The John Muir Trail in California is one of the world’s most famous hiking destinations.
The 211-mile trek through the picturesque High Sierra begins in Yosemite Valley, at an elevation of 4,035 feet, and ends at the summit of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States, at 14,505 feet.
Thousands have made the journey, and while records of this sort aren’t kept, it’s probably safe to assume the only above-the-knee amputee to have accomplished the feat is San Pedro’s Victor Wagoner. It took him 30 days (hikers with two good legs usually take about three weeks), making it to the top of Whitney on July 30.
Wagoner, 69, has done it before. “I did it in 15 days back then, when I had two legs,” he says. In fact, he had hiked the trail in the fall of 2013, just months before the January 2014 accident that cost him a leg and nearly killed him.
Fifty-seven years old and enjoying a successful career as a Delta Airlines pilot, Wagoner was cruising down the 215 Freeway on his motorcycle when, in stalled traffic, he was “taken out by a Subaru Outback.” Thrown into the back of a stopped SUV, the impact broke his helmet. His left leg was shredded, his pelvis and hips shattered, plus internal injuries; he was in a coma for 10 days.
“I almost bled out on the freeway,” Wagoner says. “I only had a couple of pints left. I’d severed all the veins in my leg and foot, but they got a tourniquet on. They didn’t expect me to survive. They said the only reason [I didn’t die] was because [I was] in such good shape. I always enjoyed working out.”
Working out is an understatement. Wagoner began running marathons in junior high and swam for the legendary San Pedro YMCA. He was a three-sport athlete at San Pedro High (1974). Swimming for the league champion Pirates, he was undefeated over three years. He ran cross country his first two years, then played tight end and defensive end in football as a senior. He went on to Harbor College, where he swam and played football, and then, following in the footsteps of his father and older brother, Ray (my W‘69 classmate), went on to UCLA with an ROTC scholarship. Like his father and brother, Wagoner also ended up in the Navy, graduating from UCLA in 1979 and going straight to flight school. Active duty, which included ejecting from an A-7 fighter when the engine failed, ended in April 1987, and he started at Delta a week later.
With flying in his blood, there was no way losing a leg was going to end his aviation career. By April 2014, Wagoner was able to bear his weight on crutches. He requalified as a pilot in November, and in January 2015, a year after his devastating accident, he was back on the flight deck of an airliner. He worked seven more years before reaching the mandatory pilot retirement age of 65.
His running days may have been over, but Wagoner wasn’t going to let a little thing like being an amputee keep him out of the pool. He had returned to competitive swimming in the masters program in the 1990s and was participating in the U.S. spring nationals three and a half months after the accident as a one-legged breaststroker.
Wagoner also returned to coaching, helping out the Holy Trinity football team. He did that for 20 years while his wife, Lea, taught there. He also got in a few days as a one-legged dockworker, amazingly requalifying for a casual card he first got in 2001.
His John Muir triumph came on his third post-accident try. The first one ended about halfway through when his prosthetic leg broke in half, and he had to be helicoptered out. The second one ended when Wagoner and his brother Ray caught COVID from a fellow hiker. He decided to make another attempt after he had successful surgery in January for AFib.
“One of the reasons I wanted to give it a try,” Wagoner says, “is it’s good advertising [for amputees]. People see that…I can’t tell you how many responses I got. They’d see where you’re headed and [think] to find the courage you have. Just being out there and the public seeing you do it does more than talking about it.”
In the pool or on the trail, Wagoner has shown that actions do speak louder than words. spt
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