Instead of birds chirping, Lukas McClish woke up to two or three black hummingbirds trying to get into his hair every morning while he spent ten days lost in the woods near the Santa Cruz Mountains.
McClish, a 34-year-old man from Boulder Creek, was reported missing on June 16 after he was last seen on June 11. While he was lost, McClish said in an interview this week, he found out he had lost a large amount of weight after subsisting on mostly water while he was lost in the woods. He also said he observed the changes to the natural area after a severe fire in 2020.
“I got to experience there being no bugs by the creek, which is really rare. There’s no animals, even though you’re out in nature. You didn’t hear any birds during the day, which was really strange,” McClish said. “It was just really interesting.”
After a combined effort from the community and four government agencies, he was found on June 20 and reunited with his family, said Ashley Keehn, a spokesperson for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.
McClish said he works a variety of jobs, usually helping people with issues on their properties. The morning of June 11, McClish was waiting for a dump trailer to take some trash out of a client’s house. Seeing that the trailer wasn’t coming, he decided to go for a stroll through the woods in the client’s backyard to his next job in Brookdale.
While on the hike, McClish made a wrong turn and ended up getting lost in an area that was deeply scarred by the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires.
He recalled that the area was almost unrecognizable, with redwood trees that could normally withstand the heat instead burned up and gone. McClish said he had hiked in the area before, and he was initially confident that he would make it to his destination.
However, established roads and trails and other landmarks were erased by the fire, which led to his “misaligned bearings,” he said. For the last three days before his rescue, he stayed in an area where Foreman Creek converged with another creek to form a river, which was where he was rescued. He said it was one of the few landmarks he knew.
“The land was reset, it’s barren, it’s not like a dark rich soil, it’s light brown, like a moonscape,” McClish said.
By the end of the first day, McClish said he knew he was lost, but he didn’t feel panicked. While he realized he was lost, he said he enjoyed seeing the nature while he followed a pipeline to a water treatment facility. He said it was interesting to see where the water came out of the ground, noting that some streams would start where ground water spilled out over some rocks or come out of a spring box before they turned into rivers.
“I’ve been in some gnarly terrain, but I didn’t think there was terrain like that in my backyard, but there was,” McClish said.
McClish …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
