Ryan Wach still isn't entirely sure what compelled his 14-year-old son Zane Wach to walk off the edge of a cliff, but he hopes the boy will be able to tell his own tale soon.
Father and son were hiking California's Mount Whitney on June 10 when the teen experienced altitude sickness and walked off a 120-foot trail ledge, according to his family. The teen has been in a coma since being rescued, but his dad shared that he is now breathing on his own after being taken off a ventilator.
“It’s going to be a survival story in the end," Ryan told SFGATE on June 25, "but right now we’re still in the middle of it."
Ryan and Zane—who his dad described as an experienced hiker and active kid who competes in distance running, swimming and triathlons—had already summited the 14,505-foot peak via the Mountaineer's Route when the boy fell ill.
After they reached the summit, Zane started showing signs of altitude sickness and apparently experienced an eerie vision involving fictional characters.
"He started to experience some hallucinations," Ryan explained. "He knew he was hallucinating. He said he saw things like snowmen and Kermit the Frog."
Once they made it back to Mount Whitney's Trail Camp, Zane seemed to feel better, his father continued. But after another hour of making their way down, the teen started to feel disoriented once again at around the 10,000-foot mark.
“He was in an altered mental state, and I don’t know what caused it. We still don’t know,” Ryan said. “My best guess is a combination of exhaustion, sleep deprivation, probably some dehydration and lasting effects from the altitude sickness. But he essentially started to doubt reality.”
Zane thought they had already finished their hike multiple times, Ryan continued, "like he was not present any longer."
“It was completely bizarre,” he added. “He told me he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or not, and he would shake his head in disbelief, like, ‘This is not real.’ Like he was in the movie Inception or something.”
And then, a father's worst nightmare: "I heard steps to my right," Ryan recalled to NBC affiliate KSNV, and Zane "was walking off the ledge."
He was able to grab Zane at that time before he went over the side of the steep granite slope, while a nearby group of hikers realized they were witnessing a fellow climber in crisis and called for help.
Zane told his father he was going to the car, which was thousands of feet down the trail, Ryan told SFGATE. When he had to grab hold of his son again, Zane said he was going to dinner.
"I was kind of losing my mind, in a way, because I was so scared and frustrated,” Ryan continued. “I had to wipe away tears. I was holding my hands to my eyes, and he walked off again. This time, I didn’t hear it until he was about at the edge, and when I went to reach for him, he was 10 feet away from me. I couldn’t get him, and he walked off the edge.”
Ryan estimated that Zane fell about 120 feet down the slope.
A fellow hiker was an EMT who coordinated the rescue effort, Ryan said, but they still had to wait six hours for an Inyo County Search & Rescue helicopter to get there and fly Zane to Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine.
After he was stabilized, the teen was flown about 230 miles away to Sunrise Children’s Hospital in Las Vegas, the closest facility with a pediatric trauma center.
While doctors told Zane's family it was "fairly miraculous" he wasn't hurt even worse, Ryan said, in addition to head trauma the teen has a broken ankle and finger, as well as a fractured pelvis.
But after being placed in a medically induced coma, he is now breathing on his own, according to a June 26 Facebook update posted to Zane's grandmother Lisa Hinrichsen-Wach's account, per People.
"I'll be brief today as it was a big day but very hard," Ryan wrote. "Zane had the breathing tube removed... This was a giant milestone and opens the door to many new steps forward. He's not doing much else at the moment, the largest focus is watching closely so that he does well breathing on his own as well and being able to cough and swallow."
Ryan noted that the boy was "well into feeling the effects of withdrawal" from the heavy drugs he'd been given at the hospital, an "extremely hard and painful" process.
"As parents it's terrible to watch," he continued. "We hope he gets through this with the least possible suffering."
But Ryan has seen his son accomplish so much, he has faith he'll overcome this challenge with flying colors.
"He is a straight-A student. He is involved with the church," Ryan told KSNV. "He is just an all-around great kid. Could not even ask for a kid this good. I am lucky to be his father."
It's unfortunately not the first freak accident to happen on a hike. Read on for more...
Maddie Aldridge
Jamie Lynn Spears' then-8-year-old daughter Maddie Aldridge was driving an ATV in February 2017 when she accidentally flipped it into a pond near their Louisiana home, leaving her submerged under water for minutes.
