The Boston Globe reported the story of a group of strangers banding together to save the life of a man who slipped and fell on a treacherous hiking trail. This is a counterpoint to the many daily stories of apathy, cruelty, indifference, and evil.
It was a casual remark exchanged among hikers on Mount Monadnock’s White Dot Trail last Thursday: “Isn’t this a beautiful day to be alive?”
But the words stuck with Gary Cohen.
Just a short while later, the 63-year-old Boston man would slip and fall on his descent from the mountain’s summit, taking a treacherous slide headfirst into a boulder. Dazed and bloodied, Cohen soon found himself on a stretcher, being carried down the steep and rugged trail by a ragtag group of volunteers and park rangers.
And all he could think about was that he was lucky to be alive.
In southwest New Hampshire, Mount Monadnock is said to be one of the most frequently climbed mountains in the world, drawing tens of thousands of hikers each year to its 3,165 foot summit. But as the fraught rescue of Cohen last week makes clear, even a well-trodden day hike can turn dangerous.
The conditions on Monadnock could not have been more pristine on the afternoon of June 30, a cool breeze offering a reprieve from the bright sun and the skies were so clear at the summit that the Boston skyline 75 miles away was etched on the horizon.
Cohen, a retired tech entrepreneur and dedicated user of the AllTrails app, had back surgery several years ago and was gradually increasing the distance and elevation of his outings. He was nothing if not prepared, carrying, as always, a first aid kit and GPS tracking device.

The group that came together to rescue hiker Gary Cohen.MAULLY SHAH
Monadnock was new to him but was well within his capabilities.
Still, Cohen could not have anticipated what would happen to him once he made the summitand then headed back down. Just 15 minutes into his descent, he lost his footing on a slope, got spun around, and fell headfirst, his skull thudding into the rocks 10 to 20 feet below.
The blood began flowing instantly.
Cohen’s first bit of luck was that his fall was witnessed by 17-year-old Neil Bennett. The teenager was on the mountain with his girlfriend and his mother, Maully Shah, a pediatric cardiologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Shah was snapping photos of the pair when Bennett saw the hiker go down.
“He immediately started yelling, ‘Help me, help me,’ so I knew he was pretty badly hurt,” Bennett said.
Shah, 56, and her son take a trip to the region annually, and together they have climbed Monadnock for a decade now, since Bennett was just a boy.
For all that experience, Bennett said, “I’ve never seen anything like that on Mount Monadnock before.”
Once Shah heard the cries for help and her son’s shouts, she rushed to Cohen, who was splayed on the ground, blood streaming from his head and splattered on the surrounding rocks. He was unable to move his neck and told Shah he feared potential paralysis.
Once she checked Cohen’s breathing and determined he was fully conscious, Shah was confident he was not in imminent danger. She cleaned and bandaged the “good-sized gash” at the back of his head. To keep Cohen’s neck stable, they fashioned shirts into a makeshift cervical collar.

The group who helped rescue Gary Cohen smiled on Mount Monadnock and Cohen gave a thumbs up.MAULLY SHAH
By that time, two others hikers who also work in the medical field had joined in to help: Amanda Herd Wilson, a physician assistant, and Alicia Lipton Lheureux, a psychiatric nurse. With a 911 call placed, they awaited the arrival of park rangers, who assisted in the rescue effort along with conservation officers from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Departmentand search-and-rescue volunteers.
With two rangers on the scene, the small group loaded Cohen onto a collapsible stretcher by sliding a thin thermal blanket underneath him and gently lifting him up. Then they began an hours-long journey over exposed rock ledges and thick mixed woods. The destination: a helicopter landing zone on the mountain, where a Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team was to meet them to transport Cohen to Elliot Hospital in Manchester for treatment.
“It was a treacherous descent,” Shah said, recalling the balancing act of everyone trying to keep their footing while also checking on Cohen. The sun beat down on their backs and their drinking water was quickly depleting.
For much of the trek, the group only numbered about eight people, including the two rangers — a far cry from the 18 or so volunteers rangers say would be ideal for such a rescue. More hikers along the trail eventually offered to help, and about halfway down, they were met by additional rescue staff. Others included a college student from Northeastern University and a father with his young kids in tow.
