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Two hikers have been found dead on California’s Mount Whitney after they climbed the highest mountain in the lower 48 states and never returned to camp.
The Inyo County Sheriff’s Department responded to a call about two overdue hikers on May 7 around 8.30pm PST from a person who had been hiking with the pair and had waited for them at their base camp.
The department’s search and rescue team immediately launched a search of the 14,505ft mountain using a helicopter and foot teams. Authorities later recovered their bodies.
The two have been identified as 28-year-old Andrew Niziol and Patty Bolan, 29, by the neighbouring Tulare County Sheriff’s Department, according to The Sacramento Bee.
The pair had intended to descend from the “Notch”, a critical point of the climb and ski or snowboard down the right side of the mountain to Upper Boy Scout Lake, where they had set up their camp.
The pair appeared to be dating, according to Instagram posts from their accounts. In one post, Niziol described how the couple had climbed Mount Shasta days before heading to Mount Whitney.
“This is the kind of living I’ve dreamed about for 15 years,” Niziol wrote in a post under a photo of him and Bolan. “I’ve finally surrounded myself with people to share these types of experiences with and I couldn’t be more thankful.”
A spokesperson for the Tulare County Sheriff-Coroner’s Office said that the couple’s bodies are currently in their custody and examinations are scheduled for next week.
Officials do not currently have a preliminary manner of death for the two.
The mountain has many potential natural hazards, according to the US Forest Service. Those include, high altitude, steep terrain, snow and ice on the trail, high winds, lightning storms and severe winter weather.
According to the US Forest Service, conditions on the mountain currently include patches of snow, with a part of a trail becoming almost completely covered in snow.
Mount Whitney is the eleventh-highest peak in the US, with the top ten all located in Alaska. It sits between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Inyo National Forest, around four hours north of Los Angeles.
