ISBN: 0-9710888-9-6

The following review was contributed by: Sue Vogan:  To read more of Sue's reviews Click Here

This book is a chronicle of how one hiker dealt with disaster, despair, hope and recovery. Amy Racina falls sixty feet during a solo hike "deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range of Northern California." and lives to tell about it.

Angels In The Wilderness is the extraordinary recounting of how this remarkable woman kept herself alive by "grit, determination, and sheer willpower." The dedication is to her three angels, Jake, Leslie, and Walter -- and to the angel in each of us.

August 4, 2003 -- "so this is how it ends." Amy remembers "the seconds of the free-fall with brutal clarity." One moment she was hiking, setting one foot in front of the other, the next minute, the ground gives way. It was as if she had jumped from a plane -- with no parachute. "There was no bouncing, no sliding, no scrambling. No trees reached out their branches." There was "no cushioning" and no way to stop the decent. She doesn't even have time to pray. As she makes contact with the rock slab, she feels nothing and her world goes gray.

Amy was an experienced hiker and had been on the trail for two-weeks. She knew how to make her way around loose rocks and knew better than to look down (vertigo). "In less than a heartbeat" she was betrayed by the landscape that had allowed her to plummet into a small ravine. When she comes to, she realizes that she is seriously injured. On top of this, she cannot walk the twenty-five miles to the nearest trailhead, she hasn't a cell phone, her family isn't expecting her home for almost another week, and she left the regular path that hikers would be inclined to follow so another hiker would be unlikely to find her. She is alone.

Among the songbirds and clean, fresh air, Racina reflects how it all got started -- her love of the mountains. It all started at the age of sixteen when Amy's father drove his family over 3,000 miles to hike. Amy and her brother, thirteen-year-old Daniel, are pictured on their first backpack in 1972. She recalls that experience and how her muscles ached, her shoulders could barely support the backpack, and how her family felt about overcoming odds --they thought of it as "snatching victory from the jaws of defeat." From this, Amy gathered that she "had to regard hardship as a necessary enhancement to the euphoria of success." She also learned never to give up.

Racina's 17-day trip was well planned. She would hike each day -- anywhere from a little over four to over sixteen miles. She "fairly drooled in anticipation." As she made her way through the itinerary, she was overjoyed. Amy stopped often to take in the panoramas, the "cluster of tiny flowers," and "a lizard doing push-ups on a sunny rock." Days one through eleven are everything and more Amy wanted from her travels.

Day twelve starts out as "a glorious day." To warm her, there's a "scalding cup of coffee," a "cup of oatmeal with raisins and cashews" and a little "coconut milk" that she has saved for a "special morning." "Life is perfect."

The rain from the evening before has not hampered Amy. She laid her wet things on a rock slab to dry in the morning sun as she packed up her belongings. Sometime into the hike, Racina lost the trail, but she isn't too concerned. However, it was an "unnecessary risk when hiking alone." She felt sure she would pick up the trail again, but in the meantime, Amy was enjoying the unscarred "by heavy human footprints or littered with careless debris." With one step, "everything changes."

As the sun is setting, Racina explores the damages from her fall. She ignores "the gaping wound that used to be a knee, the broken nose, and the snapped-off tooth for now." Amy is in pain. She considers herself fortunate -- no apparent harm to her skull, internal organs, spine, or hands. She can still wiggle her toes, but finds she can't use her legs. Later, she will learn that she has broken her left hip in several places. She is shaking uncontrollably, realizing that she is "going into shock." She makes a cup of instant chicken soup, pulls her sleeping bag over herself, and passes into "merciful unconsciousness."

Racina doesn't believe she will make it out of the ravine alive. She thinks about dying here -- in the mountains she loves. She finds approval with this, knowing that her bones will crumble into dust and "contribute to new cycles of life."

Amputation, infection, delirium and coma crosses Racina's list of complications. She contemplates her bones being found years later. Would they be able to find out who she had been? She speaks with God and decides she wants to live.

It's thirty-eight degrees and 5:25 in the morning. She realizes that it is unacceptable to "merely sit and wait." Her long journey back, with the help of her wilderness angels, includes the fact that she has no health insurance and is afraid that she will be refused medical treatment. But, her friends have set up a Help-Amy fund, another friend turns her home into a recovery room, and potluck dishes come from everywhere. The road back is filled with many firsts -- including fear, doubt, and joy.

In the end, Racina offers readers survival tools for physical survival. Number four on the list is "never give up." Twenty-one months later, Amy's friends have gone back to their lives and Amy has gone back to the mountains.

Roads End is not the end of the road after all. It is a new start." Amy claims that this story is finished, but that the rest of her life is just beginning.

Not all journeys have sixty-foot free-falls, but there are usually bumps along the trail. This is a book for whatever journey you may be on at any point in your life.