Carl “thought I was toast,” recalls Stepniewski. Still roped, Stepniewski used mechanical ascenders to pull himself up the rope and out of the crevasse, an ordeal that left him totally spent.
On the way down, his face and head bashed into something hard, shattering his right cheekbone and briefly knocking him unconscious. He doesn’t remember because he plunged into the unseen crevasse, plummeting more than 50 feet. This being before seat belts were commonplace, the two boys on the driver’s side had both been ejected and were lying dead in the road. When Stepniewski came to his senses - “Kind of going, ‘Hey, I’m still here”‘ - he realized Earl was not. “The first curve we made, the tires were screeching I glanced over at the speedometer and I couldn’t see the numbers, but I could see it was at 3 o’clock.” And nobody said a word,” recalls Stepniewski, who was sitting in the front passenger seat. The four of them took off in that direction in the other boys’ Volkswagen Beetle. He and his buddy, Earl, drove on to a forest campground, where they met two other boys who had heard about a dance in the nearby town of Kernville. “We went up there, and at midday there they were - California condors, like little airplanes,” says Stepniewski. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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