Deadly Patagonia Storm

In November, a blizzard with hurricane-force winds struck a popular hiking route in one of Chile’s most visited tourist destinations. Five people died. David Zonshayn, an emergency physician from New York, was on the trail when it happened. Here is his story.

In November, emergency physician David Zonshayn was hiking the John Gardner Pass in Patagonia, Chile, when a violent snowstorm tore through Torres del Paine National Park. Five people died. Zonsayn, a 32-year-old resident of New York City, treated victims for hypothermia and cardiac arrest while waiting hours in a hut for rescuers to arrive on-scene. This is his story as told to Madison Dapcevich.

One moment keeps returning to me. The night before the tragedy, a fellow trekker from Switzerland told me that she had a bad feeling about the next day. Something didn’t sit right, she told me, so she planned to wait for better weather before beginning her hike. I’m ashamed to admit, I dismissed her as a wimp.

I know danger, I thought. I have trekked the Himalayas, the Atlas Mountains, and the Andes. I’ve been through jungles and volcanoes, and skied the Austrian Alps with an avalanche beacon. This will be a walk in the park.

The trek we were about to do was part of a multi-day hiking loop in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park called the O-Circuit. This particular section, the John Gardner Pass, is a challenging full-day hike. It’s known for steep sections and, of course, extreme, unpredictable weather. Typically, hikers like me can complete the journey in about eight hours.

Before setting off on my trip, a local cautioned me that the “only predictable thing about the weather here is that it’s unpredictable.” Forecasts were conflicting. Still, park guides gave us the green light to proceed.

During a brief break in the wind, the group of hikers discuss how to proceed

A Decision to Push Forward

I awoke at 6 A.M. on November 17 in my tent to the now-familiar sound of howling gusts of wind. It was drizzling, and although the conditions were wet and windy, they did not seem deadly. I ate a protein bar and left camp.

The trail starts with a steep, switchbacked climb through a dense forest crisscrossed by small rivers. At one point, near the top of the tree line, a ferocious gust of wind blew in, and a tree trunk crashed just a few feet in front of me. I began to worry.

I need to get above the tree line to avoid a tree falling on me, I thought.

It seemed safer to continue going up than to risk walking through the woods amidst falling trees. Looking back, I wasn’t the only hiker who thought it a better idea to forge ahead despite the conditions.

As I pushed forward, I met a young couple from Mexico named Julian and Christina. In a few hours, they would be dead.

The three of us hiked together for roughly 20 minutes. The wind died down, and soft snow coated the ground. When we emerged above the tree line, the trail led us close to a wind-swept ravine—navigating it was yet another reason turning back seemed more dangerous than continuing forward.

Most of us had no mountaineering experience, but what quickly followed were full-blown alpine climbing conditions. Snow piled to our knees. Wind gusts reached 118 mph. At one point, the couple and I were separated, and I joined another group of hikers heading for the pass summit.

We walked further up, the path becoming more treacherous with every step. Steep zones made it difficult for us to hold our footing. As I hiked, the waterproof tarp affixed to my backpack caught the wind like a sail, and I thought I might fly off the mountain. When I reached a flatter, rocky area above, I remembered I had crampons in my bag. I crouched and knelt behind a rock to take them out, wrestling with my tarp.

This is exactly how people die, I thought.

I opened my backpack, and my only other pair of pants flew out of the bag.

Near the steep slope, I saw a woman in a blue jacket face down on a rock. At the time, she appeared uninjured and was being helped by four other hikers. I would later learn that she did not make it out alive—her body was found the next day near that very rock.

Soaked and mildly hypothermic, my group continued quickly down to the previous night’s camp.

Once there, we clambered into a hut at base camp, stripped off our wet gear, and boiled water. Slowly, the rest of the hikers trickled into the hut, which usually serves as a campsite where hikers sleep the night before crossing the pass.

But on November 17, it became an emergency room.

Although many of us that day were hiking independently and didn’t know each other beforehand, we tried to get a headcount of who was missing by reviewing the camp’s registration ledgers. Some hikers did not register, further complicating our effort. We had no way to know precisely how many people were stuck on the mountain.

Mobilizing a Makeshift Rescue Team

A backcountry litter made of hiking poles and other camping gear

We mobilized an impromptu rescue team and made makeshift stretchers from poles and ropes. Some of the hikers went back into the blizzard with the stretcher, sleeping bags, warm thermoses, and an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) to rescue those left behind.

Our improvised team of rescuers communicated between the hut and the trail via Garmin InReach. Those on the trail inevitably confirmed our worst fears: Christina’s husband, Julian, was found dead with a head wound. Christina was alive and shouting for help. Another woman was found further up, alive but minimally responsive. The rescue team could go no further.

As an emergency room doctor back home in New York City, I’ve treated hypothermia and frostbite in an urban setting. The mainstay of treatment is simple: rewarming. But this was no city. While we waited for the rescuing group to return, another doctor and I commandeered the warmest room of the hut and gathered water bottles and stoves from the other hikers. We dipped hikers’ hands into bowls of heated water. Mainly, we were preparing to treat Christina, who we knew was being carried off the mountain on a stretcher.

It was painstaking progress to carry Christina down the mountain. The makeshift litter kept breaking, and the bridge they were crossing collapsed, sending them into a river. Eventually, I ran up the hill to help them carry her down. By the time I arrived at the group, Christina had gone into hypothermic cardiac arrest, and they were doing chest compressions and defibrillating her. She was wrapped in two sleeping bags, pulseless. When I examined her, all signs pointed to severe hypothermia: her skin was rigid and freezing, her pupils fixed and dilated.

Lives Lost, Despite Our Best Efforts

In emergency medicine, we’re taught that when resuscitating patients with hypothermic cardiac arrest, there is a classic saying: “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.” People in severe hypothermia can appear lifeless with no detectable pulse, but can be revived once properly warmed. So we decided to stop CPR and transport her back to the hut.

Once back at the hut, we swapped her wet clothes out and wrapped her in two dry sleeping bags, all the while continuing chest compressions. We lined the sleeping bag with warm water bottles. Epinephrine is sometimes given to a hypothermic person in cardiac arrest to jumpstart the heart, which we did as well.

But after an hour of continuous CPR, we realized we had done everything we could do. She was gone.

Christina was just one of five others who tragically died on the mountain that day.

Tragedies in the backcountry often occur when climbers keep pushing forward in bad weather. Our fatal flaw, in my opinion, was assuming that moving forward was safer than retreating. Under deadly conditions, I now know that it can often be safer to retrace known obstacles than to encounter brand-new ones.

When faced with the vastness of nature, many people feel small. That is not how I felt on November 17. Instead, I felt the largeness of the human spirit that led us to rise to the occasion, endeavour to help our fellows, and persevere in the teeth of disaster.