Sierra G. P.

It was early afternoon when Dr. Shultz got the call: five-year-old Sara Sharr had been kicked in the head by a mule at Golden Trout Camp, 10,000 feet high in California's Sierra Nevada range. That was 25 roadless miles from the doctor's office in Lone Pine (elev. 3,728 ft.). No plane could land near the camp. Nothing to do but pack in. At 3 :30, Dr. Shultz set out on horseback, with a mule carrying a stretcher, an instrument bag and plasma.

Four hours later, Dr. Shultz found Sara lying on a blanket on a table in a log cabin. She was conscious. He gave her a sedative and scrubbed up while his instruments boiled on the wood stove. Two men held gas lanterns and two flashlights while he operated. It was a bad fracture: many pieces of bone, including a large part of the eye socket, were pressed in on the brain.

Dr. Shultz cleaned the wound and took out seven fragments. With the pressure off her brain, Sara quieted down. Says Dr. Shultz: "She was a plucky young'un. Once when she was screaming and we tried to quiet her, she said: 'I wouldn't cry so, if you didn't hurt me.'" Even so, one man had to hold her legs and another her head. Dr. Shultz cleaned the bone fragments and put them back, sewed up the wound and gave Sara 250 cc of plasma. A mattress was slipped between Sara and the table, and she slept soundly.

Getting her down the mountain next day was a business. A rider tried to carry her on a pillow but his arms went numb with the strain. So the rest of the way they carried her on the stretcher. They stopped twice to give her more plasma and sedatives.

Just 24 hours after the first call from Golden Trout, Sara Sharr was put to bed in Lone Pine's hospital and given tetanus and penicillin shots. Last week, though her right eye was still closed, she was cheerful and well on the way to recovery.

After he got Sara Sharr to bed, and was eating dinner, Dr. Shultz got another emergency call: a woman, bleeding profusely from a severe cut, was being flown out of the mountains to him.

Emergencies are standard practice in Dr. Shultz's vast domain, which stretches 225 miles long, 150 miles wide, from 14.495-foot Mount Whitney (the U.S.'s highest) to sub-sea-level Death Valley.

Shultz drives a shiny new Buick and has a De Soto station wagon rigged as an ambulance. He pilots his own Fairchild plane for easy hops up & down the valley, and flies with a pilot in an old Waco into mountain meadows. All told, Dr. Shultz manages to see an average of 45 patients a day.

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