December 26
Capron awoke the day after Christmas and set out this time to the west, eventually connecting him to Trail No. 203, which would take him back in the general direction of the original trailhead. But 30 hours of steady rain had swollen a stream that usually meanders along the trail. To continue in this direction, he would have no choice but to pass through flooded, narrow canyon walls.

“This was the day everything went wrong,” Capron says.

At several points, the swollen river wiped out his trail, forcing him to switchback through the chilly, rushing water to find solid footing. “When it was no more than waist deep, I’d carry Petey across,” Capron says. When the water was chest deep, he would loft Petey to the other side and cross over, grabbing for trees, roots and anything he could find to pull himself to safety. The rapid current often swallowed the mud beneath him, sucking him under the water. But his swimming skills and an improvised life preserver – his backpack pulled taut with the two empty Gatorade bottles inside – kept him from ever seriously coming close to drowning.

For hours the grueling zigzag pattern repeated itself. “Then real disaster struck,” Capron says, recalling a point about halfway down the canyon when his foot became lodged between two rocks at the river bottom. The sports sandal on his right foot slipped off, rushing downstream.

He climbed onto the riverbank, thinking, “Boy is this going to be painful.” Yet, when he put his weight on the bare foot, he didn’t feel a tinge of pain. “My foot was completely frozen. I couldn’t feel a thing,” he says.

He pressed on for another two hours before the urge to quit overwhelmed him. Capron, the thrice-wounded, never-say-die Vietnam vet, was soaked, hungry, tired, cold, semi-shoeless and in pain from arthritis in his hips. “I lied down on the riverbank, put my cap over my face, and thought, ‘What an ignominious way to die.’”

Nightfall: December 26
Capron dozed off for about 45 minutes, enough to re-energize him to persevere through water that was rushing faster, deeper and wider with every step he descended in elevation. He scaled a canyon wall to see if higher ground would lend perspective.

About a half mile ahead, he saw it: a road.

“C’mon, Petey!” he yelled, scrambling back down the canyon wall. “We’re getting out of here.” They forged ahead along the river, crossing it for the final time by crawling inch by inch along a downed tree over raging waters. The time was 4:30 p.m. He had needed eight hours to travel the 2.8-mile-long flooded canyon. Petey ate his third can of dog food, and the pair pressed on, not thinking too much of a small pump station he passed upon exiting the canyon.

“Then, about a mile down the road, what do we encounter? The damn river was crossing the road. I wasn’t sure if we could cross it.” It was 5:30 p.m., daylight would soon be lost, and Capron couldn’t even see where the road emerged from the wide swath covered by the river.

He retreated a mile to the shelter of the pump station. He ate the candy bar and gave Petey the final half-sandwich, then began the gruesome task of wrapping his exposed, bloodied foot with small pieces of cloth he found in his abandoned shelter. With his backpack as his pillow, he fell asleep, awaking only a few times with a shiver. It seemed colder that night

Capron revisits the abandoned shack that sheltered him and Petey from four days of rain and snow. Opposite: The shallow streams of Haunted Canyon quickly turned into raging rivers as Capron tried to find his way back.

December 27
Capron and Petey awoke the Saturday after Christmas to two shocking realities. “The floor was covered with blood. Most of the flesh was gone from my foot and it bled all through the night,” he says. Then he opened the pump station’s door to find four inches of snow.

The overnight temperature had plummeted to 16 degrees, making for a brisk 6:30 a.m. wake-up call. Out of food, Capron and his faithful companion had no choice but to leave the shelter of the pump station and try to make it out alive.

Capron set out down the road, alternately wondering how he was going to cross the river that halted his progress the night before, and how much damage he was doing to his severely frostbitten foot with each bloody step through the snow. In moments of darker humor, he fancied his shoeless step-thump, step-thump cadence as a decent Gregory Peck/Captain Ahab impersonation.

They hiked a mile to the familiar place where the river washed over the road, only this morning it was a frozen sheet of ice. He carried Petey across with ease, his optimism for making it home alive increasing with every step-thump. The position of the sun told him they were headed roughly in the direction of US 60. He estimated they’d have to cover six or seven miles to get there.

By 8:30 a.m., Capron was lost in contemplation about whether his badly battered foot would carry him that far. Then Petey jolted his thoughts. “He took off running down the road. He was jumping up and down at the top of a hill in the road,” Capron says. Having lost much of his hearing capacity in the Vietnam War, Capron couldn’t hear what Petey could hear – the rumble of a truck approaching the bedraggled pair. “Thank God,” Capron remembers saying when the truck crested the hill. “We’re going to live.”

