A boy, a girl, two rattlesnakes
and a legacy
May 17, 2019:
Today I am celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the day I survived two rattlesnake bites, a day that I remember as if it was yesterday, and one that left a lasting impact on the sense I carry of my own strength, resilience, and the appreciation I feel for legs that are still strong and healthy.
But, this isn’t really a story about me, or my snakebites; It is a story about the young man who saved my life that morning and his remarkable legacy, a legacy that relatively few are aware of, even those who benefit from it most.
Each year hundreds of Pacific Crest Trail hikers traverse the flank of Mt. Jenkins which lies just north of Walker Pass at PCT mile marker 652. They walk past a sign dedicated by “The friends of Jim Jenkins”, and pass a plaque placed in Jim’s honor, as they make their final push out of the deserts of Southern California and into the Sierras at Kennedy Meadows. I wonder how many even notice, or stop to wonder why this portion of the trail is dedicated to him. This is a story about the man for whom that mountain is named, a story that hasn’t been told in fifty years but may very well have set a course that still affects all of us who love the PCT.
Fifty years ago I was nine years old. I was a child who loved to wander and was blessed with a family ethic where traipsing through sagebrush in search of Native American camps and morteros was not only allowed but encouraged. I wasn’t supposed to be in the path of snakes that morning in May; I’d planned to stay home in Los Angeles with my mother instead of going to our family ranch with my father and a teenage boy I’d never met. But even as a little girl the pull of adventure was just too strong to resist, and so, at the last minute, I asked for time to throw on my jeans and pull my hair back in a headband, a headband that only hours later would save one of my legs, before racing out to jump in the car for the hour drive north to the mountains.
The year was 1969 and my dad, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, had offered to take the son of a colleague, to the mountains with him that day. All I knew about this boy, Jim Jenkins, was that he was seven years older than I, and that he loved the mountains. My dad told me that Jim had found a home in nature because he had been born a little different than most kids, with a form of Cerebral Palsy, and felt most comfortable when he was out hiking alone. My father wanted to introduce him to our ranch, a magical piece of property on the side of Mt Liebre, that looked north across The Antelope Valley towards the Tehachapi mountains. It lays adjacent to what is now mile 510 of the PCT. Dad thought it would be good for Jim to get out of LA and explore.
I remember feeling a little shy on our drive out of the city. Jim sat in the front seat of our yellow Ford Galaxy 500 talking with my dad about backpacking trips in the Sierras that he hoped he’d get to do one day. Listening in from the back seat, I heard him talk about all of the research he’d done on what it took to survive in the mountains. Once we reached the ranch, and Dad made it clear he would be working on our cabin all day, I realised that Jim and I were on our own. I put shyness aside and asked him if he wanted to hike to the “Indian Rocks”, a group of big granite stones covered in grinding holes a few miles away.
It was a warm May morning and there was an easy quiet between us as we set out hiking. It had been a wet spring and the grass and chaparral were thick. That, combined with a nine year-old’s poor sense of direction, meant that we never found the morterros that were deeply hidden in the overgrowth. I lost our path in sagebrush while we searched, but neither of us were worried. We could see Pine Canyon Road a half mile below and I knew we could just follow it back to our ranch gate if it came to that.
I never saw the snakes before they struck. They must have been as surprised as I because they never had the chance to rattle. I remember jumping back and Jim helping me to find a place to sit down a safe distance away. He asked if I had been bitten. As he was checking the wound on my left ankle I pulled up my other pant leg and saw blood starting to spread across my white knee-sock. I will never forget the look on that sixteen year-old’s face as he realised he had a little girl with double snake bites on his hands in unfamiliar terrain. It was, of course, years before cell phones, or satellite emergency beacons. It was just Jim Jenkins, a nine year-old me, and two rattlesnakes, who by then had begun a furious storm of rattling just meters away.
I remember his calm. I remember he asked me to take off the stretchy Danskin shirt I was wearing as he explained it would make the best tourniquet for my left leg. He eyed my stretchy, black headband and decided it would be placed below my right knee. He told me I needed to stay seated and that I had to keep my legs below my heart and just wait by myself until he could get back with my father. He knew he had to to leave me there; I was tiny, but even then I was too heavy for this boy with a handicap to carry. He asked how to find his way back to our cabin and I told him to just go to the road below and head left, he’d find it eventually. As he got ready to leave I asked him what I should do if the snakes came back. He left me with rocks to throw and told me not to let them bite me again. I look back on that conversation today and marvel at the poise we both demonstrated that morning. We were only children really, and yet every move we made determined life or death.
