability to make fire and the ability to communicate. And this was the one and only time of thousands of times of writing that I forgot it, that morning on February 6th. Eric curses himself for these two critical oversights. The temperature is plummeting, and the wind seems to howl around him with an even greater intensity. He rubs his hands together, racking his brain for another solution.

He starts patting himself down, hoping for a miracle. Then his fingers brush something small and hard in his chest pocket. He reaches inside and pulls out a lifeline, an old pack of matches. He must have stashed them in here years ago and forgotten about them. Eric carefully opens the box and slides out a match. He tries to strike the tip against the touch paper, but the wood immediately disintegrates in his fingers. He's soaking wet.

One by one, he tries to light each match. It fails every time. They don't even make a spark. Soon, he's down to his last one. With painstaking care, Eric holds the tiny wooden stick in his gloved hands and blows on it, trying to dry it out. Then he runs the match against the touch paper and watches it crumble into a soggy pulp. You know, had I been able to light this fire, obviously I would have kept taking bark and adding to it and staying warm,

and I was hunkered down and kind of shaded from the night. He's no longer seeing the funny side of this adventure. All he wants to do is get off the mountain. He's starting to feel jittery and restless, and not just because of the cold. These are both common side effects of chronic meth abuse. It's been 24 hours since Eric's last hit, and his cravings are about to push him into a rash decision. In my frustration and my inability to sit still because I had methamphetamine in my system and me not getting what I wanted, I made the gravest of grave mistakes. Because if you ever get stranded, stuck, injured, lost, stay where you are. Eric is still located inside the

perimeter of the ski resort. Deep down, he knows he should wait until morning, then make his way back to a populated area and flag down help. But instead, he makes the fateful decision to head out of bounds and ride in the direction of another ski lodge to the east of Mammoth. It's called Tamarack Lodge. He figures it's the closest option based on where he thinks he currently is. As he weaves through the trees, Eric crosses the boundary marker separating the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area from uncharted backcountry. From now on, he is truly alone in the wilderness. It's 10 o'clock at night on February 6, 2004. Out of bounds now, Eric drops down into a steep

section of the mountain. The blizzard has eased off The snow is still falling, but lightly A cloak of freezing fog mantles the night sky Eric can only see a few feet in front of him He steers his board through wide turns Trying to keep his balance But the grade of the slope keeps getting steeper and steeper. My shoulders started hitting the snow on my turns. That's how steep it was.

And then all of a sudden I start to hear, I'm scraping on rocks. And I'm like, wait a minute, it just snowed 12 feet. I must be going literally off of a cliff. Eric brings himself to an abrupt stop. He peers forward, but he can't see beyond the misty clouds of his own breath. There could be a sheer drop, mere feet away. He backs off and continues to inch his way down the slope. Gradually, it flattens out into what seems like a sprawling snowfield. Eric unstraps his boots and once again sets off walking, carrying his board across his shoulders. He's now experiencing intense hunger pangs.

He's hardly eaten anything all day, just an apple and an energy bar. With shaky, gloved fingers, he unwraps two sticks of chewing gum and swallows them whole, then stuffs the wrappers back in his pocket. Ice crystals, whipped up by the wind, sting Erik's face as he staggers forward. The snow falls softly in heavy clumps, adding further layers to the waist-deep drifts that have already built up. He buries his chin in the neck of his jacket. But just then, in his peripheral vision, he spots a dark shape moving nimbly over the snow. A flash of matted fur and a pair of glinting yellow eyes. Eric thinks back to a night in the resort bar earlier this week.

He'd been shooting the breeze with some fellow barflies when they mentioned a recent news story about a skier who strayed too far off piste out here. They were talking about a skier who got lost. They knew his name. I guess he was in the paper or something or on the local news channel. And his name was Chris Foley, may he rest in peace. But he had gotten trapped in the back country and was out there for two nights.

And they found just his legs. According to the reports, the unfortunate skier likely fell victim to wolves. Eric stands motionless, his pulse racing. He stares at the alpine predator blocking his path. The animal stares back, snout lowered, inhaling Eric's human scent, sensing his human fear. A second creature slinks from the shadows. Then a low growl makes him look round to where a third member of the pack has appeared behind him. All three are bearing their fangs. They've got him surrounded.

But Eric isn't going down without a fight. I slowly take my board around and I look and there's one about two to three feet sniffing at my pocket where the wrappers were and where the other two pieces of gum were and as I'm bringing the board around, I

throw the board at that animal and then just start screaming like, like a crazy man. And I started to run. I wanted something behind my back because they scattered and scurried and I didn't see them and I couldn't see them. I would take a few steps and I would get hunkered down and like stuck in the snow. And I'm like looking behind me, looking around me and I don't see them. So I'm just making noise loud. And I get my legs going.

I go again, I boom, I get hunkered down again. And I finally get to a downed tree. And I just remember jumping over it and digging with my board and getting something behind my neck and my back where it made me feel like, okay, well that area behind me is kind of protected. Crouched, panting behind the fallen tree, Eric presses his back firmly against the snowy

embankment. He takes his board and holds it horizontally in front of his chest. Then he snaps off a branch and whittles it into a point with the edge of his snowboard. He clutches the sharpened stick tightly, scanning the darkness for moving shapes until he feels confident the animals have lost interest. Although they look somewhat similar, what Eric believes to be wolves are more likely coyotes. Here in the Sierra Nevada, these carnivorous canines are far more common. And if they feel threatened or spy an opportunity for an easy meal, coyotes can be even more dangerous. By now, it's almost midnight.

