ABOVE: Honolulu Fire Department firefighters (left to right), Shaun Forges, Matt Ramsey and Chris Johnson have all received special training to rescue lost, injured or trapped hikers from the most difficult-to-reach places.
Halfway up Oahu's Koolau Mountains, Ian Snyder made his peace with God. The 34-year-old hiker from California had rolled hundreds of feet from a ridge and smashed into a shelf below, breaking his elbow, finger and a cheekbone. Consciousness came and went, only faintly registering the dull roar of engines on Pali Highway in the near distance. There was no going back up. Below, no way down except by waterfall. Snyder dragged himself to a spot between two rocks for shelter, close to a trickle to drink from. His two phones, which had gotten wet, were dead. "I remember day, night, day, night," he says. Then he lost count. "I remember praying for a rescue and thinking, 'If this is it, I'm content to go.'" He could hear planes passing far overhead.
Then, three days after the fall, he heard the shudder of helicopter blades. A yellow-bellied machine floated into view. Snyder waved.
"He's waving," the pilot, Zach Potter, said over the radio.
"He's alive?" said Chris Johnson, the firefighter sitting opposite him.
Adrian Cravalho, a fire rescue captain on the ground nearby, also couldn't believe it. "He's waving at you?"
Atop Hawaii's ridges, like Kalepa Ridge on Kauai mist can sneak up you. Rain slicks the trails and fog obscures the path; before you know it, you need rescuing.
Snyder hadn't shown up to pick up his kids from school that week, so his family filed a missing person report. Before he fell, he had, like countless hikers before him, posted videos of Hawaii's grand, green peaks to social media. Police tracked the location of the device posting the videos, and that's where rescue firefighter Lanson Ronquilio was driving the firetruck that Thursday afternoon. In the back of the truck, Ramsey looked through Snyder's posts, trying to calculate his probable trajectory. When they arrived at the Nuuanu Reservoir, the firemen put on their red helmets and red long-sleeves and pulled their harnesses up around their waists.
The helicopter arrived, and rescue fireman Shaun Forges and Johnson climbed aboard. Potter flew to the location the police had sent, and the team searched from the air for half an hour before Forges rappelled down to the site to keep searching. He found a Clif Bar wrapper, then what might have been the path of a sliding object. "Our mindset was that we would find a body rather than a live person," Cravalho says. So the whole team was shocked when that body waved, a few hundred feet from where they'd been looking.
Potter flew over to pick up Forges, dropped him back at the landing zone and picked up Ramsey. When they returned, Johnson lowered Ramsey on a rope onto the ten-foot-wide ledge. "He was surprisingly coherent"—he remembered his name—"but he was injured and he wasn't gonna be moving anywhere," Ramsey says. "If we didn't find him, I don't know how long he would have lasted."
Ronquilio followed, and the two firemen packed Snyder into a Stokes basket, a portable, hard-backed stretcher. "I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that the guy was alive," Ronquilio said. "As far as disbelief goes, it was a ten." They belted him down across his chest, hips and legs. They clipped straps into a carabiner centered over his navel, then secured the rope descending from the chopper. Ramsey clipped himself in and sat next to Snyder. As the helicopter ascended, the inescapable ledge below grew smaller and smaller until it was gone. "I remember flying through the air. I remember getting chilly," Snyder says. "And the guy said it'd only be a minute."
In a training exercise, HFD firefighters Ramsey, Nevin Kamakaala and Forges fasten an actor into a Stokes basket, a metal stretcher that secures a victim’s spine and attaches to a rescue helicopter’s line.
More than a century ago, across Nuuanu Valley from where Snyder fell, three men—one of whom was "the expert trail and mountain man of the outdoor promotion committee"—barely survived a hike up Lanihuli, the distinctive spire just north of the Pali Gap. In February 1915 they attempted "a route never before essayed" and, with "but one lunch among them," tried a shortcut along a "razorback ridge," the Hawaiian Gazette reported. By nightfall they ended up on a ledge, looking five hundred feet down on three sides to the valley below. They crawled back and, gripping onto trees growing at right angles from the mountain, reached a less daunting cliff of a mere hundred feet. The next day, the famished trio crawled up to the summit where, upon seeing a man from a rescue party bearing food, they "almost fell down the steep trail in their eagerness."
