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In April of 2019, Eric DeSplinter went missing while hiking in the mountains in California, where he lives. His mother, former Pipestone resident Karen Ziebarth, wrote a book titled “Two Trails: A Hiker’s Story of Survival and His Mother’s Story of Hope” about the experience from her perspective and her son’s.
“We knew it was a story that needed to be told actually hours after the rescue,” Ziebarth said by phone from her home in Adel, Iowa. “Eric was rescued and instead of going home to sleep, which is probably what he needed to do, he came to the hotel where we were staying and he just sat in the lobby and we sat and talked for several hours, and he was telling us what he had done to survive to get out of that canyon. We were so fascinated and just in awe of what both he and Gabrielle had done that we just knew it needed to be a story, a book.”
The story began when DeSplinter and a group of friends and co-workers went on a hike in the mountains of San Bernardino County. He and a woman named Gabrielle intended to summit Cucamonga Peak.
Eric DeSplinter (center) had this photo taken with his sister, Nikki, and brother, Tim, shortly after he was rescued after going missing while on a mountain hike in California, where he lives, in 2019.
“Eric and Gabrielle were the only ones who could go to the peak because they had crampons and ice axes with them,” Ziebarth said. “They were equipped to go, other than the fact that it was supposed to be a day trip, so they didn’t have a lot of food with them or additional clothing.”
They were planning to meet the other members of the group at the trail head for dinner after reaching the peak. When DeSplinter and Gabrielle didn’t show up for dinner, the other members of the group called search and rescue.
Up on the mountain, DeSplinter said, Gabrielle’s crampon didn’t dig in far enough into the ice, causing her to fall and slide a few hundred feet down. She sustained injuries to her hand and leg and was shaken up by the fall.
DeSplinter went to where she had fallen to and they first planned to climb back up to where she had fallen from and go back down the mountain the way they’d come up. They soon determined that wasn’t feasible because the risk of falling again was too great. They decided to go down from where they were at and ended up descending into a canyon.
DeSplinter said they knew where they were and that they needed to exit the mountains to the south. The challenge was finding a safe way out of the wilderness.
The only food they ate over the next five days was two energy bars that Gabrielle brought on the hike. They also had a water filter, so they were able to stay hydrated.
“One of the keys was the fact that we did have a water filter and we were in a place that did have water once we got into the canyon,” DeSplinter said. “We were able to drink as much water as we wanted and that was part of the reason why we never necessarily felt hungry. If we did start feeling thirsty we simply would drink water and that would actually solve any sort of hunger issue.”
The two hiked each day and stopped at dusk to build a fire and sleep. DeSplinter said they were at an elevation of about 7,000 feet and the air was cold at night. He said the fourth day was very cold and too windy to have a fire. They had just light jackets and an emergency blanket that DeSplinter said was shredded by that time and they weren’t able to sleep due to the cold.
Meanwhile, DeSplinter’s family flew out to the search and rescue center in California. Ziebarth said the family had differing opinions about why DeSplinter, an experienced hiker, wasn’t coming back. His sister Nikki feared he was dead, his brother Tim thought he was likely injured and Ziebarth wavered between optimism and fearing the worst.
“Something had to have been horribly wrong or he would have been crawling on his hands and knees to get to us,” she said.
DeSplinter said he wasn’t very concerned during the first day, but once they had to spend a night in the wilderness, he feared it might not end well. By day four, when they encountered another large waterfall with no way around it, he estimated the risk of them dying at about 80 percent.
Ziebarth said that on the fifth night, one of the search teams decided to stay out over night, so the team members could go deeper into the canyon. Their plan paid off when they found footprints. A helicopter was dispatched to the location and DeSplinter and Gabrielle were found.
“Once we realized they had seen us, that was elation because we thought that they had seen us two other times on previous days,” DeSplinter said. “We were excited on both of those times, but this time they had actually talked to us through their speaker on the helicopter, so we knew that they had seen us.”
They were hoisted out of the canyon by a cable and, once they landed, were examined medically and found to have no serious issues.
DeSplinter said he learned some lessons from the experience, including: Have a personal locator beacon with whenever going into the wilderness. Bring backup batteries or chargers for cell phones. Don’t descend a canyon beyond a point that can be ascended from. Don’t go too far down an unknown canyon without appropriate gear.
Following the experience, DeSplinter joined the San Bernardino County Cave Rescue Team. The team specializes in underground rescues, but also does mountain rescues. He said he’s been on about eight missions this year.
In addition to wanting to share the tale of what her son and Gabrielle did to survive for five days in the wilderness, Ziebarth said she wrote the book to honor the search and rescue team members, many of whom are volunteers, who give their time to help others.
“Those people are not home for dinner at night with their families because they’re still searching for them,” she said. “They’re not at home to tuck their kids into bed, if they’ve got little ones, so there’s a lot of sacrificing that goes on and I just marvel at these people. They’re out there looking. They’re sacrificing their time, their families, for somebody they don’t even know. I just have so much respect for them and I just wanted a way to say thank you to them and let people know what selfless people they are.”
Ziebarth said she wrote most of the 118-page book during the COVID-19 pandemic using her own experiences and pieces of DeSplinter’s recollection of his experience that he wrote down right after it happened. The book and more information are available at www.twotrailsbook.com and www.facebook.com/twotrailsbook. The book is also available through other online retailers.