"When we were finally able to get her out of the water and I saw her and then the first responders took her from me, we thought she was gone," Jamie Lynn recalled on a 2020 episode of Maria Menounos Better Together podcast. "We thought we'd lost our daughter."
Though the family wasn't sure what sort of damage had been done, Maddie was awake and talking two days later. A few weeks after that, she was back to her normal routine.
"God gave me the blessing of giving me my daughter back," Jamie Lynn continued. "I lost her and I got her back."
Rebel Wilson
Filming on Rebel Wilson and Anna Camp's 2025 action comedy Bride Hard turned dramatic during the Aussie's final day of playing secret agent. "In a fight scene, a gun accidentally got whacked across my face," Rebel explained to Access Hollywood in a June 2025 interview. "It was just a freak accident, and my nose got split open, so I left set. It was my last night of shooting. I was like, 'How unlucky can I be?'"
Surrounded by a pool of her own blood, "I was freaking out," she admitted of the 2023 incident. "They take an ambulance and they have to call a plastic surgeon, because if they didn’t, I would have been permanently disfigured. So we got the plastic surgeon, they did all the stitches, and you can’t tell now."
Jimmy Fallon
Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon almost lost his finger after he tripped and fell in his own home. He tried catching himself on the counter and his ring got stuck on the way down, pulling his finger out.
He described it as "ring avulsion," and it kept him in the hospital for 10 days as doctors worked to prevent him from having to get it amputated.
Zane Wach
An experienced hiker who competes in distance running, swimming and triathlons, Zane Wach was nearly felled by altitude sickness while hiking with his dad Ryan Wach on California's Mount Whitney in June 2025.
"He started to experience some hallucinations," Ryan explained to to the SFGATE of the 14-year-old. "He knew he was hallucinating. He said he saw things like snowmen and Kermit the Frog."
Ryan managed to stop his teen from walking off the cliff multiple times as they made their way back down the trail. “He was in an altered mental state, and I don’t know what caused it. We still don’t know,” the father noted. “My best guess is a combination of exhaustion, sleep deprivation, probably some dehydration and lasting effects from the altitude sickness. But he essentially started to doubt reality.”
And on a third attempt, Ryan was too far away to catch Zane, watching as his son fell roughly 120 feet off the cliff. After waiting six hours for an Inyo County Search & Rescue helicopter to get there and fly Zane to Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine, he was stabilized and transferred to a pediatric trauma center in Las Vegas. Placed into a medically induced coma, he eventually began breathing on his own.
“It’s going to be a survival story in the end," Ryan said of his teen, who suffered head trauma along with a broken finger, ankle and fractured pelvis, "but right now we’re still in the middle of it."
Jeremy Renner
On New Years' Day 2023, Avengers star Jeremy Renner was using a snowplow to tow a truck that was stuck in the snow on the driveway of his Lake Tahoe home. But after exiting the machine, he was pulled under while trying to stop the plow from hitting his nephew and suffered 38 broken bones.
"As I lay on the ice, my heart rate slowed, and right there, on that New Year’s Day, unknown to my daughter, my sisters, my friends, my father, my mother, I just got tired," he wrote in his 2025 memoir My Next Breath. "After about thirty minutes on the ice of breathing manually for so long, an effort akin to doing ten or twenty push-ups per minute for half an hour . . . that’s when I died."
Fighting broken bones, blood loss and the threat of hypothermia, "I know I died—in fact, I’m sure of it," he wrote. “When the EMTs arrived, they noted that my heart rate had bottomed out at 18, and at 18 beats per minute, you’re basically dead."
Trigg Kiser
TikToker Emilie Kiser and her husband Brady Kiser were forced to face the unimaginable when their 3-year-old son Trigg Kiser fell into the pool at their Arizona home in May 2025.
Chandler Police Department told USA Today that officers responded to a drowning call at a residence on May 12, for a child who had been pulled unconscious out of a backyard pool. Both police and firefighters administered CPR on the scene, before taking Trigg to Chandler Regional Hospital. But, sadly, the toddler died six days later.
Emilie later filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County public offices requesting that the court prohibit the public release of details surrounding his death. "Emilie is trying her best to be there for her surviving son, two-month-old Theodore," the lawsuit stated. "But every day is a battle."