"There are places on that alleged trail that are absolutely dangerous, and either a trail should be cut up through this wonderful glen or a notice posted forbidding people to use the trail," one of the rescuers, Alexander Hume Ford—who taught Jack London to surf and founded the Outrigger Canoe Club—told the paper. "We must have an outdoor man that knows the trails thoroughly from personal experience, and how to guide and instruct our young students so that no mishap will occur."
In those days the Trail and Mountain Club often sent its members to search for wayward hikers. But eventually the responsibility fell more regularly to the Honolulu Fire Department's rescue crews.
In 1934 the Honolulu Star-Bulletin covered the rescue of a ten-year-old boy and two friends who had set out for a swim at Manoa Falls. "FIREMEN RESCUE MORRIS BOY; YOUTH NOT HARMED BY A NIGHT OF EXPOSURE," read one of the paper's front-page headlines. "FRIENDS DEAD AFTER PLUNGE FROM A CLIFF," read another. "Lad Says He Had 'Swell Night' On Manoa Ledge," read a third, less emphatically. At the time, said lad was "unaware of the fate of his two companions," and the rescuers had just given him hot coffee.
In 1948 a Honolulu Rapid Transit driver named Donald Kennedy hiked up behind Wilhelmina Rise and got lost. After a day and a night wandering, just past midnight, fire rescue teams found him headed for a streambed. Even the experienced hikers of the Trail and Mountain Club sometimes got into trouble. In 1959 fifteen of its members hiked into Kahana Valley and got stuck overnight on a ridge no wider than a foot. They sang to stay awake, for "to doze off meant death in a plunge hundreds of feet to the floor of the valley," the Honolulu Advertiser reported. By the time rescuers began trekking up the valley the next morning, however, the hikers had made their way out "under their own steam." One of the lucky told the paper, "I've been stranded on a mountaintop before, but it wasn't as dangerous, wet and slippery as this one."
Ian Snyder, pictured in Zion National Park more than a year before his fall while hiking on Oahu. Snyder, an experienced hiker, went astray following Google Maps and fell hundreds of feet from a ridge in the Koolau Mountains. Injured and trapped on an inaccessible ledge, Snyder miraculously survived for three days before firefighters reached him by helicopter.
Despite the intervening decades of society's breakneck advancement, the rain continues to fall, the rocks still crumble and gravity is always bringing us down. In the past decade, hikers on Oahu's trails have continued to fall and die: the Ohana and Mahalo Trails (2023), Lanikai Pillbox (2023), Maunawili Falls (2021), Maili Pillbox (2021), Lulumahu Falls (2020), Punaluu Castle Trail (2017), Luakaha Falls (2017), Puu Manamana (2016) and Manoa Falls (2016). Perhaps the most fatal trail, the three-peaked Olomana hike on the Windward side, is a prime example of the problem's insolubility. The best the island's bureaucrats could do—short of closing and strictly guarding the trail—was erect a sign at the trailhead two years ago: "ATTENTION Olomana Trail Users," it reads. "Six people have fallen to their deaths after hiking past the first peak."
The particular fruit of modernity that might be most responsible for keeping fire rescue teams busy? "Instagram," deadpans Ronquilio. His crewmates laugh. "Can't believe everything on Instagram," Cravalho adds. Nearly twenty thousand posts are tagged #olomana on the social media app, showing hikers standing on or scaling the trail's promontories and knife-edge trails.
While Olomana is the deadliest, it's not Oahu's busiest spot for the fire rescue crews. The title, at least for the start of 2024, goes to Lulumahu Falls, a popular but slippery hike in Nuuanu, followed by the Lanikai Pillboxes in Kailua and then a tie between Diamond Head and Koko Head. Last year, when the fire department recorded 290 "high-angle rope rescues," Lulumahu Falls was again the busiest, but Diamond Head beat out Lanikai Pillboxes for second. In 2022, a year with 242 rope rescues, Diamond Head beat out Lanikai Pillboxes and Koko Head.
Kamakaala practices rescuing Johnson in a folding triangular harness nicknamed the “diaper,” a method for hoisting victims who have not suffered a spinal injury.
