“Burned into my memory are the images of him, on that slick rock, grasping for something, anything, to hold on to, as he slid slowly but inevitably toward the edge. Worst of all is the memory of him looking back at me, desperate and helpless,  as he soundlessly disappeared. That moment is forever etched into my memory. The replay is always the same, always in slow motion, and always includes searching for him – it seemed like forever – and finally noticing that one of the side pools  at the bottom of the falls was colored red”.

There was a time in my adult life when mountaineering and being involved in mountain rescue would have been unthinkable. The reason was simple: to do so would have required me to deal with my worst possible FEAR – one that arose decades earlier as result of a jarring and tragic event that played out in the mountains of California’s Sierra Nevadas.

One day in  1976, the year I arrived in the United States from Sweden, forever changed my life. It was the day I witnessed the traumatic death of a Swedish friend  visiting  me and my then boyfriend – now husband- Scott at his parents property just outside Yosemite National Park. Staffan, was an amazing young man  practicing as a psychologist in Lund, Sweden. He had a sense of adventure and was excited that morning to be hiking and scrambling with us in the awe-inspiring nature surrounding Yosemite. Scott’s parents’ property had several water falls along Gertrude and Whiskey Creeks, one of them was 5 or 6 stories tall with an expansive, sloping glacial polished rock shelf on top and a large pool below.

On that hot summer day while we were reclining against a boulder Staffan got up and walked about 30 feet or so onto the shelf and laid down in a trickle of water to cool himself. I remember telling him “be careful, the rock over there is much slicker than it looks.” And I remember a few moments later, hearing a wet thud and glancing over to see that in his attempt to get up and move, he had slipped and fallen on the slime under the thin sheen of water where he had been sitting, and was now, sliding, as if in slow motion, towards the edge some 30 feet away. The slope of the rock was not steep, but the angle was just enough to keep him sliding, and the moist expanse was wide enough and slippery enough to prevent him from maneuvering out of harm’s way. Burned into my memory are the images of him, on that slick rock, grasping for something, anything, to hold on to, as he slid slowly but inevitably toward the edge. Worst of all is the memory of him looking back at me, desperate and helpless, as he soundlessly disappeared. That moment is forever etched into my memory. The replay is always the same, always in slow motion, and always includes searching for him – it seemed like forever – and finally noticing that one of the side pools  at the bottom of the falls was colored red.

I shudder every time I recall my husband scrambling down the rocks over to the side of the pool, where he grabbed a hand barely visible below the water’s surface, pulled it and cradled Staffan’s head a he coaxed the body over to the side of the pool. Later he would tell me that the head felt like a hard boiled egg in a sack that had been slammed on a rock.

For many years I had recurring nightmares that woke me up in a panic.

During the next several decades, I got married, developed a successful career, and brought a wonderful daughter to the world. Yet, what had happened with Staffan had created an almost irrational fear of exposure: standing by cliffs, drop-offs or waterfalls  terrified me and tainted any of our experiences as a family on hikes and backpacking trips in the Pacific Northwest as I was trying to hide my panic.

In our book A Dog’s Devotion: True Adventures of a K9 Search and Rescue Team you will find out how I ultimately overcame my fear. By joining search and rescue and my local mountain rescue unit, I had to stop resisting my fear and literally step into it. I learnt to live comfortably outside my comfort zone and make fear my friend.