He’d been lost for five days in the White Mountains when he limped to the top of a hill, pointing his toes outward to relieve the pressure on his bloody heels. Ron Bolen hoped to catch sight of a U.S. Forest Service road. That night, when the midsummer sun relented, he planned to make one last attempt at escaping Boundary Peak Wilderness.
The 57-year-old assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma had arrived July 13 intending to do a day hike, part of his new hobby of scaling the tallest points in states he visited. Boundary Peak was Nevada’s contribution. He’d parked his silver Toyota 4Runner at a trailhead inside Inyo National Forest, a park spanning the eastern Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains that straddle the California border.