Honolulu Fire Department (HFD) rescue crews cover the entire island and its surrounding waters out to three miles. The division has two trucks, three watches and thirty rescuers total. (Other specialized divisions in the department include the helicopter team and the hazmat team.) To take the rescue exam, firemen must have worked in the department for at least four years and typically have had up to a year of specialized training. Those who pass go through an interview process and a rescue agility test. If HFD gets a call that someone's stuck somewhere they can't get themselves out of, they go. They've rescued people stuck between cement walls—a six-year-old boy whose leg was caught and a homeless man. A teenager running down the Koko Head stairs tripped, fell and blacked out; they flew the helicopter over, rappelled down and pulled him out. A Russian man was stuck on the Koolau ridge at night; HFD came and got him. More recently, Ramsey and Forges had to hike some five hours to retrieve a young man abandoned by his friends and escort him back down; he wasn't injured—just lost, scared and alone.
The danger to the rescuers is obvious. More than a year ago, Ramsey and Ronquilio rappelled from a helicopter to a steep slope on the third peak of Olomana. A hiker had fallen two hundred feet, and the firemen, to make sure they themselves wouldn't fall, tied up to trees on the slope as they tried to rescue the man, who was himself just a nudge away from another, longer drop. The man was "technically alive still," Ramsey says, but wouldn't be for long. Despite the danger, the effort to save a life—even when it doesn't work out, which sadly in this case it did not—is worth it for them.
Social media users who think with their thumbs often take to the internet to indict those whose poor decisions outdoors necessitate a rescue. They advocate for saving taxpayer dollars, for better allocating scarce resources and for the safety of the rescue personnel. For years, some Hawaii lawmakers have proposed charging negligent hikers for rescues, but fire officials oppose this, worrying that those in need will hesitate to call for help. The fire department, meanwhile, budgets for rescues. "We exist to do that job," Ramsey says. "We're happy to do our job—and find people alive. There are circumstances where maybe we'll feel this person really endangered themselves and other people," Ramsey says. "But that social media thing can be funny; it can be frustrating to read."
Ramsey reaches for the helicopter’s rope during a practice drill at Sandy Beach.
A knife-edge of a trail leads to the third peak of Olomana, on Oahu's Windward side. Olomana’s beauty has made it a popular destination on social media, but the danger of hiking to its second and third peaks has been underemphasized. Olomana has claimed six lives since 2011—so many that a warning sign was posted at the trailhead after recent fatalities, two in 2022 alone.
Not long after Snyder's rescue, three of the crew set out to rescue a young man stuck on a steeper cliff well above Snyder's landing. Forty mph winds blew out of the south, and the summit was ringed with clouds. "So one, you're on a trail that's not sanctioned, and two, it's one of the worst days, weatherwise, to go," Cravalho says. The helicopter, able to travel only so far, dropped the three men, who proceeded to climb a steep and risky section to reach the hiker. They realized they couldn't go back the way they'd come, so they hiked another three hours to get him out. "Those are the kinds of calls I would say that we were put in more of a risky situation than we needed to be," Cravalho says.
Snyder's saga has been turned into a public service announcement. Less than a week after his rescue, he walked, slowly, into a meeting to thank the firefighters who rescued him. He wore a purple lei, and despite the cane in his hand, his arm in a sling, the gash on his forehead and his eye swollen shut, he smiled. He told his story to some of the media in attendance and used the opportunity to discourage hikers from using Google Maps for trails, as he had. By the time Snyder was back home in California, he was contacted by the communications director for the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, who flew out to film a "lessons learned" PSA. One of those lessons: Don't hike alone. By March, Snyder was back to hiking and running. "Once I finally got to the chiropractor and straightened out my spine again, I slept quite well," he says. Vision in his right eye remains a concern.
Even with a century of hikers getting stuck and no dearth of cautionary tales, the problem might still be getting worse. "Ever since Ian's story came out, I feel like we've gone on that same trail more. Prior to his incident, we hadn't gone on the trail," Cravalho says, proving that curiosity can kill the copycat. "And I noticed, actually, a few of the calls that we've done are college-aged kids, and they stated to us that they've done it multiple times recently."
Johnson, one of the firefighters who first spotted Snyder alive, knows it's all part of the job. "We're not upset that we get put in those situations," he says. "If we don't figure it out, no one else will."
