Boys Hike for Help as Father Dies in Wilds

Frank Brace and his sons had ventured into the woods for day hikes before, but nothing in the youngsters’ backwoods experience prepared them for the moment their father dropped dead on a rugged mountain miles from civilization.

Unable to read their map--and having no compass--the boys scrambled five miles over rock-strewn slopes and across meadows, relying on landmarks and their sense of direction to find their way back to some cottages they had seen when they hiked in two days before.

They found help there, then led rescuers back to their father’s body in a clearing.

“We really didn’t know where we were going,” 12-year-old Jesse Brace said. “Our dad led us in, and we didn’t have any emergency plan for the trip.”

After their father died of a heart attack while hiking up a steep hill, Jesse and Isaac, 13, were forced to spend a night alone in the high mountain country before hiking out.

The Labor Day weekend excursion was the first time the boys or their father had ever gone on an overnight backpacking trip.

“I can’t imagine having been in their place,” Sandra Leigh Thomas, the boys’ mother, said Friday. “They acted so responsibly. There’s nothing they could have done any better than what they did.”

The ordeal began last Saturday when they shouldered their packs near Pinecrest, about 180 miles east of San Francisco. About five miles past the last rough dirt roads and small summer cottages, they made a camp. The next day they hiked to a reservoir nearby.

As they were climbing a steep hill to return to camp, Brace, 43, collapsed. The boys tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“We were calling for help, going to the tops of mountains and yelling,” Jesse said. But it was getting dark and nobody came, so they ran back to camp.

“You don’t plan for your dad to die all of a sudden, just in a few seconds,” Jesse said.

Thomas said the boys told her they spent a frightening night alone. They turned on every flashlight they had and put a radio on full blast “to take away some of their fears,” she said.

At first light, the boys walked away from the camp--with just the clothes on their backs--and headed back in the general direction where they remembered seeing the cabins. The hike took three hours.

“I was extremely impressed,” said Raymond Gada, who met the boys near the cabins and called for help.

Thomas said that the boys, starting seventh and eighth grade this year, became very upset once they were safe at home. They both were close to their father, who had lived a mile away since he and Thomas divorced eight years ago, she said.

“These kids did real, real well,” Gada said. “It’s very rugged terrain back there. Under the circumstances, they were troupers.”