Angels in the Wilderness: The True Story of One Woman's Survival Against All Odds

This extraordinary tale is one of the very few wilderness survival epics. Most solo hikers who suffer severe injury off trail do not make it out. Their story is told, if at all, on tattered scraps of paper found on their body. Amy Racina fell sixty feet onto granite, both legs were broken, a hip and kneecap were fractured, and she had open wounds. Once I got started on this book, I hated to put it down. This is the kind of thing every hiker pushes to the back of their mind. "So there's no trail, I've done this lots of times. I'm always careful, so I'll be fine". Amy wasn't fine. The book starts with the fall. The first sentence is "So this is how it ends." as she thinks she is going to die. The next two chapters give you the background - how she grew up a hiker, and how she was on this "trip of a lifetime" when she fell. I'm following along, nodding my head as she describes the backcountry and plans her trip, but I'm tense knowing what is to come. After the fall, she decides to try to get down the canyon where she should hit a trail. She can move a few yards a day, sometimes calling for help. At maybe a day from death, someone hears her and the rescue begins. This is enough already for a good book, but there is a whole second part of this story that also demands your attention. It took a large support system of friends, and an immense amount of painful and exhausting physical therapy - the Repairing Amy part. Amy is now out backpacking again. We have a friend who has been going through physical therapy for a stroke for a couple of years, and this book made me realize that I really didn't have a clue about what she was going through. For me as a backpacker, the drama of the hiking story is the compelling reason to read the book, but I recommend it to anyone who is encountering the experience of repairing the body through extensive physical therapy. It is very, very difficult, but it can be done.

Award-winning graphic artist Amy Racina went on her first backpacking trip with her family at age sixteen. This was the beginning of a life-long love affair. As an adult she found herself often "suffused with longing to be in the mountains as I make my way through ordinary life." Amy made it a custom to spend some time alone in the wilderness each year, and in the summer of 2003 she decided to make her "trip of a lifetime" through some of the roughest, most inaccessible, and most staggeringly beautiful terrain of the Sierra Mountains. But in the far flung reaches of the Sierras, Amy lost her trail, and then with one life-changing step, fell over sixty feet onto a harsh slab of rock, breaking numerous bones, smashing her nose, and sustaining severe bruises all over her body. She was already off trail and had not seen another human being in two full days. This is the remarkable story of how she survived for four days, unable to stand and barely able to move, how she was rescued by three passing "angels" who heard her calls for help-and how she recovered and returned to her beloved mountains less than two years later. More than the story itself, the writing here is suffused with glowing honesty and wonder, bracing as mountain air. "'Please let me live. Please help me,' I pray. . . . I am led to remember that eventually all humankind will die. . . . I feel the quality of the sacred in the very desperation of my situation." The "quality of the sacred" is precisely what characterizes this courageous and oddly tender tale. -- Marc Polonsky for the FEARLESS REVIEWS

Angles In The Wilderness: The True Story Of One Woman's Survival Agains All Odds is the biographical story of how heroine and author Amy Racina became lost in deep wilderness and faced a truly life-threatening situation. After falling sixty feet onto a granite boulder during a solo hike in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range of Northern California, she kept herself alive through sheer determination. Dragging herself by her hands despite exhaustion and pain, she survived four days until her cries were heard by another hiker and she was airlifted out of the canyon. Angels In The Wilderness was written shortly after her miraculous survival, and includes black-and-white photographs as well as quotes from a journal she kept while hiking the trail. A profound true story of human courage and the will to live.

Thank you Amy for coming back to share your awesome story and your incredible inspiration. You are truly an amazing spirited woman!

Just as an adventure story it is exciting reading. As a soul-examination in the face of death it is enlightening reading. As an exploration of life versus risk it is intriguing reading. And she is a writer with a superb way with words, a great pleasure to read. You will want to read this book more than once.