For 59-year-old Jennifer Ho, getting lost on Mauna Kea for almost 24 hours wasn’t an ordeal despite spending the night in freezing temperatures, enduring whipping winds without gear, warm clothing or food and hiking 15 miles in rugged terrain.
"I was curious," said the Hilo woman Friday, a day after her adventure. "This is a challenge. ‘Are you going to make it?’ I wasn’t scared. I knew that people die on that mountain, but I had the skills. I grew up hiking."
Ho’s 300-yard walk back to the car at the 12,000-foot elevation at 1 p.m. Wednesday ended up a 15-mile detour all the way down the mountain and onto Saddle Road, a 7,000-foot descent.
Authorities said Ho was lucky she didn’t get injured.
Fire Battalion Chief Gerald Kosaki said, "There are a lot of hazards up there. Being up in that altitude is dangerous in itself because of the lack of oxygen or the lack of ability for the oxygen to get into the blood, so it creates a condition of hypoxia."
While on the mountain, Ho had nothing but two Ricola cough drops, a bottle of water and a bottle of snow, a camera she couldn’t operate and no cellphone when she got separated from the others while on a supposedly short hike with her husband, Nelson, friends and a renowned archaeologist from New Mexico to see an archaeological site.
A careful hiker, Ho was left behind as the rest of the group went ahead to an ancient adze quarry.
Her husband, Nelson Ho, an environmentalist and the head of the Hawaii island branch of the Sierra Club, is red-faced because he lost his wife and didn’t realize she was lost until the group returned to the car on Mauna Kea Access Road at about 5 p.m.
She was lagging behind, and when her husband waved at her, she thought he was going to turn back toward her, so she headed back to the car. But the group continued on.
The 59-year-old said she began walking and took the wrong trail, which led to the wrong cinder cone.
"What I was using for a marker was not the right one," she said.
Before heading out on the trail, Ho left her thermal jacket and cellphone, which ran out of power, in the car.
She was wearing a pair of silk long johns, nylon long johns, jeans, two shirts and a hooded jacket.
When Ho realized she wasn’t hitting the access road, she changed course and decided to blaze her own trail down the mountain to Saddle Road.
"I was not going to go left or right and get lost," she said.
"As I went further down the mountain, I realized I wasn’t going to be seen anyway," she said. "I thought I would be able to hike down the mountain by the evening to Saddle Road. I could see headlights."
"What drove me was seeing civilization," she said.
But the road was deceptively far.
She hadn’t done much hiking in recent years, just some swimming and gardening and occasional walking and working as a massage therapist.
But she picked her path carefully over rough lava fields, trying to avoid going up and down.
At one point Ho slipped with one foot while the other foot got caught, and she fell forward and hurt her hand.
She rationed her water. With only one full bottle, she fortuitously had collected snow in another bottle for a cultural practitioner friend who uses snow water.
"That became very critical for me," she said.
"I never got altitude sickness," she added, but as she moved down the mountain, she found she could move more quickly.
As she hit the tree line, she saw depressions where goats slept.
"I had this fantasy it’s going to be all right," she said.
It was still light, so rather than bed down at that point, she kept hiking.
But at dusk, when the sky had turned purple, she could no longer safely see.
So she found a "soft little place. I made this little nest. I’m not the kind of person who would snuggle into a bunch of weeds."
Ho picked some dry grass, stuffed it into a canvas bag, found a dead tree with lots of grass growing around it and tried to keep warm. Her husband estimates she was at the 7,000- to 8,000-foot elevation.
"When the moon went down, it became really windy," she said. "First it was just cold. Then the winds came up and it became noisy … coming from every direction."
She couldn’t stop shivering and kept picking up her legs and shaking them to get warm.
Nelson Ho said perhaps she was experiencing the onset of hypothermia.
Once it became light, she continued her descent.
After seeing helicopters flying over, flapping her arms, she figured, "if I’m going to wait for you to find me, I’m going to die."
When she finally reached the bottom, she had to scale two fences — one 7 feet high — and climbed under a third.
Two passers-by, Ryan Williams and Luis Colon, picked her up at about noon Thursday and drove her home to Hilo.
She called 911 on the way home. She also tried to call her husband, but his cellphone wasn’t working.
She is appreciative to everyone who worked to rescue her.
But she reminded her husband, "Sierra Club has a thing: You don’t hike faster than the slowest person, and always stay in visual contact. He feels properly chastened."
