Volunteers rescue man stuck on 10,000ft-high ledge in Sierra Nevada

Climber, stuck on 6in ridge, had veered off treacherous path and ‘any fall would almost certainly be fatal’ An ill-fated move left a man stranded on a 6in ledge over 10,000ft off the ground for hours in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, before a volunteer rescue team came to his aid. The climber, who has not been publicly identified, had been scaling the Mendenhall couloir, a gully on the face of Laurel mountain, with a friend on Saturday. The route is steep with portions of potentially destabilizing loose rock. The section the man, reportedly an experienced climber, had been traversing had no route markers, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Veering off path, which the man did by accident, can be deadly, according to the Mono county search and rescue team. “Traveling off-route quickly leads to increasingly vertical, un-protectable 5th-class terrain with no viable means of continuing either up or down. With thousands of feet of vertical exposure below, any fall would almost certainly be fatal,” the volunteers wrote in a Facebook post last weekend. The rescuers were in a race against time. After the sheriff’s office alerted them to the stranded climber, they searched