Falling 91 meters onto hard rock often leaves little hope of survival. However, a mountaineer survived this “unsurvivable” situation after slipping a rope through his harness and escaped with non-fatal injuries. Scientists naturally tried to understand how he achieved this.
As described in a 2011 case report, a 28-year-old woman was climbing with her boyfriend like every other day. With 20 years of climbing experience, the woman was no stranger to climbing large rock faces, and they both wore seat belts and helmets. The ascent in question consisted of three separate 30.5-metre boulder faces, and the woman had nearly completed the ascent while securing a 91-metre-high anchor to anchor them to the wall.
However, the rope had no safety knot and slipped from the harness, causing it to drop vertically 61 meters onto the rocks below, crashing there, and fall another 30.5 meters before stopping. The impact is estimated at around 120.7 – 128.7 kilometers per hour, and you can imagine how impressive the woman’s survival was, given the very low chance of survival of pedestrians in a car crash traveling at just 69 km/h.
Her boyfriend watched everything and tried to help her. The woman was awake but unresponsive and in obvious pain. First aid was administered until the first responders arrived and intubated the woman. He was transported to a hospital and resuscitated, where the extent of his injuries was revealed.
The climber had a traumatic brain injury, blunt trauma to the internal organs, multiple rib fractures, fractures to the femur and pelvis, and many other things. Still, he was alive despite everything.
Despite the brain injury and spinal cord injury that resulted in neurological problems and paraplegia, extensive rehabilitation and invasive surgeries led to an excellent recovery. The woman had basically normal brain function and continued rehabilitation to increase the weight bearing of her lower extremities. This was a marked improvement over the initial lack of sensation he had below his spinal cord injury.
How did he fall from 91 meters and survive?
Coming to the miracle of his survival, the researchers determined that the lowered body position may have blunted the blow and allowed the force to be reduced sufficiently to prevent fatal injuries. The team said they tried to protect the head and chest from as much impact as possible by rolling backwards in an “ideal” body position to land on the feet first and then land from a big fall. The large surface area of her thighbone, pelvis, and then back resulted in as much slowdown as possible before reaching vital organs in the chest, and the team believes these conditions saved the woman from sudden death.
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