Falling Into a Mountain: Pulverising Impact

In a remote corner of the Himalayas, close to the border of Nepal and Tibet, a jagged mountain

chain serates the Cobalt sky.

“It's a bright cloudless day, and the sun's glare of the snow is blinding.”

Around 20,000 feet up on a wide wind swept plateau, a tent has been erected on the frozen ground. Inside, an unzipped sleeping bag, a head torch, a coffee percolator balanced atop a camping stove, unused, clearly whoever was just here didn't plan on being gone for long. Outside the entrance of the tent, a set of footprints leads off at a slight angle, weaving

through the deep, soft powder.

The tracks are fresh, not yet covered over by new deposits.

They stretch on for a short distance until abruptly they stop, vanishing into a tiny, dark hole in the snow. A pin brick of black in the endless white.

“It's the opening to a deep hidden crevasse where 70 feet beneath the surface down in the”

bowels of the glacier, 44 year-old John Ol, lies in a crumpled heap. I'm just laying there on my side, and on top of the arm that I just ripped out, and then I feel the agony, but then it's also like, "Whoa, wait, I'm alive." John Blinks is vision adjusting to the bluish blackness.

Blood gushes from his nose and spills through the cracks in his clenched teeth.

His right arm hangs by his side, twisted into an unnatural position. Far above him, a dim shaft of light leaks through a hole in the snow. Gingerly, trying not to put any weight on his right arm, John pushes himself upright. Every breath sends voice of pain ripping through his chest. He looks around, dazed. The last few seconds are a blur, a rush of vertical, a sudden, pulverizing impact with

the crevasse floor. But as he comes to a senses, John notices that his legs are dangling off the edge of something. He isn't at the bottom of the crevasse at all. I could see maybe 100 meters one direction and probably 50 meters the other direction, and there was just a couple of blocks of ice, traps, and different spots in the crevasse

that I had landed on all of them. John has landed on a frozen slab, wedged between the crevasse's vertical walls. Below him, the chasm continues stretching on endlessly into black nothingness. Balance on his precarious platform, delicately poised above a bottomless abyss, John turns his gaze in the only direction that now matters up.

His only option of escape it seems is an impossible one. There was just no way a climate, especially if we just want our, because this arm was totally useless that I can't use this half of my body, that I'm just looking up on how and how am I going to get up there.

“Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes?”

If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. Please have your astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extra ordinary situations. People suddenly forced a fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet Professor, Mountenea, and Environmental Scientist, John, or.

In the screen of 2014, the 44-year-old is leading a research trip in a remote corner of the Himalayas. And on the morning of May 22, John experiences firsthand the dangers of doing scientific research on the roof of the world. While crossing a harmless looking snow field, he stumbles into the mouth of a concealed

crevice, plummeting into the castle. And so it's one of those things where it's just like vertical I'm falling. This is how I die, you know? After tumbling 70 feet, John comes to land on a hard icy ledge. But surviving the fall might only have bought him time, turning what would have been a quick

His trap, critically injured, deep beneath the surface of the glacier, with no means of calling

for help.

“His only hope is an audacious, elaborate, and incredibly dangerous self-rescue.”

"Hunter meter fall, if I fall, so my habit of like free solo from block to block, knowing what one fall is death." Time John Hopkins, from the noise a podcast network this, is real survival stories. It's April 2014, Everest Basecamp. In the shadow of the world's tallest mountain, a group of people sit around a campfire,

heads bowed in meditation. This is a poochar, a Buddhist ritual for blessing the dead. While solemn, monstrous echo around the valley, ink, black smoke, rises and dissipates in the thin, clear air, brightly colored prayer flags, strung between tent poles, flutter in the frigid wind.

Among the mourners is 44-year-old John Orr, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed college professor and climate scientist.

“John is here on official business, he's leading a team of researchers collecting snow samples”

from Everest's system mountain, not safe. The hope is that the samples will contain clues about how climate change is affecting ice in the region. But yesterday, tragedy struck on Everest, and work was pushed to the back of everyone's minds.

