Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast · Brad Choma

The Mount Hood Field Trip Disaster of 1986 | Episode 100

·53 min·1 clip

A 15-year-old climber started slurring, then staggering—his body was shutting down and he wanted to sleep.

Start with a school field trip. The host takes that ordinary childhood annoyance, teachers watching every move, and points it straight at a mountain. Episode 100 gets its little ceremony too: a personal aside about a French strip club, a man of faith, and the nasty promise sitting inside the trip itself. Then the mountain starts doing the talking. Maybe forty-five minutes into the hike, Hillary Spray gets stomach trouble and chooses the lodge over throwing up, or worse, on a steep, famous slope in front of her class. Fair enough. The host does not go too hard on her, because normal discomfort stops feeling normal when the weather turns and everyone is thousands of feet up. The group keeps climbing. At Silcox Hut, roughly 7,000 feet or 2,100 meters up, Lorca Smetana and Courtney Boatsman get cramps and turn back. Then dropping out starts to spread. Three more students leave for their own reasons, and the host keeps the judgment loose because nobody listening was standing there in the cold. Now only fourteen are left. Clouds build, fog rises, visibility disappears, and wind starts whipping loose snow around like the mountain has found something to do. The kids are still cheerful, which somehow makes the whole thing worse. The transcript piles on fatigue, freezing hands and feet, falling temperatures, and weather getting worse by the minute. Then the whiteness closes in. Snow and fog turn the world into a bright curtain, and Dee Zudniak develops snow blindness, complete with the host's awful joke about burning corneas. She stumbles back to the lodge. The remaining plan is that the summit is close enough, around 11,000 feet or 3,350 meters, so they should keep going. That is where the story curdles. A guide scouts ahead, sees the conditions are bad, and finally turns the group around. The excerpt cuts off just as the host says it is already too late.

As heard by us

A school trip slides into a fogged-out disaster climb, and the episode keeps pushing forward as the conditions get worse.

The 100th episode turns a school trip into a disaster story, starting with the usual awkwardness of a group outing and then tightening as the hike gets colder, foggier, and harder to stomach.

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Why you'd press play

You want one school field trip that keeps getting more miserable by the minute.

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