Kathryn McKee knows how to prepare for subzero conditions. Trained in high-altitude and winter conditions, she made sure to bring lights, snowshoes, emergency gear, and extra battery packs for her hike in the White Mountains last weekend.
But after a long day traversing some of the highest points of the Presidentials, she and her hiking partner found themselves snowed in at 5,000 feet up with night falling.
In fear for their lives, they called 911 and waited for rescue, hardly believing their predicament.
“We thought, ‘Is this really happening to us?’ ” McKee said.
For nearly eight hours, McKee, 51, and her partner, Beata Lelacheur, 54, huddled in the darkness, waiting for a search team to make its way through subzero temperatures and sustained winds of 50 to 60 miles per hour.
McKee is back home in Southborough after a brief stay in the hospital. Even now, she still has no feeling in four of her fingers, but realizes she could have been in far worse shape.
“It was touch-and-go for a bit there,” she said Wednesday.
McKee considers herself an experienced hiker. She is a member of the Worcester chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club and has attended countless trainings on high-altitude backpacking and cold weather safety protocols.
“We see the press releases of other hikers being rescued,” she said. “But we try to be prepared.”
The pair’s harrowing experience showed how quickly events can go awry in Mount Washington’s forbidding climate.
“We just spent so much time trying to find our way that it got dark,” she said. “That’s when conditions get scary, because you can’t see. Everything looks like a cairn or stick and you’re not sure which is which.”
The pair set out for the Jewell Trail around 7 a.m. on a hike of roughly 13 miles up nearby Mount Jefferson and Mount Monroe. Aside from a breeze in the afternoon, it was a “bluebird day,” McKee said.
“Everyone who hikes above the tree line is used to breeze, that’s not a problem at all,” she said. “It was just later when the winds picked up and the snow came and it was dark. So it was only after sunset that the conditions worsened.”
At 5:23 p.m., with daylight fast fading, she sent her husband a text message that they had lost the trail above the tree line, where it is only marked by stone cairns. She assured him they were “still OK” and were on their way down.
Then the darkness fell and the wind picked up. What had been an afternoon breeze turned into sustained winds, with gusts upward of 60 miles per hour, blowing snow into deep drifts. Temperatures at the summit dropped to -2 degrees, according to wildlife officials.
At 5:52 p.m., she texted him again: “We may need assistance. Stand by.”
The two then called 911. Officials from the state’s fish and game department were notified shortly after 6 p.m. and were able to contact the hikers by phone.
Over multiple calls, conservation officers tried to guide the two hikers down the mountain. Rescuers said that based on their GPS coordinates that put them near the upper end of the Jewell Trail, below the summit of Mount Clay, they were only 34 feet off the trail. But they were unable to follow it for long because it had been covered by blowing snow.
So they fought their way through the harsh weather and precarious “spruce traps,” holes in the snow underneath trees.
“When you fall in those spruce traps, there’s other little spruce limbs and all sorts of things that can pierce you,” she said. “They pierce your head, they can pierce your leg. So if we had an injury like that up there, we would have definitely not made it. We wouldn’t have been able to care for ourselves, even with our first aid items, because of those conditions.”
As things got worse, they realized they had a choice: wait for rescue or keep moving and potentially die trying, McKee said.
“We were like, ‘I don’t think this is safe to continue,‘ ” she said. “And it’s not safe to drag people out to save you, either. But it was that moment of difficulty — we had to make a decision.”
Around 8:30 p.m., the two huddled in the snow to keep warm and made the hard decision to ask wildlife officials to send help.
“It was difficult to accept,” she said. “If we call [for rescue], we are putting people at risk.”
While rescuers prepared to ascend the mountain, McKee and Lelacheur hunkered down. They broke out full-body emergency weather bags and other gear to keep them warm.
But McKee said the two quickly lost dexterity in their fingers, which made any sort of adjustment extremely difficult.
“I couldn’t open the first aid kit,” she said. “I couldn’t find the emergency blanket. It was there [in my pack], I just couldn’t find it.”
Half-buried in the snow, they wiggled their fingers and toes to stay warm and tried to keep each other focused and alert.
It wasn’t easy to keep the situation light, either.
“I tried to ask [Beata] where she wanted to go, if she could go anywhere,” McKee said. “I don’t think she was interested in having that conversation at that moment.”
Rescue crews found the hikers shortly before 2 a.m., nearly three hours into their search and more than five hours after the hikers called for rescue.
Both were suffering from “cold-weather injuries,” wildlife officials said, and McKee was taken to Littleton Regional Hospital for treatment.
Wildlife officials said that even with McKee and Lelacheur’s preparation and winter hiking experience, “unforeseen conditions” made the situation life-threatening.
“Had they not had the amount of gear that they had with them, it is unlikely that they would have survived,” Sergeant Matthew Holmes, a spokesperson for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, said in a statement.
McKee agreed and said she and her hiking partner were extremely grateful for the efforts of rescuers.
“I can’t say enough for them,” she said. “They put their lives at risk to save ours.”
McKee said the harsh experience only underscored the fact that as important as preparedness is, it’s still not a guarantee of safety.
“Don’t just be an ego-driven person that thinks they can conquer anything,” she said. “I consider myself a strong person. But I couldn’t will my fingers to move [up there]. It’s not about willpower.”
Camilo Fonseca can be reached at camilo.fonseca@globe.com. Follow him on X @fonseca_esq and on Instagram @camilo_fonseca.reports.