Eric knows he should try and get some sleep. The adrenaline coursing through his veins keeps his mind whirring. He tells himself that when morning comes, he's going to stick to his plan to continue east to Tamarack Lodge, where hopefully an end to this ordeal awaits. He just needs to get through the night. It's the morning of Saturday, February the 7th. As dawn filters through a crack in the winter sky, Eric crawls from his makeshift bunker. Visibility has hardly improved.

A damp mist hangs over the mountain. It's deathly quiet, the snow and the fog muffling every sound, save for Eric's chattering teeth. Bone-chilling though it is, it's not the cold that presents the most immediate danger. After the intense physical exertion of last night, Eric's body has lost a significant amount of moisture through sweat. He's well aware of the dangers of dehydration. Funnily enough, the night before he got lost, back in the warmth and security of Eagle Lodge, he had fallen asleep reading a book about surviving in the wild.

He could never have dreamed he would have to rely on it. But in his current predicament, he manages to recall a crucial piece of advice. I was thirsty. And I learned from this survival book, it said, don't eat snow. That in fact, when it's dry snow and powder snow, it's so porous that it will pull water from you and actually make you more dehydrated. Even though I took a mouthful here and there, I knew not to keep eating it

because it's going to make you colder and it's going to pull water and moisture from you. Eric tries to ignore his thirst and focus on getting his bearings. He climbs up a nearby incline. Based on the angle of the sun and the position of the mountain, he works out which way is northeast, the direction of Tamarack Lodge. He straps into his board, sets off downhill, entering a featureless world of white. Soon, his board starts scraping over sharp, blackened stumps poking up through the snow. He remembers hearing about a forest fire they had the year before. These must be the scorched remains. There were these black daggers that were sticking out of the snow,

burnt trees, burnt bushes, burnt black daggers. A couple of them I went around, a couple of them I ollied over, where you spring back on your board and jump over. And I'm thinking, damn, it's dangerous out here. Eric carefully maneuvers between the charred spikes, taking care not to trip and impale himself. And then, after a while, he becomes aware of a sound, the distant but unmistakable gurgle of running water.

Soon he arrives at the banks of a swiftly flowing river, about eight feet wide and four feet deep. I get down to the river and I scooch myself closer and closer and closer to where I've got my board in my right hand and I'm putting my face down to start to suck some of the water out. I continue to drink it and drink it and drink it.

With each energizing mouthful, Eric feels the strength returning to his body. Satisfied, he falls back on the riverbank and rests his head on the snow. I fell back in the snow because I was tired. It was cold. I was hungry. The water made me a bit colder, but I could feel it kind of nourishing my body. But as he gazes up into the fog-bound sky and his head starts to clear, a new thought enters Eric's mind, the familiar twinge of craving.

And the first thought in my head was, you have meth. Instinctively, Eric reaches into another of his jacket pockets. It's where he keeps the one thing that he truly never goes anywhere without. A plastic Ziploc bag containing a thumbnail-sized amount of crystal meth. He removes the bag and looks at the white powder inside. It glints tantalizingly in the morning light. Even a small bump would subdue his appetite, lift his spirits, and perhaps even give him the energy boost he needs to get off this mountain.

Maybe it could help him survive this ordeal. But as he begins unzipping the baggie, he hesitates. And then I started to wrestle with these emotions of remembering a time when I was going on vacations with friends and how long it had been since I've seen these friends. And why am I such a loner? And what has this drug done to me? And back and forth I go wrestling with these. Do I take it? Do I dump it?

What do I do? Why am I here? And I decide to turn and upend the bag and I watched the meth just go out of it. And it felt good again to reclaim the real Eric Lamarck by saying, no, I am not. The line draws here. I am not taking crystal meth anymore. I'm blaming crystal meth for bringing me to this point of being so exposed, so lonely. He's empowered, but also vulnerable. From now on, he'll have nothing to rely on but his own determination and willpower. As he wrestles with the conflicting emotions, he stares at the now-empty Ziploc bag. An idea springs to mind. I grasped the utilization of that bag.

And I filled the bag up with some water. I drank it. I filled it up again. I drank it. Now I'm shivering more because it's ice cold water. And so I'm just resting and I'm thinking and I'm saying, all right, well, from here forward, once I take these last few drinks, I could fill this bag with snow and I could put it in my inside pocket and my body temperature will melt the snow and I'll have at least some water. In a way, that little plastic bag might well save his life after all.

Having filled it with snow, Eric stuffs the bag into his pocket and prepares to continue his journey northeast. First, though, he goes back in for one last drink from the river. He crawls to the edge of the bank and reaches his head down to the water. But as soon as his lips brush the surface, he hears a soft creaking, then a crumpling sound. And all of a sudden, the snow gives way beneath him, and Eric plunges face-first into the freezing river. In the next episode, Eric's ordeal on Mammoth Mountain is far from over. Before he can even think about navigating his way to safety, he has to survive the raging torrent.

The water was shoving me forward and my board falls perpendicular and it yanks me down the river. And it's not just the icy clutches of the river. There's also the 80-foot waterfall that lies downstream. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. You can listen to part two of Eric's story right now by subscribing to Noisa Plus. To be continued...