Seduced by the siren song of the High Sierra
Wilderness re-energizes harried visitors, but claimed 2 young lives in past week
For ambitious college students and young people consumed by the high-tech, highintensity world that is the San Francisco Bay Area these days, there’s a place where more and more of them are seeking a temporary antidote to match their high-flying pursuits: California’s High Sierra. In the past week, two students lured to the state’s lofty
heights have perished in the process.
On Saturday, San Jose State student and avid outdoorsman William “Billy” Nguyen drowned in Eagle Lake, an ice-cold basin perched 10,000 feet above sea level. The following day, Stanford University medical student and accomplished mountaineer Maria Birukova plunged more than 800 feet to her death. She was 26 years old; Nguyen was 19.
Both students died doing what they loved in mountains that sometimes seem like siren songs, seducing young Californians looking for an alternative to competitive college campuses and pressure-cooker startups. While some young people are content to relax by binge-watching Netflix or perfecting their beer-pong moves, many increasingly seek recreation commensurate with their lives in overdrive back in the Bay Area. In this context, the Sierra Nevada and Silicon Valley offer images of the same searing intensity, mirrored like some exquisite alpine lake.
“For a lot of these kids, going to the mountains is about doing something that causes the pulse rate to increase,” said Rob Simpson, a professor at Simpson College in Redding who once ran an outdoors program for college students who’d leave the traditional classroom for an adventure in the Sierra Nevada. “It’s not necessarily death-defying sports, but skiing and hiking and climbing. People find a tremendous amount of satisfaction and re-energizing just by being in these highaltitude places, sometimes with an element of risk.”
Risk, of course, is woven into the very fabric of the state’s wilderness. Nguyen, whose drowning is still a mystery, was flirting with risk when he and the school’s Outdoor Adventures group he was leading got a permit to camp at Mosquito Lakes before setting off on a 3 ½-mile hike from the Mineral King trail head in the Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park, where the valley’s floor floats at an elevation of 7,500 feet.
“Hiking at this altitude is strenuous,” says the park’s website. “Gauge your hiking to the least fit member of your party.”
But the kinesiology major, who had learned the basics of backpacking in a yearlong course when he was a freshman, was in great shape, and his friends said he embraced the adventure, risks and all.
“Very sad for this guy,” Nate Tanemor wrote on Nguyen’s Facebook page. “I’ve been to Eagle Lake and hiked Mineral King. It’s beautiful and rad out there. But Mother Nature can be cruel if you don’t have respect and know what you’re getting into. RIP Billy.”
The risks also attracted Birukova, an accomplished climber who was near Bear Creek Spire when she reportedly lost her footing and fell between 800 and 1,000 feet, according to the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office.
“Maria lived life to the fullest knowing the inherent dangers of a sport she loved,” a commenter named Tiborhorvath wrote on an online blog. “It is a reminder for all of us that life is short and not to take risks deprives us of a life fulfilled. We can all learn from her vitality.”
Birukova’s professors and fellow students at Stanford are in shock this week over the death of such a well-liked and hard-driving student. But they also remember the Russian-born mountain-lover as one of those Silicon Valley residents who seem always to have one eye on an intense agenda of the day-to-day and the other gazing eastward toward the peaks.
“I think that she was intellectually, as well as physically, an explorer,” said Dr. Paul Bollyky, an assistant professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology who ran the lab where Birukova conducted her research.
To Bollyky, the Sierra Nevada and the Stanford campus were two sides of a single dazzling coin in Birukova’s eyes.
“Just like she was out there climbing mountains, I think she was willing to take on some of the harder, more interesting questions and challenges,” he said. “I think that’s a strand that runs through most of everything she did.”
The Sierra Nevada are full of young people like Nguyen and Birukova these days. Ian Fettes, who runs a High Sierra Jeep adventure company based at June Lake near Mammoth, says he’sseeing more and more of them coming under the mountains’ spell each year, often going back home with a sort of wondrous rapture from their visit, but sometimes with unfortunate results.
“Any wilderness area, once you get away from the highway, can be a dangerous place with plenty of ways to get yourself into a compromised situation,” said Fettes, who also works for the local firedepartment. “I spend a lot of time at the Mammoth hospital, and it’s like a war zone sometimes, with young people hobbling in or being brought in on stretchers after doing crazy stuff on mountain bikes or snowboards.”
But he gets it. Young people, particularly those from high-energy outposts like Los Angeles and the Bay Area, seem to be burning off in the mountains what’s been building up inside them back near sea level.
“Kids these days believe they have to do all this extreme stuff because that’s what they’re expected to do — bang themselves up,” said Fettes. “It’s definitely something I see among the younger generation, this belief that they have to do extreme stuff in order to be normal.”