DUNGENESS – Humbled, dazed and with hallucinations fresh in his mind, Craig Upton found his way out of the wilderness Tuesday morning after five days of wandering.
Upton, 61, of Dungeness, wasn’t quite ready to describe himself as OK two hours after he walked out of the forest and was given a lift back to his car, which he parked last Thursday at Slab Camp, in Olympic National Forest some 15 miles southwest of Sequim.
But he agreed to talk with the Peninsula Daily News, in hopes of preventing other hikers from getting lost as he had.
At noon Thursday Upton, a woodworker who makes custom furniture, drove up Lost Mountain Road, planning to climb Baldy Peak, a 6,797-foot mountain , on Friday.
He left a note for his housemate saying he’d be back Friday night.
Upton set up camp near the timberline on Thursday evening, and Friday morning headed for the summit, leaving scraps of paper from a sandwich wrapper to help him find his way back.
The scraps of paper were found Monday night by searchers, just as Sgt. Monty Martin of the Clallam County Sheriff’s Department was considering “scaling down” the breadth of the search, Martin said.
The searchers could tell the scraps were from the paper that Safeway uses to wrap its deli sandwiches.
That information corresponded to a receipt that Martin and Undersheriff Ron Peregrin found in Upton’s car, showing that he bought two sandwiches from Safeway at about 11 a.m. the day he went hiking.
“We look for clues, and the clues are going to find the people,” Martin said.
