A couple’s stroll by the seashore turned treacherous in the Bay Area on Easter Sunday. Clinging desperately to a rocky cliffside after sundown, the adventurous young man from Louisiana, Cody Cretini, 22, had taken a walk with his girlfriend along the rumbling shoreline of Alexander Battery in the famously beautiful Golden Gate National Recreation Area when something went awry.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department’s rescue helicopter, Henry-1, responded as darkness fell.
“So I started climbing and about 40 or 50 feet up, I get to a spot where all the rocks started crumbling and every rock that I grab just gets removed from the cliff,” the avid hiker said in a video call with the station. Mr. Cretini’s girlfriend flagged down a passerby who ran to the parking lot and found enough service to call 911.
“[Mr. Cretini] told me he was there for around an hour before being rescued,” Deputy Matelli told The Epoch Times. “He was trying to climb up the cliff to get to the trail above from the beach. He got stuck and slid down into that position.”
With extensive training in aerial rescues such as this, Deputy Matelli and Mr. Cooper planned their approach on the fly, opting to lower Deputy Matelli on a long line to retrieve the stranded hiker. The approach was perilous. A wrong shift of just a few feet could knock the clinging man from the cliff, and there was the rotor wash forcing the pair off center to contend with.
“My muscles were tired. I was cramping,” Mr. Cretini told ABC News, adding that at times he was literally clinging by a digit. “I knew if I’d fallen, that it wasn’t going to be good.”
Deputy Matelli looped a “horse collar” rescue strap around the young man but warned him to keep holding onto the rock, as he wasn’t yet secured. To release at this point could be fatal.
“Hey, don’t let go, man,” Deputy Matelli was heard telling him in footage later released by Sonoma Sheriff. “Don’t let go, okay?”
With only a single spotlight on the rockface as a reference, the pilot relied less on visual cues and more on hand signals and the feel he and his partner had for when all was well. The situation ended well, as both daredevil and deputy were hoisted off the rock and back onto solid ground where they were received by Southern Marin firefighters, the wayward adventurer fully intact and safe.
Despite his Easter Sunday misadventure, Mr. Cretini suffered “no injuries, just a few scratches,” Deputy Matelli told The Epoch Times of the man who has since jetted home to Louisiana. “He was relieved to have been rescued and thanked us.”
