It was the most eventful day I had ever spent in the mountains even before we saw the woman sitting in the trail with blood streaming down her face.

The sight was rather grisly.

Her nose and cheeks were so thoroughly coated with blood that from a distance of 100 feet or so it looked as though she were wearing a maroon mask.

She was holding her hands to her face and they too were smeared.

The scene seemed more typical of a 1980s slasher movie — the sort that pits a group of hapless teenagers against a villain who inevitably interrupts the carnage to deliver a witty pun — than to the alpine splendor of the Sierra Nevada mountains above Lake Tahoe.

Despite the blood, which was even spattered on a trailside granitic boulder, the woman was friendly.

She was in fact immediately apologetic, as though she was worried more about interfering with our hike than with the gash on the bridge of her nose which continued to ooze blood as she smiled.

Her story was simply told.

She is an experienced hiker, having recently finished a “rim to rim” trip in a single day at Grand Canyon. She wears bifocal glasses. She told us that the lenses can affect her perception, and although she understandably didn’t recall the fall, she had landed face first.

She told us she was sure she could get back to the trailhead — it was just a quarter-mile or so away, and downhill — if we would help her up.

My wife, Lisa, and I, who were hiking with our kids, Olivia and Max, on the first full day of our vacation, both replied, almost in unison, that we didn’t think that was a good idea.

We urged her to remain sitting.

I rummaged through my pack to see if I had something to stanch her wound.

Lisa took out her cellphone and said she would call 911.

As it happened, we told the hiker, we knew EMTs were already at the trailhead.

This necessitated an explanation, both there, on the Tahoe Rim trail, and here.

Less than half an hour earlier we parked at the Mount Rose summit, along the paved highway that connects Reno and Lake Tahoe. At 8,911 feet, it is the highest year-round pass through the Sierras.

We were standing around our car, ready to start our hike, when a noise, which I first took for a badly muffled truck climbing the final grade on the Reno side, reached a crescendo that no wheeled vehicle could create.

It was a massive four-engine propeller aircraft, threading the pass at an altitude that was probably not nearly as low as it seemed.

(Which was low enough that I fancied, once my heart rate had subsided to something less than dangerous velocity, that I could make out individual rivets on the fuselage.)

I think it was a C-130 Hercules.

Less than a minute later a second aircraft, of the same type, flew through the pass on the other side of the ridge where the trail runs.

After that thrilling, and wholly unexpected interlude, I presumed the hike, and the rest of the day, would be anticlimactic.

But then Max exclaimed.

“He crashed.”

I whirled around and looked across the highway.

Amid a cloud of dust that was quickly dissipating in the brisk mountain wind, a motorcycle was lying on its side against the cutbank, its rider sprawled across the granitic sand.

He was hollering, obviously in pain.

Between profanity — wholly understandable given the circumstances — he hollered about being “stuck.”

I sprinted across the road, Lisa just behind me.

Fortunately the rider wasn’t actually trapped beneath his Harley-Davidson, as Lisa and I would have struggled to move it. I suspect his foot got tangled in the saddle bag when he went over.

He was certain that his leg was broken.

Other than a cut on one hand he didn’t seem hurt otherwise. He had a helmet, which he had taken off after the crash.

A few dozen cars were parked at the pass — the Tahoe Rim trail is popular, and it was a fine sunny Sunday morning — and someone had already called

911.

A minute or so after Lisa and I got there a woman who is a nurse practitioner ran across the highway, along with a man who said he is a first responder.

I brought the first aid kit from our trunk, the limit of the assistance I could offer.

We had hiked only a few hundred yards when we heard, then saw, an ambulance and a couple other emergency vehicles on the highway below.

We were still talking about the two episodes — the two low-flying planes and the motorcycle crash — when we saw the woman sitting in the trail.

We stayed with her for 15 minutes or so, as Lisa talked with the 911 operator to make sure the EMTs knew where we were.

The woman, despite her injury, was friendly and engaging.

If not for the blood it would have been a typical trailside conversation, the chance encounter with another hiker who you almost certainly will never see again.

At least 20 hikers passed while we waited, and almost all paused to ask if they could help. One offered the injured woman a packet of moistened wipes so she could get rid of at least some of the blood.

Like the motorcycle rider she was completely coherent.

Unlike the rider, she didn’t swear.

We lingered for a minute or two after the two EMTs arrived. We wished the woman good luck and then continued on our hike.

Nothing much of note happened the rest of that day — or any other day during our vacation, which included stops in Yuba City, Fort Bragg and Eureka, California, and Florence and Redmond in Oregon.

I appreciated the lack of drama.

As someone who struggles to properly attach a bandage, thrust into a first responder role I am more apt to worsen the situation than to improve it.