Kathi Ludwig was about 3,000 feet from the top of Mount Shasta when a watermelon-sized boulder came out of nowhere, hitting her in the ribs and knocking her off the ground.
At first, the slight, 56-year-old Santa Clara woman was OK, her husband, Mike Ludwig told the Mercury News. She was hurt, but alert.
It was more than an hour later on the snow-covered mountain in Siskiyou County on July 4 that her heart stopped. Twenty minutes of CPR didn’t work. And she died before making it to the hospital.
“I saw her dying,” said long-time friend Carolyn Gannon of Woodside. “It was terrible. ”
Mike Ludwig, a 58-year-old semiconductor designer, is left remembering his second wife as the woman he felt the most comfortable with and who died living her life to the fullest, as an outdoor adventurer.
Gannon said Kathi Ludwig had a “tremendous zest for life.” She found it ironic that the woman she and other friends would seek comfort with in times of tragedy would become a victim of a tragedy.
Gannon and the Ludwigs, along with a small group of hikers and two guides, were trellomg up the 14,000-foot mountain as part of a three-night, four-day trip. At 3 a.m. on Sunday, the group began their ascent. They expected the final climb to last 10 hours. But about 6 a.m., when they were about 11,000-feet up, the rock fell. Kathi Ludwig was the only one hit.
Ludwig said the group huddled around Kathi, who became a Life Coach after years at Bank of America and other financial institutions. There was an Oakland firefighter tith the group, Ludwig said, who helped relieve pressure on his wife’s ribs. The guides, trained in First Aid, tried to make Kathi more comfortable. Group members threw their coats on top of her. Ludwig held her head.
In more than an hour, a California Highway Patrol helicopter arrived to lift her up into a basket. But it was too late. “It felt like forever,” Ludwig said, who had to hike down the mountain with half of the group. This was not Kathi Ludwig’s first mountaineering trip.
In 2007, she climbed the 19,000-foot Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with friends to raise money for Support Network in San Jose, where she volunteered as a domestic violence counselor. And last Fourth of July, she and her husband hiked Mount Rainier in Seattle, roughly the same height as Mount Shasta.
“But Kathi had a small fall and she was a little freaked out,” Ludwig said. “She was a little fearful. And she trained harder for this year’s trip.” His wife liked to bicycle, waterski, run, and hike. When she was nearly 50, she took up snowboarding and ended up as an advanced “black diamond” snowboarder, her husband said. “She tried to stay active,” he said. “Our focus was health and fun.”
And that’s what Ludwig said the couple, who had dated for 10 years before marriage, was doing: Having fun. For their wedding ceremony two years ago, after having a small service in California with family, the two jetted off to Thailand for a traditional ceremony overseas.
“Let’s do something different and memorable,” was how Kathi pitched it to her husband. The couple had traveled all over the world together. Ludwig said he has no regrets about taking the adventurous trip with his wife.
“She died trying to conquer her fears and conquer the mountain,” Ludwig said. “She lived her life and didn’t ever waste it.”
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