The body of a 33-year-old man who tried to climb alone to the top of a mountain some 11,500 feet high was found by a rescue team at the base of Big Falls in Southern California, authorities said. local.
“
When you wake up, go out and look at the highest mountain you see.
And I will be there
.
Wish me luck, ”Robert Carey Jr. had written in a cell phone message sent to his mother before leaving on Saturday morning for the San Bernardino National Forest, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles.
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Carey's family told investigators the young man was an experienced hiker but had never climbed a peak.
His goal that day was to reach the summit of San Gorgonio Peak, according to his mother in an interview with NBC News.
Big Falls in the San Bernadino National Forest.Getty Images
According to Phillips, the two exchanged text messages in the hours before her death.
In the last one, the young man told him that he was a mile from the summit.
But when night came and she didn't show up for the traditional Saturday family dinner, she says she got worried.
“
I already knew something was terribly wrong
.”
The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department was alerted to Carey's disappearance that same Saturday, April 30, when she did not return from the hike to reunite with her family.
Shortly after, emergency services received calls from people who said they had heard someone screaming for help in the Forest Falls area.
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The police deployed an operation with the assistance of the fire department in the park, until finally a sheriff's helicopter located a body at the base of the waterfall.
"Investigators estimated that Carey fell approximately 80 feet," the Sheriff's Department said in a statement.
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A rescuer tried to go down to retrieve the body, but the conditions were very dangerous and it was already late at night, so they waited until the following Sunday morning to remove it.
Carey's mother believes that the young man reached the top just as he had assured her by text message.
"I was convinced that he was going to get to the top of that mountain,"
she noted, "and he did."
Carey was a bus driver in downtown Los Angeles, and well liked at work, according to his mother, who described him as a person with a big heart who took care of her and her grandmother: "He was everything to me."