Zane Walch California teen ‘loses touch’ with reality and falls 120ft down Mount Whitney cliff and survives ordeal after suffering altitude sickness and hallucinating during 19 hour hiking trek with his father, Ryan.
A California teen told his father that he saw ‘snowmen and Kermit the frog’ moments before the ‘hallucinating’ boy walking off a cliff and falling 120 feet below according to the boy’s dad.
Ryan Wach said he and his 14-year-old son Zane were climbing Mount Whitney along the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California on Tuesday, June 10 when his son ‘began to lose touch with reality’ before eventually falling off a steep slope, according to SFGATE.
Zane Wach California teen begins to hallucinate during long trek hike
The fall led to Zane suffering head trauma, a broken ankle, a broken finger and a partially broken pelvis. The 14 year old was also placed into a medically induced coma.
It was during the father and son’s 19 hour hike that the dad recalled Zane beginning to show signs of altitude sickness. The pair in turn started heading back down the mountain.
Initially, Ryan recalled that Zane’s altitude sickness was ‘not too severe.’ But things progressively worsened as the father and son continued down the mountain.
‘He started to experience some hallucinations,’ Ryan told SFGATE. ‘He knew he was hallucinating. He said he saw things like snowmen and Kermit the Frog.’
Leading into the formidable endurance sport, Ryan said his son regularly competed in distance running, swimming and triathlons and had plenty of prior hiking experience.
‘He’s in better shape than I am,’ Wach told SFGATE. ‘The idea was that this would be kind of like his introduction to mountaineering.’
By then, the pair had already gotten the hardest parts of their route — scrambling and climbing over granite cliffs and loose rock to reach Whitney’s summit — out of the way, and just needed to hike several miles down the Mount Whitney Trail back to where their car was parked.
Hallucinating teen boy walks off 120 ft cliff
Ryan recalled his son started feeling ‘considerably better’ about six miles from the trailhead as they continued their descent, only to notice that the boy’s condition suddenly worsening about an hour later, with Zane ‘starting to doubt reality.’
A short time later, Ryan said his son thought they had ‘finished the hike multiple times over,’ but the pair still had not reached the trailhead.
‘He told me he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or not,’ the dad recalled, ‘and he would shake his head in disbelief, like, ‘This is not real.’ Like he was in the movie Inception or something.’
Eventually, another group of hikers helped the father-son duo and called for help, according to SFGATE and The Independent.
But the unbelievable and the unthinkable was just moments away.
It’s then that the dad said that Zane walked off the cliff, with the boy falling 120 feet.
‘I didn’t see how there would be a way for him to survive it, so I screamed,’ Ryan recalled, according to The Independent. The father said he raced over to his son after the fall and miraculously found him ‘still breathing.’
What causes altitude sickness?
An EMT who happened to be nearby helped assess Zane and coordinate help. Rescue teams arrived about six hours later, with Zane flown to Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine before being transported to Sunrise Children’s Hospital in Las Vegas where he continued to remain.
‘He was in an altered mental state, and I don’t know what caused it. We still don’t know,’ Ryan Wach said. ‘My best guess is a combination of exhaustion, sleep deprivation, probably some dehydration and lasting effects from the altitude sickness. But he essentially started to doubt reality.’
‘It’s going to be a survival story in the end, but right now we’re still in the middle of it,’ Ryan said.
Dr. Puja Vithalani, a family medicine physician speaking with News3lv noted that altitude sickness can affect even experienced hikers above 8,000 feet. ‘You can definitely get confused, you can maybe be speaking and not make as much sense, your speech can be a little bit affected,’ Vithalani told the outlet. Wach and his son were around the 10,000-foot mark when the incident occurred.
More than $26,500 has been raised through a GoFundMe campaign to support Zane and his family following the incident. The donations will ‘help ease the burden of their travel costs, such as gas expenses to and from CA to Las Vegas, lodging, and meals.’
