#’How I nearly died in the desert and was rescued by chance’

“I remember the sound my body made as it hit the ground. A sharp crack. Then the white heat of pain that stabbed through my body, escaping through my mouth in an almighty howl. I tried to scramble to my feet — the instinctive reaction to falling — but I couldn’t get up. Everything below the arms remained a dead weight.” 

Thus begins Claire Nelson’s memoir, “Things I Learned from Falling,” (HarperOne), out May 25, a harrowing page-turner of a book recounting a 2018 hike she took in Joshua Tree National Park in California, with near-disastrous consequences. 

Nelson was a 30-something New Zealand journalist seeking time off from her hectic London life when she traveled to California for two weeks of house-sitting at a friend’s place, eager for a chance to relax and reset in nature. 

Nelson had always been a hiker, so when she set off down the Lost Palms Oasis Trail that was marked only “moderately hard,” she felt confident, supplied with a hiking stick and water bottle. 

A few hours into the hike, Nelson lost her footing, slipped off the path and shattered her pelvis in a fall. She remained there, dehydrated and in pain, for days, running out of hope and time, even resorting to drinking her own urine. Alone, in a scorching hot desert, she started running out of hope. (When she was finally rescued, the search party feared they wouldn’t find her alive.) 

While Nelson had forgotten to tell anyone else her itinerary, her silence on social media prompted friends to call search-and-rescue teams. Her abandoned car was discovered at the trailhead. But given the size of the park, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Prior to her fall, she had strayed from the path, making finding her even more of a challenge. After four days and three nights, she was found by a helicopter that had previously passed by two other times without seeing her. Because she had created a little sunshade out of her hiking stick and was waving it, that little flash of movement made the helicopter return. 

“I was a mess, but I was a lucky mess,” she writes of being rescued. “I had a second chance now and . . . this new and brilliant second life would not be like the one before.”