Cara Hodgson
A family vacation to Thailand turned into "the worst 10 days" of Dr. Cara Hodgson's life after she was electrocuted by power lines in December 2023. After blacking out and being rushed to the ER, the influencer spent the next week and a half "going in and out of hospitals fighting to regain my strength and fighting for my life," she detailed in a New Year's Day Instagram post. "I am so lucky to be here today."
As such, the orthodonist found a new reason to smile through the pain. The experience "taught me something I think we all need to be reminded of when we get caught up in the little things: What a precious privilege it is to be alive," Cara shared, "being able to breathe, eat, talk, move your body, is something grand and something to be celebrated."
Juliana Marins
Tragedy occured when Brazilian tourist Juliana Marins was hiking on Mount Rinjani, an active volcano in Indonesia, in June 2025. After she fell off a cliff (but not into the volcano's crater), a team of 48 search and rescuers spent four days "hindered by adverse weather, terrain and visibility conditions in the region," the Brazilian government shared in a statement, and eventually located Juliana's body.
"Today, the rescue team managed to reach the place where Juliana Marins was,” detailed a post on an Instagram account providing updates from her family. “With great sadness, we inform you that she did not survive. We remain very grateful for all the prayers, messages of affection and support that we have received."
Tori Spelling
When former Beverly Hills, 90210 star Tori Spelling attended a 2015 Easter brunch at Japanese restaurant Benihana, she tripped and burned her right arm on one of the Hibachi grills. After undergoing skin grafts to treat the injury, the actress ultimately deciding to sue the restaurant.
“I have a skin graft that they had to take from my leg," she later detailed on a 2024 episode of her and Jennie Garth's podcast 9021OMG. "Not many people can say, 'Hey, I'm wearing my thigh on my arm,' and I'm not even kidding. So I'm wearing a thin layer of my thigh on my arm because the skin burnt so bad."
Tony Knight
When comedian Tony Knight attended France's Rock&Cars festival in June 2024, he was killed after two large branches fell from a tree. "He was only 54 and having the time of his life," Joanne Allen, the sister of Tony's longtime partner Hayley Wright detailed in a GoFundMe message. "He was fit, healthy, happy and had everything going for him. He was charismatic, funny, passionate."
And, of course, adored by his longtime love. "He was an exceptionally talented man, with so many strings to his bow," Haley wrote in her own Instagram post. "There really was nothing he couldn’t do. He was a fantastic friend to so many, an amazing dog Dad….but most of all he was my world & it will never be the same without him."
Sanjay Shah
A company celebration turned catastrophic in January 2024. To kickoff the planned 25th anniversary festivities for Chicago-based software company Vistex, CEO Sanjay Shah and president Vishwanath Raju Datla were suspended in an iron cage meant to be lowered 20 feet onto a dais at the India-based party, a company official told The Times of India. Instead, two wires snapped, causing the men to crash onto the concrete stage.
Sanjay, 56, died of his injuries at the hospital following the accident, the paper reported, while 52-year-old Vishwanath sustained a severe head injury and passed months later.
Orlando Bloom
"When I was 19 I fell three floors from a window and broke my back," Orlando Bloom shared in a joint 2022 Instagram video with UNICEF. He had been trying to climb to the rooftop terrace of a three-story building with friends when the drainpipe he was scaling collapsed. Though he broke several vertebrae in his back, "I was very fortunate to survive the fall because my spinal cord was still just intact."
Still, he detailed, "When I was in the hospital, I was told for the first four days that I may never walk again. That was really the beginning of what was a long and painful journey for me into recognizing and understanding some of the patterns that had been in my life that had led me to having numerous accidents. And the culmination was breaking my back, which was a near-death experience."
Leaving the hospital in a back brace with heaps of physical and emotional pain, "I started partying straight away—with the back brace on," he shared with GQ in 2005. "It took me a couple of months to realize this was my life, and I didn't want to mess it up."
The experience has "informed everything in my life," he added. "Until you're close to losing it, you don't realize. I used to ride motorbikes and drive cars like everything was a racetrack; it was ridiculous. It wasn't because I thought it was cool; it was just because I loved living on the edge. But I've chilled."