A family who became trapped on the top of a remote 40-foot waterfall during a four-day camping trip received help in an unlikely way.
Curtis Whitson was with his girlfriend and 13-year-old son at California’s Arroyo Seco tributary when the nerve-racking ordeal began. Whitson told the Washington Post that the group had reached the most difficult part of their journey, a tall waterfall, when they discovered that their only way down, a rope that was supposed to be affixed to the top of the waterfall, was missing.
Whitson said that when he made the same trip seven years earlier the rope allowed him to rappel down, but because it was gone there was no way to climb out of the gorge.
“It was a sad realization, to know that our trip was over and we needed help,” Whitson said. “Every inch down that river had committed us to a spot where we couldn’t get out.”
With no cell service, Whitson, his son Hunter, and his girlfriend Krystal Ramirez, needed a plan. So Whitson decided to cast his luck, literally, downstream.
Whitson scratched the word “HELP” onto the side of his green Nalgene water bottle and scrawled the date on a piece of paper along with the note, “WE ARE STUCK HERE @ THE WATERFALL GET HELP PLEASE.” He then tossed the sealed bottle down the waterfall in the long-shot bid.
The group also used rocks to spell out “SOS” on the ground.
“We’ve done all we can do,” Whitson recalled telling the other two. “The only thing left to do now is wait.”
Around midnight, the trio who had retired to their sleeping bags, awoke to a loudspeaker blaring, “This is search and rescue, you have been found. Stay put and we’ll be back to get you tomorrow morning.”
Two hikers had spotted the green bottle bobbing about a quarter mile downstream and went for help.
“They told me they found the bottle in the narrows of the river,” said Arroyo Seco Campground manager Cindi Barbour.
The next morning a California Highway Patrol helicopter came to their rescue, pulling them up using safety lines.
“It blows me away how it all came perfectly together,” he said. “What are the odds?”
