Lauren Elder will never know why she survived the plane crash that killed two friends and stranded her on an icy Sierra mountaintop, wearing a lightweight skirt and vest and high-heeled boots.
But she knows how she survived below-freezing temperatures when the plane crashed 30 years ago: by climbing down a 13,264-foot snow-covered mountain in spite of a broken arm, shattered teeth and a gashed and swollen leg.
Her fearless determination to survive came from a sense of responsibility to others, especially her mother and grandmother, Elder said in a recent interview.
"They had lost my uncle in a plane crash; I didn't want them to lose me too. It was part sheer animal will and another part my ego -- my resume was too short."
Elder, 59, an Oakland artist who teaches college art classes and designs public spaces, said surviving as an artist for 30 years has required "far more fortitude than those two days."
Her 14-hour climb down Mt. Bradley -- which lies north of Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower 48 -- was recounted in her 1978 book "And I Alone Survived." Last month, the Discovery Channel explored her ordeal.
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April 26, 1976, began with a surprise: Elder and two friends took off on a Monday from Oakland Airport for a half-day outing in Death Valley. Elder, then 29, hadn't been scheduled to go. But her boyfriend, Jim Fizdale, "backed out at the last minute because he had a work shift," she said. "I took his place in the plane."
She dashed out the door without panties. "I was in a rush and had no clean underwear that day ... just what mothers warn you not to do," she said in the recent Times interview.
Oakland veterinarian Jay M. Fuller, who worked with Fizdale, was piloting the single-engine red and white Cessna 182. The other passenger was Fuller's girlfriend, Jean Noller.
The day was clear and calm, Elder recalled in her book. After she became accustomed to the plane's plunges, she wrote, "I felt a kind of thrill at our daring. Jay was having a wonderful time, slipping the little plane through these valleys and massive mountains, acting like guide to two thoroughly engrossed women."
Elder, seated in back, unsnapped her seat belt to get the best angle to shoot photographs of the Sierra. Suddenly, the plane hit a downdraft and nosed into the mountainside, 15 feet below the summit.
