Viral OnlyFans model Kamryn Renae rescued off Mount Whitney hike

Kamryn Renae was about 2 miles from the summit of Mount Whitney — the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States at 14,505 feet — when she started to feel sick.

The 22-year-old OnlyFans model had been backpacking since March 26 along the Pacific Crest Trail, documenting the 2,600-mile journey from Mexico to Canada with provocative social media videos and amassing tens of thousands of new followers on Instagram.

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Admittedly, she didn’t have much experience hiking mountains — she had only summited one “much, much smaller” one previously, she said in a video post. But she was inspired by a psychedelic mushroom trip in Brazil, and by the 2014 Reese Witherspoon movie “Wild,” based on the eponymous bestselling book by Cheryl Strayed, she told Outside Magazine in a recent profile. Her trail name is Flamingo, because she loves wearing pink, and she is learning on the fly.

In the hours before Renae became one of the dozens of people who end up needing a helicopter rescue off one of the Sierra Nevada’s most treacherous trails, her Whitney hike amazed her.

The morning of May 20 began like many others along the PCT. Renae packed up her stuff and documented each step of her process. She did her hair and makeup. She collected water from a stream. Then she set off along a trail that dipped through creeks, ascended rocky slopes and curved along steep snowfields, for which she carried a pink ice axe in case she slipped.

“It was just so, so beautiful,” Renae says in the video. “Like, while I was hiking up to the mountains, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this may be the best day of my life,’ because it was just so gorgeous.”

Above 13,000 feet, though, during one of the toughest parts of the hike, she fell ill and set up her tent to rest. She tried to relax, and hoped she’d eventually feel better, but instead, she got “worse and worse.”

“I started throwing up, and then I like couldn’t make it down the mountain. Then I had to call SOS,” she says in her video. Inyo County Search & Rescue did not immediately attempt to rescue Renae, and declined to respond to SFGATE’s inquiry.  

In her video, Renae does not give details about what it was like to spend the night sick and alone at 13,500 feet, in temperatures near zero. Nor did she respond to SFGATE’s request for comment on this story. But her own video, interviews with regional safety experts and comments from one of the hikers who came to her rescue help to tell the story.

Early Thursday morning, several hikers who summited Mount Whitney to watch the sunrise noticed Renae’s tent on their way up the mountain, but did not yet realize she was “in her little pickle there,” Dan Lougee (trail name: Marmot) told SFGATE.

The 25-year-old from New Hampshire quit his mechanical engineering job recently to set out on the PCT. He had hiked a lot with his dad growing up, he told SFGATE, and done steep rock scrambles, camped in snow and hiked at elevation before. It felt like all his skills were coming together on Whitney.

Lougee was hiking alone, but he met others at the top. And one of them had heard “groaning” coming from Renae’s tent, Lougee said. On the way down, two other members of the group pushed ahead and encountered Renae outside of her tent. They recognized her immediately.

“She’s like, famous, right?” Lougee said. “So everyone kind of knows who she is.”

Renae explained to the hikers that she felt sick, Lougee said, and had already contacted search and rescue, but they hadn’t sent anyone. “She had puke in her tent, like all in her gear,” he said, and the other hikers sprang into action, helping to clean up and pack up her gear for her.

By the time Lougee caught up, the other hikers had prepared Renae to walk down. “They were awesome,” he said. “If it was just me, I don’t know if I would have known what to do right away.”

As the group slowly headed down, they formed a line with Renae in the middle to navigate the steep snowfields, taking their time and staying focused. Lougee tried to stay close to Renae, but he felt unsure about whether there was anything he could do if she fell. It felt “sketchy,” he said.

“I don’t know if she was really well enough to, like, properly self-arrest,” Lougee said, referring to how a hiker who slips must use an ice axe to stop a potentially fatal slide down the mountain. “It was a little bit nerve-wracking, but I think everyone was in good spirits, and just, you know, kind of keeping the morale up.”  

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After about 2 miles, as they reached Guitar Lake, Renae vomited up all the water she had been drinking along the trail. The group had been in communication with search and rescue all along, weighing options, Lougee said, and at that point a helicopter was dispatched to “a nice flat landing area” at Guitar Lake.

Renae filmed the helicopter’s approach, part of her flight and also her time at the hospital. “I ended up just getting sick from a water source, so yeah, just really bad timing, honestly,” she says, wrapping up her video on the experience. 

When a person becomes ill on a high-altitude climb, which happens all the time on Whitney, the recommended course of action is to immediately descend, officials told SFGATE. Staying high up prevents a person from recovering from altitude sickness, and becomes risky in the afternoon because of lightning.

“Many people do not reach the summit due to the effects of high elevation,” wrote Holly Streit, a National Park Service spokesperson. “Visitors should know the early signs of altitude sickness — such as headache, nausea, dizziness, and fatigue — and be willing to make the informed decision to turn around and descend if symptoms develop.”

According to Renae’s video, though, altitude sickness was not her problem. And even when she did descend, it does not appear to have helped.

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A post shared by Kamryn Renae (@kamryn35)

Contaminated water is another known concern in the region, according to former Yosemite National Park search and rescue volunteer Dustin Weatherford, who worked as a guide on Mount Whitney. The problem, he said, is that a large marmot population lives, eats and poops near hikers’ water sources.

“That’s not something people usually think about,” Weatherford said. “When you find a water stream, don’t just fill up. Look up and down the water stream.”

Filtration typically solves the problem, though, and in her video, Renae’s water system has one. “But she could have also very easily had water on the outside of the bottle, or water on her hands, or it could have dripped from scooping it,” Weatherford said. “One drip on the outside of the device can do it. It doesn’t take much.”

Even before the rescue, the comments sections of Renae’s videos were rife with critics — often male — judging her OnlyFans income stream, accusing her of faking the trip and looking down on a woman who dresses in pink, describes hikes in a baby voice and moves through the outdoors on her own terms.

Responses to her rescue video, too, are full of judgment. “There’s like a whole lot of people that are like, ‘you should have done this,’ you know, people who weren’t there,” Lougee said. “I’m like, ‘Just shut the f—k up.’”

One good thing that comes out of a high-profile rescue, though, is the opportunity for educating others who aim to summit Mount Whitney.

“Hikers must be ready both physically and with appropriate equipment for rapidly changing alpine conditions,” Streit wrote. “… For example, hikers may need to use crampons instead of microspikes, and they should always review weather and trail reports before choosing equipment.”

Every year, Whitney hikers need rescue “due to inadequate preparation, unrecognized altitude illness or inappropriate gear,” she added. “… This is not a beginner‑level trail.”