A 58-year-old man from Singapore who was visiting the Adirondack Mountains in New York went missing for three nights last month.
He was fortunately found and rescued by forest rangers on June 22, telling them he may not have survived a fourth night alone at Dix Pond Swamp, where he was found.
Andrew Lewis and Jamison Martin, forest rangers with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, did not name the Singaporean man, only mentioning that he is a professor who recently resigned from his job.
The Adirondack Daily Enterprise reported the rangers as saying that the man drank swamp water in order to survive.
When they found him, his face was covered in insect bites and his clothes were torn. Moreover, he was found in hypothermic conditions.
The man had told his wife he wanted to spend a week in the Adirondack Mountains, telling her he would hike five mountain peaks in one day.
After flying into the John F. Kennedy International Airport, he rented an SUV and drove to the mountains.
But by June 22, the man’s wife made an emergency call to say she had not heard from her husband since June 19, when he had planned in hiking the Dix Range, which is not an easy path to climb.
Based on messages from the man to his wife via Whatsapp, as well as his logged progress on Strava, a map app, it showed that the Singaporean man had successfully made it to the range’s five peaks.
The forest rangers found the man’s rental vehicle and saw from the trail register that he had signed in, but had never signed out.
They began searching for him, interviewing people on the trail who had seen the Singaporean, some of who told them he had looked very tired.
The rangers later determined that the man had left the last summit, Macomb, at around 7 pm, after he had hiked for at least 12 hours, and then was likely to have lost the trail later that night.
The Singaporean then entered “one of the most brutal swamps you could get stuck in,” one of the rangers said, and at times was knee-deep in it.
A ten-man rescue team looked for the man and called his name, but weather conditions forced them to stop for a while.
When the search resumed, one ranger, Jason Scott, was looking for the man at the south side of the Dix Pond swamp, calling out his name.
The Singaporean man answered.
“When Scott eventually approached the man, his clothes were shredded, his shoes were falling apart and his face was covered in bug bites and scratches from thrashing through the trees. He was hypothermic and roughly two miles from the trail,” The Adirondack Daily Enterprise reported.
He thought he would not have been able to “make it through the night” if he had not been found, he told the rangers.
He also said that he rationed whatever food and water he had in order to survive, but suffered from hallucinations and severe lapses of memory from being nutritionally deprived.
The man also had to face rough weather conditions—rainy days and cold nights.
Fortunately, after the man was given a medical examination, dry clothes, food and water, he was pronounced fit to drive to a hotel.
“He told his wife that he was never going to hike that mountain again,” one of the rangers said.
/TISG