Despite his evident pain, Cohen remained upbeat and brave throughout — often asking how the team was holding up, Shah said. He later credited the mother-son duo and all the others as being “angels among us.”
1:24
After nearly two decades as a physician, Shah is familiar with “sort of high-drama situations,” but the makeshift “trauma center in the mountain” was hardly comparable to a hospital setting. Their efforts were punctuated by moments of humor and camaraderie, with people quietly taking over more strenuous tasks like lifting when it was apparent another was struggling with the weight.
“The sort of trail magic that happens where strangers came together in a very critical situation,” Shah said. “This was not assigned to us. We just happened to be there. It actually got in the way of everyone’s day, but everyone went home probably with the best feeling in their heart because they helped a human being.”
About 15 minutes after the band of hikers made it to the landing zone, the helicopter touched down. Bennett said the moment Cohen was lifted into the aircraft and flown to safety is one he will remember “for the rest of my life.”
Also good news, Huffpo reports that Biden won’t be nominating the anti-abortion judge in Ky.
Public pressure works. If we don’t fight for democracy, we lose it.
Wonderful
It wasn’t public pressure that did it. It was because Republicans opposed the nomination. “President Joe Biden no longer plans to nominate a Republican who has defended abortion restrictions to become a federal judge in Kentucky because Republican Senator Rand Paul of that state has declined to support him, the White House said on Friday.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-abandons-plan-nominate-anti-abortion-judge-kentucky-2022-07-15/
When are you guys going to understand that the Democrats don’t work for you? They, along with their esteemed colleagues in the Republican party, work for their donors.
Yep….no blue slip from Rand Paul, therefore no nomination. As much as I don’t like Rand Paul, he finally did something that was respectable.
Or, the Democrats accepted the risk of a finesse, forcing Rand between a rock and a hard place. His choices- lose the religious right vote or his reputation as a libertarian.
On the whole, Kentuckians are a fiercely independent people.
When will you learn that Putin isn’t fighting Ukraine Nazis, he is bombing the heck out of hospitals and homes, laying cities to ruins and killing children and other civilians? If Israel did that, you would be up in arms but you give Putin a pass – is it because Ukraine has a Jewish leader that you don’t mind the destruction of their country and the murder of their people?
When are you going to understand that the REPUBLICANS don’t work for you but the Democrats do? The deal Biden made with McConnell was bad, but there was a purpose – to get all the progressive federal appointments that were being held up done as a trade off.
The above comment is simply a rehash of the same crap this person posted throughout 2016 about how it didn’t matter whether a Democrat or Republican appointed the Supreme Court Justice to fill an open seat when the Supreme Court was tied 4-4. We heard her spewing the same lies about how there was no difference to justify her sociopathic hatred of the Dems and her never ending posts about how Trump was perfectly normal and being victimized by the evil Dems and should never be impeached.
Why didn’t Rand Paul want this judge? Anyone who believes it is for “respectable” reasons is naive. Maybe this guy wasn’t neo-fascist enough.
Biden is not a knee jerk Republican – he is a Democratic president trying to negotiate with a Senate tied 50-50.
Instead of bashing “the evil Dems”, work to elect alot MORE Democrats so that Joe Manchin no longer has power.
Or do what you did in 2016 and help elect more far right Republicans. Easy for those who are white and not Jewish or Muslim to not be very concerned about the far right takeover of our country. You are complicit.
To corroborate my speculation above (4:30) about a Dem-created finesse- Kentucky ranks 37th in percent of Catholics. Anti-abortion zealots are Catholic. The position is relatively new for evangelicals as Frank Shaeffer reported recently. For those who don’t know, on the whole, Kentuckians’ independent streak makes them more opposed to government intrusion than to Catholic anti-woman dogma.
Both Democratic strategists and Rand Paul have a great deal of demographic and socio-cultural data to make political decisions.
correction- than receptive to Catholic anti-woman dogma.
