'Water angel' saves hikers in hot weather
PHOENIX, AZ - Under a piercing blue sky, with the air temperature peaking just over 100 degrees and humidity near 21 percent, the man in dusty sneakers points a digital thermometer at the blacktop.
He’s mopping beads of sweat from his brow in the parking lot at the base of Echo Canyon Trail in east Phoenix. He’s already navigated the winding pathway once on this Tuesday morning, pounding past dry desert brush, climbing a stairway carved into the earth, making his way closer to the Arizona sun.
After wrapping a Band-Aid around a cut on his finger, Scott Cullymore would climb Camelback Mountain again, 2,704 feet to the highest peak and about 1.3 miles each way, on a trail Phoenix has given a rating to warn novice hikers: “Extremely Difficult.”
Cullymore hikes this trail every day and he likes to know what kind of heat he'll face before making his way upward. He glances at the thermometer.
“The blacktop’s 130 degrees,” he says, shaking his head, “and with the humidity … it’s brutal.”
He reaches into his carpet-cleaning work van to refill his orange backpack. He fills the bag until it's bulging at the seams with icy water bottles. Then he pulls the thin black straps over his shoulders. He’s ready to go.
By the time Cullymore returns to the lot after his second hike, he’ll have given away 17 water bottles. Each one went to someone who underestimated the heat, how much water they needed or the difficulty of the trail.
They call him the 'water angel'
Cullymore has earned a nickname.
People call him the "water angel." He’s part of a small group of Arizonans who hike Camelback Mountain religiously.
They carry extra water, snacks and watch out for hikers in distress. Some like Cullymore are so good at hydrating 24 hours beforehand — when most experts recommend drinking water before undertaking an arduous physical activity in the scorching Phoenix heat — they don’t even need to carry water on the hike.
Cullymore had gotten to the point where he was drinking water before and after his hike, but avoided carrying water on the trail, a round-trip he can now make in about 45 minutes.
But he had second thoughts when he saw people suffering on the trail.
“They underestimate how much water they need,” he says. “If you’re seeing them and they’re just hunkering down trying to find any shade and their face is just flush red, they’re not sweating anymore.”
Cullymore was on the mountain last July when firefighters found a 48-year-old English woman dead in a ravine. She had been hiking Echo trail at about 9:30 a.m. with her son and husband, who went back down the mountain ahead of her.
Rescuers searched for nearly six hours before a police helicopter spotted her body.
Cullymore remembers the sound of the helicopter circling above him and the whining emergency sirens.
“They underestimate the mountain and they overestimate what they can do, and they get themselves in trouble,” he says.
So Cullymore started carrying waters and snacks, handing them out to passing hikers. A few times he’s walked people down the mountain where they called for help.
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