The Worst Day of My Life (actually an inspirational story)

Preface: I wrote this a few years ago when my father-in-law was dying of cancer. Quora seemed like the only place for it. Now I'm curious how Steemers will like it...

Mustachioed dad and me (I'm the one on the left), ca. 1970

The worst day of my life was the one that dashed my hope of finding my dad alive in the Sierra Nevada Mountains after he'd been missing for three weeks on a solo backpacking trip.

On July 22nd, 1991 a backwoods fisherman – also on a solo trip in this extremely remote area of Inyo National Forest 200 miles southeast of Yosemite – found my dad's remains in a treacherous stretch of the Kern River aptly named Hell's Hole. His adventure was cut short, too, as he tied up his kayak and hiked 12 hours to a ranger station to alert the local search and rescue team and then lead them back to the precise location.

The tragedy was nearly compounded when the helicopter used to recover my dad's body almost crashed while trying to hover over the location and allow the recovery team to rappel down the cliff to the river.

This was not the ending I had anticipated when my aunt and I flew from Chicago to Reno, NV and drove to Bishop, CA to find out where my dad was and why no one had heard from him since June.

My dad the badass, ca. 1980

In 1991 email was still a few years away from being commonplace, and my dad didn't have an answering machine, so when I called him on July 13th (as we had arranged in our final conversation a few weeks prior), I just assumed I had missed him. A few days later I spoke to one of my aunts and she mentioned that she hadn't spoken to him since the end of June. We agreed he must have spoken to my grandmother because he always called her before and after his major backpacking trips. My aunt called back the next day to say that no one in the family had spoken to him for three weeks.

I had just graduated from UCLA on June 15th, and a few days after the ceremony at Arthur Ashe Stadium my dad, my grandmother and I took a weeklong cruise from Vancouver to Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. He was really excited about the two-week "Search for 1,000 Species" trip he had planned with a group in Yosemite at the end of July. He had brought the itinerary to show us how they would bisect the park, learning about its flora and fauna. Fortunately, he had also mailed the itinerary to his sister, and it had the phone number of the organization leading the trip. Thus began three days of phone calls to California trying to track him down.

At my UCLA graduation celebration, after reading Polonius' advice to Laertes from "Hamlet" ("Neither a lender nor a borrower be..."), June 15, 1991

The rest of the saga, including my attempts to find out exactly where my dad was killed, is here:
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-worst-day-of-your-life-and-why/answer/John-Packel?srid=h4Ek