I used to have a house about a mile from Mt. Monadnock. I would put my daughter in a backpack and carry her up and down the mountain, in addition to climbing it myself, solo and with others, all the time. A beautiful place. Thanks for sharing this lovely story, Diane.
Long ago, I worked as a teacher at an environmental ed Center on Otter Lake in Greenfield, NH, which is nearby. We used to go to a coffee house in Peterborough to listen to folk musicians like Bill Staines, Greg Brown and others.
Haaa! I had a house in Peterborough (what a lovely town) and went to that coffeehouse all the time. There might have been nights when we were both in the audience! My home was across the street from the MacDowell Writer’s Colony. I was within easy walking distance from a beaver dam that my kid and I used to go visit regularly. There was great hiking from my front door when, that is, the idiots weren’t out hunting and shooting at everything that moved.
Boi was there in the Fall of 1979.
The environmental ed Center was called Otter Lake Conservation school (at Camp Union, which I think is an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp) . The environmental ed Center operated for around thirty years and closed down in the late 90’s
Why did you move from NH to Florida, by the way?
The winner !!!!!
I moved from NH to MA to VA to FL. Work.
Gary Cohen was both unlucky (that he fell and lost his footing) and extremely lucky that there were so many great and capable people to take him down the mountain to safety and ultimately a hospital. Upon further reading, I found out that he does not have any lasting injuries and that he should be able to continue with his hiking as soon as he is completely healed. Definitely a hopeful and uplifting story.
It is odd how some of our worst experiences become our best memories. Usually because of how people respond in times when humanity is essential.
Good thing he wasn’t climbing Everest, cuz people would have just left him to die.
To be fair, some of them deserve it, or at the very least, are asking for it. It’s a cesspool of rich folks who want to check something off the bucket list, environmental consequences be damned.
https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/too-many-tourists/
Not sure I’d go so far as to say they deserve it, but I’d definitely agree many ask for it.there are lots of folks up there who know nothing at all about high altitude mountaineering or even mountaineering and climbing in general. They pay their $100k to get dragged up and down the mountain by guides — and sherpas who carry all their crap.
Everest has basically become a zoo and a trash heap.
I used to do mountaineering (though lower altitudeaaltitude) I’m not even sure what the fascination is with Everest other than to be able to say “I climbed the tallest mountain
What a beautiful story that gives us hope. Thank you, Diane.
Stories like these – not just “feel good” stories but events and actions that deem attention – are fortunately in the news.
What is not in the news are the similar RESCUE stories most will never know or see – stories where TEACHERS and schools rescue children!
Not just “support” but rescued. So, to digress from the beautiful story, Diane, if I can add…
Rescued? Thank you TEACHERS!
And there are teachers! They rescue students every day in ways that no one will ever know. I’m talking well beyond what we do know is they buy supplies to make their rooms inviting and comforting or show up at the soccer game (all wonderful, too). I’m talking about the actions known to few that in that moment is a RESCUE for a child.
They deliver the learning packet or ipad or bag of a week’s lunches to the front door in the neighborhood they were cautioned not to go to.
They get or give hug the child needs when the child needs a hug.
They spend a Saturday in the hot school gym to give out backpacks and meals.
They randomly call the parent or guardian just to say hi and “I am so glad your child is in my class! S/he is a wonderful student.” (Even the child who is “a challenge” some days).
They reduce the heat in the parent meeting because the parent realizes the teacher really knows and likes their kid.
They garner trust with parents in a system that some parents don’t trust or whose memories of school have them on the defensive from day
They advocate for the student who has no one there to advocate for them – to attend the field trip, to put them in the honors class, to say, “S/he can have lunch with me” and in all kinds of meetings where a student or students need a voice
They whisper stories and mouth the words to songs during the dreadful intruder drill.
They see the picture the child drew and tells gets the counselor and see the bruises and make the hotline call.
They listened in confidence (at least until it was illegal for a teacher or counselor to listen to a student)
They attend the funeral because their students will be attending, too.
