Legacy Matters
He saved a couple a year after he died. Lost Virginia's Hiker's Point of Despair
The shaky handwriting in the margins of the hiking map was that of a desperate man, lost in the wilderness 2,600 miles from his Virginia home, out of energy and out of hope.
He was down to his last three crackers, he scribbled. He knew that nobody was looking for him. And he expected that here, alone in this treacherous gorge in California's San Jacinto Mountains, he was about to die.
His last entry was May 8, 2005. He packed his maps into his new orange and yellow backpack, along with his navy blue fleece and the Ziploc bag containing the Virginia driver's license that identified him as John Donovan, 60, of Petersburg. And then he vanished.
On Monday, exactly one year later, Brandon Day, 28, and his girlfriend, Gina Allen, 24, also lost, hungry and desperate, blundered into the same rugged gorge and, through John Donovan's apparent demise, found their survival.
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We definitely knew that we were looking at somebody's grave," Day said. "The thought was, 'Is this going to be our grave?' "
R.I..P. John Donovan.