Andrew Lunsford, an employee with Carlota Copper Mine near Miami, remembers encountering Capron. “I was on my way to work and drove down to Haunted Canyon like usual in the morning, and I saw this older gentleman waving his arms. He had a lot of blood coming out of his foot,” Lunsford says. He wrapped Capron’s bloodied, shoeless foot, helped him into his truck and rushed him to the mine’s guard station, calling ahead for help. He offered his dinner – Christmas Day leftovers – to Capron, who let Petey have first dibs. “He ate turkey and mashed potatoes, stuffing and cranberries. He ate everything but the rolls,” Capron remembers.

The precise location of Capron’s rescue was on U.S. Forest Service property where Carlota gets its mine water. He had hiked perhaps 15 to 16 miles, ascending 2,000 feet in elevation, along a ridge and back down again, nearly completing an almost perfectly rectangular loop back to his car. “He was on the right track to finding people who could help, but I don’t think he would have made it another half day out there,” Lunsford says.

Once at the mine’s guard station, first responders were already waiting for Capron. “The first thing to do was to get him warmed up and get medical attention,” says Captain Deborah Hiibel, who was called into work by her security company that morning. “His foot was terribly bloody. We got it bandaged up, but he had hypothermia pretty bad.”

With Capron safely en route to the Valley, the next thing was to find someone to care for Petey. But the only listing she could find for Capron’s friends, the Bardusons, was a fax number.

The Road to Recovery
Sitting in her home office on Saturday morning, Maggie Barduson thought it was strange that her fax line would be ringing. Even more bizarre was the hastily composed, hand-written message scrawled on the incoming fax.

“This morning a hiker and his dog were rescued from Haunted Canyon in Miami, AZ. The hiker was airlifted to Phoenix and the dog was left at our guard gate. We have the dog and we need someone to come get it.”

The “hiker” was not named and there were no specifics. Barduson didn’t need them.

“I knew immediately. Don was lost in the stinking woods!” She called Hiibel, picked up her brother Tom, and visited Capron at the Maricopa Medical Center Burn Unit. By midday, she and Tom were on their way to Haunted Canyon to retrieve both Petey and Capron’s car. Other than having dropped a few pounds, the dog received a clean bill of health following an emergency trip to the veterinarian.

As for the dog’s master? “He’s very lucky to be alive,” Hiibel says.

Capron’s recovery has taken him down one of the more challenging paths of his life. The nerve and skin damage to his foot – plus other health complications that arose during his weeks of hospitalization and nursing home care – have tempered his enthusiasm for future hiking excursions. He faces more foot surgery and possibly partial amputation of his foot.

Looking back, he knows he should have told someone of his plans. “There’s a certain amount of hubris in that I didn’t think I needed to tell anybody where I was going. I had a map, a compass and a flashlight, and I thought they could get me out of anything.”

Yet several things turned out right, too. He credits a Marine-instilled survival instinct and a bit of ingenuity on his part – à la the improvised rucksack-turned-life preserver – for literally keeping him afloat. And he knows that if not for finding both the half-standing shack and the pump station, his misadventure could have become the latest chapter of Superstition Wilderness lore, the next name on the long list of lives brutally swallowed up in the harsh terrain.

Part of him isn’t sure he’s going to hit the trail anytime soon, which is a big letdown considering he had planned to drive east and tackle the southern part of the Appalachian Trail in the spring. Still, he flirts with going back to Haunted Canyon.

“My first instinct is to say, ‘I’m going back out to the place, only this time I’m bringing a full backpack with me, a sleeping bag, an air mattress, four or five days of food, and I’m going to figure out what the hell went wrong out there.’ The maps say there is a trail, and I say there isn’t. I’m curious to see if I just missed it.”

And then he thinks, why go looking for trouble? “There is this sense of foreboding. It’s the worst hiking experience I’ve ever had.”

In the end, he’ll never look at the Superstition Mountains quite the same way. While the casual passerby on US 60 might view the rugged beauty as a photo op, he’s seen the enigmatic, inhospitable underside of that terrain.

Meanwhile, he’s still not sure how to characterize the meaning he’s derived from his survival. The sardonic side of him scoffs at the suggestion of a Christmas miracle. He jokes about buying a cell phone.

But maybe his biggest lesson has been one in humility.

"I’ve always had this attitude that I could run through a brick wall,” he says. “The brick wall caused a lot of damage this time. In the future, when I’m confronted with the unknown, I’m going to rethink what I’m doing before I push on. Next time, I think I’ll turn around and go back.”