What they do NOT deserve is the politician’s response that teachers are paid too much already. That the hug could be grooming. That the home visit is the government intruding into private lives (even though they spew that it’s ok for them to control a woman’s body). That government is enabling and the sickening bootstraps argument. That the teacher let the child with two mommies make a Valentine’s card.
And, add to the rescuing the services and supports built in to the schools (services the right wants to bring down, as well). McKinney-Vento is policy. There are requirements. There are those schools and districts that go far beyond taking care of a family that is homeless with no recognition or fanfare. Working with utility companies, clothing, taken to a safe house shelter. (And homeless, by definition, is not (only) the person sleeping in the park. Ask your local urban district what percentage of students are homeless. It will shock you. AND, they are being served – and rescued.
Maybe these don’t parallel being stuck injured on the side of a mountain. And, there are some people who wouldn’t respond to the call.
But to the five-year old who sees their teacher through the window during covid or the 16-year old who hears, “S/he belongs in your AP class!” and the other examples – that’s rescuing.
Thank you for reminding us that teachers save lives every day.
Nonteachers have little notion how common this stuff is. Middle school and high school are really volatile times for kids, emotionally. Teachers often make the difference, literally, between life and death for kids.
Well said, thank you.
Hold the comet for a day .
Haaa!
Comets cause extinction events on their own schedule and don’t give a damn about feel good stories.
And black holes are even less empathetic than comets.
People might as well face reality: the universe is completely apathetic toward human problems.
And even apathetic toward God’s problems with humans.
Rugged landscapes bring out the best in people. I lived in Breckenridge for years, and later Frisco, both in Summit County, Colorado.
When something bad happens – a fire, a fall, someone lost or hurt on one of the many mountains, the locals come out in droves. The fire departments are volunteer, and extremely proficient. People in the backwoods will come to anyone’s aid.
This is community. No one asks who you voted for, nor do they care. If something goes wrong, folks come out of the woodwork to help put it right. I’d never lived anywhere like that.
More of this!
I lived in Utah for 15 years and did a lot of hiking and Backcountry skiing.
And i always asked who people voted for before helping them in the Backcountry. I left a lot of Republicans to die along the trails.
And never felt bad about it.
I always figured “this guy might some day be President and do all kinds of damage. I’ll be damned if I’ll help him”
ROFLMSAO!
Based on voting trends, you didn’t leave enough of them.
It’s Utah.
I left all of them that I encountered.
The problem is that there just weren’t enough of them out hiking around.
It’s easy enough for even a young person with great balance to lose his or her footing amid the scree, or talus, just past the timberline. So glad that there were qualified people there to help him!!!
There is a particularly grim true story of s fellow who wawas walking across a boulder field in the Wind River mountains of Wyoming and got pinned between two boulders when they moved when he was crossing them. He spent a week trapped like that before he sec umbed to lack of water.
I spent many a backpacking trip in those very mountains and had many experiences of giant holders moving underfoot. IyI had also hiked the very drainage where he got trapped. It was a remote , seldom visited drainage which is why no one found him until after he died.
!!!!!!!
Here’s a link to the story
https://www.backpacker.com/trips/trapped-the-mike-turner-story/
I figure I couldn’t let Diane’s good news go unanswered.
People might start thinking that the world is not as bad as it seems.
And if God didn’t care enough to save one of Her apostles –a minister trapped between two boulders– from a brutal weeklong death by thirst, what chance in Hell do the rest of us have?
Another one: a 25-yr-old man in Lafayette, IN was driving by a burning house, stopped his car, & ran in to save the lives of all the children inside (there were 5 or 6). This was on our local Chicago news, as well as NBC Nightly News. Would everyone have such stamina & courage!
That is beautiful!
And here’s a story from Ohio, where a woman saved a family by alerting them that their garage was on fire:
Inspiring Story
Staying in Spain, my husband fell and broke his hip. We needed an ambulance, but I don’t speak Spanish. A waiter in the restaurant below us called the ambulance and stayed with me until it came. Four days later, when my husband was discharged from the hospital, and we had no way to get him up to our second-floor apartment, two waiters from the same restaurant carried him up three flights of stairs. No words can describe such kindness or thank such generosity of spirit.
Elaine H.