
If it weren’t for her red hair, Saylor Guilliams might not be alive today.
Back in March 2014, the 22-year-old set out for what was supposed to be a fun hike in Santa Barbara, California, with her friend Brenden Vega, also 22. But inexperience and bad luck turned their adventure into a nightmare. The terrain was tougher than they expected, and as darkness crept in, they struggled to find their way back to their car. Then disaster struck — Guilliams miscalculated a jump from a rock and landed hard, breaking her left leg.
And just when things seemed bad, they got worse. Their phones were dead, and neither had thought to bring a flashlight. Vega, trying to help, attempted to carry Guilliams — but he lost his footing, went crashing down, shattered his glasses, broke his elbow, and to top it off, broke her ankle too. It was chaos.
With Guilliams unable to move, Vega had no choice but to leave her behind and go search for help. That was the last time she saw him.
A Lonely, Desperate Fight for Survival
For the next 24 hours, Guilliams lay in the wilderness, screaming for help despite slipping in and out of consciousness. The whole night passed, and still, no one came. By the next afternoon, exhaustion took over, and she stopped yelling altogether. Lying face down in the dirt, barely aware of her surroundings, she was covered in mud, surrounded by buzzing flies, and dangerously close to death.
But just as things seemed hopeless, three hikers unknowingly walked into the story.

Nicole Gergen, a 29-year-old pediatric resident at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Rhode Island, was hiking with her boyfriend, Joe Villapiano, and his brother-in-law, Peter Biava. As they made their way through the isolated, rocky terrain, something caught Gergen’s eye — a flash of red.
“Then I saw it move,” she later recalled.
Rushing over, she realized they had just stumbled upon a severely injured woman who had somehow survived alone in the wild for over a day. The situation was grim — Guilliams needed urgent medical attention, or she wasn’t going to make it.

Hot Pink Sneakers to the Rescue
Villapiano immediately grabbed his phone and dialed 911. The decision was a lucky break — Biava had actually argued against bringing their phones in the first place, thinking they should “connect with nature.”
“This place was so empty,” Biava, 28, later admitted. “It was the middle of a workday, and no one else was dumb enough to be out there. Even I was only there because I was unemployed.”
As emergency services rushed to the scene, they needed a way to pinpoint the hikers’ exact location. That’s when Gergen decided to get creative — she started waving her bright pink Adidas sneakers like a frantic air traffic controller. And it worked.
Meanwhile, news of the rescue reached Guilliams’ family, and her father, Jeff Guilliams, wasted no time. A former Fleet Training Specialist for the Navy SEALs, he jumped in his car and floored it.
“In my car, the speedometer maxes out at 125, but the needle didn’t move, so I must’ve been going even faster,” he later said. “Everyone moved over for me — it was great. I never had to change lanes.”
Soon, a rescue helicopter arrived and airlifted Guilliams to Cottage Hospital, where she finally learned the tragic news: Vega had never made it. His body was later found, and it’s believed he fell to his death while trying to get help.

Life After the Fall
The accident changed Guilliams’ life in ways she never expected. She underwent five surgeries in the following months, but she didn’t let the trauma stop her. Eleven months later, she returned to school at Ventura College and even took a class on holistic healing — an interest sparked by the experience.
Vega’s mother, despite her grief, postponed his funeral until Guilliams was well enough to attend.
The whole story might have remained a personal tragedy if it hadn’t blown up online. As HuffPost reported at the time, Biava later posted about the rescue under a pseudonym on Reddit in response to the question, “Hikers and backpackers of Reddit: What is the weirdest or creepiest thing you have found while hiking?” The internet took notice.
As for Jeff Guilliams, the ordeal made him rethink everything. He left his 14-year Navy career to spend more time with his daughter. “I used to be gone all the time,” he admitted. “Now I know that life can change in an instant. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. There but for the grace of God go I.”
Biava, now employed as a treasurer at an asset management firm, still marvels at the insane luck of it all. “I wasn’t even in California that morning,” he said. “I took a red-eye flight from Florida the night before. We could have hiked another trail. We could have skipped the hike altogether. We could have left our phones behind.”
Even his mother chimed in. “I knew it!” she told him. “The Lord had a purpose for you being unemployed that year!”
Gergen, for her part, said that despite her medical training, the experience left her in awe. “As a doctor, I deal with life-or-death situations,” she said, “but I’ve never felt so amazed by what the human body can endure. And how lucky we were to have been there at the right time.”
Villapiano, a wide receivers coach for Harvard football, later looked through photos from that fateful hike — only to realize Guilliams was barely visible in the background of some of them, lying injured just out of sight.
And what about Guilliams? She did eventually go hiking again — at Arroyo Verde Park — but this time, she played it safe.
“I made sure to stay on the trail.”