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>Near the summit, Sotelo tried to turn back. She fled as the wind howled in her face, heading down the side of the mountain. Sotelo’s footprints suggest she tried to run to safety, heading toward Interstate 93, which cuts through Franconia Notch. At some point, rescue crews believe, she lost her shoes, likely without noticing. She sought cover in a drainage area, which would have offered some reprieve from the wind.
>In the meantime, her mother, who was supposed to meet her after she climbed down the mountain that day, notified authorities that her daughter was missing.
>That evening, an expansive search to find her began. Finally, on Tuesday, rescuers found traces of Sotelo — footprints, a banana — and followed them until they were forced back by the conditions and encroaching darkness. In places, the snow was waist-deep.
>The next day, at 11 a.m. on what would have been her 20th birthday, Sotelo’s body was discovered. She had died from hypothermia, three-quarters of a mile from the trail. “I think she ran until she couldn’t do it anymore,” Colonel Kevin Jordan of New Hampshire Fish and Game, which runs search and rescue missions in the area, said at the time.
