Rescue and death of US hiker under heat warning

A woman hiking in Southern California has become the latest woman to die while hiking as the United States experiences sweltering heat.

San Diego police said the body of 50-year-old Diem Le Nguyen was found about a quarter-mile (400m) off the Black Mountain Trail on Monday, hours after she made a distress call to other hikers saying she was “very hot.” , and it’s very hot.” Need water”.

There have been several deaths of her in Colorado and Arizona this month, as well as multiple near-fatal incidents across the country, as she struggled under a “heat dome,” with temperatures as high as 114 degrees Fahrenheit in some popular trail areas (approximately 46 degrees Celsius).

In Colorado, Iowa’s Marsha Cook collapsed and died on June 10 while trying to follow a “moderate to steep” hiking trail to the Colorado National Monument.

On June 14, a 44-year-old Pennsylvania woman collapsed and died from heat stroke while hiking with her husband and two daughters in Sedona, Arizona.

Two days later, a 41-year-old man died on the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon.

Although officials have not confirmed that his death was heat-related, the National Park Service advises against hiking below the Grand Canyon rim during heat warnings.

This comes after another California hiker was found ten days after being lost in a landscape transformed by recent wildfires.

Lukas McClish, 34, said he survived on wild berries and water collected in his boots after getting lost near Santa Cruz.

According to the National Park Service, hiking in extremely hot weather can cause heat stroke, heat stroke, hyperthermia and hyponatremia. All of these can be fatal.

More than 1,700 people in the United States died from heat-related illnesses in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Experts say even the most experienced hikers can make mistakes and quickly need rescue in sweltering conditions.

Officials said Ms. Nguyen disappeared during a group hike on Sunday when temperatures reached 95 degrees.

After her group, which included about 100 family and friends, returned around 8 a.m. local time, she continued walking along the trail. About two hours later, she called her family to say she was struggling in the heat and desperately needed water.

San Diego police officer Dan Meyer said she was almost safe before she collapsed.

“She was only a quarter mile from the crowd, the street,” he told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

“She almost succeeded.”

“Hiking in the summer is dangerous, especially when it’s very hot,” Mr. Meyer said on Monday.

“Even if you take all the precautions available, you can still be in a situation you don’t want to be in.”

Descending into canyons and deserts also increases the risk of “temperature inversion,” a phenomenon in which lowland areas are significantly warmer than the highland areas from which hikers set out.

Isaac Sanchez of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire) told BBC News that the agency frequently responds to heat-related illnesses suffered by hikers in backcountry areas.

Mr. Sanchez said heat-related emergencies on hiking trails are “a very, very common rescue” for workers in the San Diego area.

Sanchez said one of the most common and fatal mistakes hikers make is not carrying enough water.

Despite its weight, “we’d like to see people carrying gallons.”

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? We want to have enough water, not not enough, because we don’t know what’s going to happen later in the day.”

In the outdoors, “overpreparation is a good thing.”

Cal Fire says hikers should not feel embarrassed about asking for rescue, or they could get lost or even get sick.

“The bottom line is, no matter how experienced we are and how prepared we are, sometimes we all get into situations that we can’t get out of without help,” Mr. Sanchez said.

Reporting by Max Matza