Heat, Steep Grade Sends Marine’s 146-Mile Run ‘Down the Tubes’

LONE PINE, Calif. — Suffering from dehydration, cramps and hallucinations, a Marine Corp major who lost a lung when he was wounded in Vietnam reluctantly gave up Friday in his attempt to run 146 miles from Death Valley to Mt. Whitney.

“Down the tubes,” muttered John Bates, 42, as he recuperated in a mobile home driven here by his wife, Stephanie, 36. “I am very upset.”

Bates said he was “done in” by a steep 11-mile grade and temperatures of more than 100 degrees he endured Thursday.

In the first minutes of Friday morning, 23 hours and 70 miles into the run, Bates said he began to hallucinate.

Hallucinated a Car

“I tried to climb into a bush thinking it was my wife’s car,” he recalled later, managing a weary smile. “I was also violently regurgitating anything I ate.”

Stephanie Bates found that her husband’s temperature was 101.6 degrees and, over his objections, called it quits.

“I decided to drive him into Lone Pine,” she said. “He said, ‘No, just let me rest a little longer.’

“I said, ‘Try to fight me.’ I knew he could not.”

“Eventually, no matter how high your spirits are, the body just stops,” Bates said.

Bates left Badwater, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level, at 8 p.m. Wednesday. His goal was to reach the summit of Mt. Whitney, at 14,464 feet, in time to beat the run’s fastest recorded time of 45 hours, 15 minutes, set by Gil Cornell of Lone Pine in 1987. About a dozen people are believed to have made the run, including Bates, who did it in 1986 in 63 hours and 12 minutes, including two eight-hour stretches of sleep.

Scores of travelers along the road applauded the heavily sweating Marine as he jogged past sand dunes and hardpan in the scorching desert sun.

“He is a little bit mad, no?” said Andre Navarre, 57, of Paris, who was vacationing in Death Valley and could scarcely believe his eyes. “Mad, but very courageous.”

Meanwhile, Death Valley National Monument rangers were frankly worried about Bates’ health.

“He picked one of the toughest terrains in the world at a real bad time of the year,” said Russell Marsh, acting chief ranger.

“We are talking about an average temperature of 120 degrees and a ground floor temperature of 200 degrees.”

In Lone Pine on Friday, Bates slept through much of the morning within sight of his goal, Mt. Whitney, 33 miles to the west.

“I’m going to visit the mountain today with my son,” he said. “We are driving.”