People who have read about Jim Jenkins, both in accounts of my rescue, and later as he was lauded for his mapping of the Sierras and the PCT, probably envision a strong and fit young man, like so many of the young “through hikers” today. It’s true, Jim was strong and fit, and completely equipped both physically and mentally for everything that the mountains require of a person who makes exploring them their life passion. But the Jim I knew, the one who
This is the only photo I have of Jim. It was taken shortly before his death.
makes exploring them their life passion. But the Jim I knew, the one who saved my life, was also a boy who contended with a condition that was usually viewed as a handicap, but one he used as motivation to build expertise in the environment where he felt most comfortable. Even so, it left him with a stumbling and uneven gate and I can still hear his ragged, pounding steps as he ran away to find help that morning.
By the time he reached my father I was already entering physical shock back on the mountain. Somehow I was able to guide them to where I sat hidden in the tall sagebrush. My father had brought a tea towel and razor blades with him, but thankfully had accidentally dropped them before carrying me to the car, where he had intended to cut my legs and suck the poison from my wounds. The fact that there was no time to return for them was one of the many little miracles that saved my life and legs that day, as cutting, the protocol of the time, was later proven to cause far more harm than good.
My father pushed that Galaxy 500 to its limits as we raced around the curves, through the little communities of Three Points and Lake Hughes, to the hospital in Lancaster over forty miles away. I was submerged in vats of ice to slow the flow of venom to my heart, and anti-venom was flown in from multiple locations and administered to my tiny body intravenously. I was a serious case, supposedly on record for years as the smallest body weight individual to consume as much rattlesnake venom and still live. Jim and I made the Sunday Evening News with Walter Cronkite, the front page of The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and received an invitation to The Art Linkletter show. Everyone, without exception, acknowledged that I was alive because of Jim Jenkins, a young man who had taken the time to learn the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness, and had used those skills flawlessly when it mattered most.
Jim isn’t here to celebrate with today. Tragically, just eleven years after my snakebites, at the age of twenty-seven, he was killed on the shoulder of Interstate 5 when he stopped to help an elderly driver who was having car trouble. I had not seen Jim in those intervening years, and we never knew each other as adults. I wish that we had had the opportunity to talk about how that morning in May had impacted who we grew up to be. I know that I was left with a sense of being somehow different from other people, a little tougher, a little less afraid. The Native Americans say that having Snake as your totem animal is only earned by surviving multiple poisonous bites and gives one the gift of resiliency and the ability to transform difficult situations for the better. I don’t know if I even believe that, while at the same time it feels absolutely true.
I often wonder if our experience changed Jim as well. I like to think that he grew in confidence where his own talents and strength were concerned, and that he used that confidence as he pursued his passion to make a difference in the world of distance hiking. He went on to become a USFS Forrester, hike thousands upon thousands of miles through the rugged terrain of California, measuring and mapping the trails we use today. He wrote five books, including one of the finest Sierra trail guides ever written. Before the age of Halfmile and Guthook it was Jim’s surveying, mapping, and record keeping that helped hikers cross the Sierras safely. It was an amazing contribution, accomplished in eleven short years.
Two years ago, while hiking the PCT, I reached mile 652 and the portion of the trail dedicated to Jim. It was a glorious morning and I found myself weeping in gratitude for that boy, long gone, who had made the rest of my life possible. I felt like he was hiking with me that day, and I think I felt his presence as, ironically, I had my closest call since the last time I’d spent the day with Jim, with a rattlesnake at mile 664, in the sagebrush flat just past Joshua Tree Spring. As afraid as I was, I laughed out loud and “told” Jim I was never hiking with him again!
Today Jim would have been sixty-six year’s old. His legacy lives on as more than a sign, a plaque, or even a mountain. I hope that somehow he knows that his efforts to make the Sierras safely accessible to all of us are appreciated, and that, as the PCT community, we take a moment, as we traverse the flank of that mountain named in his honor, to thank him for the contribution he made for all of us.
