Lauren Elder

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Lauren Elder is known for being the sole survivor in the crash of a light airplane in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1970s.

Lauren decided to take up an offer to be the third passenger in a Cessna 182 on a trip from Oakland airport in the San Francisco Bay area to Furnace Creek in Death Valley. The pilot was confident and competent but had only some 300 flight hours. He sought but missed Kearsarge Pass through the Sierras, and Lauren, sitting in the back seat and enjoying the view of mountains all round, turned forward to see a wall of granite moving towards them. When she woke up, she realised that they had crashed. The crumpled plane was lying on a precarious slope a few feet away from a ridge in California's Sierra Mountains at an elevation of 12,460 feet, one-half mile south of Mt. Bradley.

Lauren was the only survivor. She could see the lights of the Owens Valley below, but miles of wilderness, elevation and sheer, icy cliffs separated her from it. She was wearing nothing but a blouse, a wraparound skirt, and boots with two-inch heels. One of her arms was fractured. She decided to climb down from the mountain to the valley below, at one point having to lower herself down a 100-foot-tall dry waterfall, and having hallucinations on the way because of lack of sleep and shock. The descent took her 36 hours.

Finally, as she reached civilisation, she had trouble finding help when she walked late that night into the town of Independence, California. People saw her disheveled appearance and were afraid; Charles Manson had recently been put to trial in the area, and his female followers spent a lot of time hanging around.

Her story was made into a book titled "And I Alone Survived" [1], which was later made into a TV movie with the same title [2], as well as a documentary aired by the Discovery Channel.

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