A massive slab of ice broke off the side of the glacier, crashing down on the heads of an unsuspecting group of shepherds.

John was one of the first on the scene to help search through the debris.

We spent that whole day digging bodies out, and helicoptering bodies down and trying to figure out who was alive and dead because you didn't even know. Some people had gone above, and so was like, did they make it through, where they trapped there.

“By the time all the victims were accounted for, the death toll had reached 16, making”

this the deadliest accident on Everest to date. Among those tragically lost were several of the shepherds who John had hired to assist with his own expedition. And so it really was this kind of intense time period where it was just me and my friends morning, so we spent essentially hours of the day doing nothing but meditating on

doing pushes, trying to blast the dead as much as we could. One death has hit John particularly hard. Asman was a young shepherds he'd hired in the weeks before the trip.

It was to be his first ever expedition as a guide.

Essentially, if you can get on and become a guide as a surpa, that's like, you know, playing in the NBA or something, it's going to make the money for your family to survive and everything. And so we were given in that shot, you know. In the wake of such a tragedy, everything else can pale into insignificance.

As the days go by, however, John and his colleague's thoughts gradually return to the reason they're here. The expedition, the research. Caring on as before clearly isn't going to be possible. Following the deadly icefall, no climbers are allowed to ascend Everest or surrounding peaks.

John and his team wait patiently at base camp, but after almost a month with no change, it becomes clear that ordinary service isn't going to resume. Still, despite the setback, neither John nor his colleagues are ready to go home. Perhaps even more so than before, they feel they have a duty to complete the research that brought them here.

Well, I felt at least to a poshman sacrifice for this greater good, and for us just to walk away, would garnish the sacrifice he made. If anything, the tragedy on Everest only highlights the importance of John's research. As the planet gets warmer, these mountains become more volatile, with a greater likelihood of avalanches, rockfalls, and collapsing glaciers.

And so unwilling to call it quits, John and his team start scouting out different locations to gather samples.

It's already mid-May.

“They have just a few weeks to pick a location, get there, acclimatize, and collect samples.”

All before the arrival of warmer weather in June makes their high-altitude work far too dangerous. After some discussion, they settled on Mount Himland near the Anapurna range. After obtaining climbing permits, the team embarks from the capital Catland do to the base of Himland, keenly aware that every day that passes brings them closer to that all important cut-off.

The end of the climbing season on Everest and in the Himalayas is when the monsoon hits. And so we knew we were looking at late-May early June as when the monsoon hits. And so we were getting closer and closer to that, because we'd had to move and come down from Everest all our year over there, anapurna and go back up. So we know we've got like a week and a half left.

It's a trip, not without risk. But the balance against that is potential reward. The opportunity to gather data and push science forward. This search for knowledge is one of John's main motivators that keeps bringing him back to the mountains.

Growing up as a keen climber, he learned about the early mountaineers who scaled Everest for no better reason than because it was there.

But such naked ambition has never sat well with him.

At the end of the day, climbing is a selfish pursuit of minutes, risking your family's happiness, it's risking your friends' happiness, if you die, you're dead, but everyone that you've touched is hurt and you're leaving that void. And for me personally, it just needed to mean more. It wasn't until he was older that he discovered how to make climbing more meaningful.

After finishing his bachelor's degree in environmental science, John began applying for PhD programs, but before resuming his studies, he decided to take a year out. And it was during this period, traveling through South America and climbing peaks as he

“went, that he came to an important realization.”

His two great passions in life, climbing and environmental science could exist side-by-side. The mountains could teach him more about our changing world. The Andes are great because maybe 100 meters of horizontal distance gets you 5000 meters of vertical distance. And so I could see how, as people moved up and down the mountains and managed the land

in different ways, that it led to really different environmental outcomes. Years later, John co-founded the Climate Science Program, a non-profit organization that facilitates research in remote mountainous environments. John is currently professor at Western Kentucky University. But during the summers, he guides researchers through some of the world's most extreme

places, from the dryest deserts to the highest peaks. We'd measure vegetation, we'd measure water quality, we'd measure grazing impacts, fire impacts, and you know, published papers on all his different things.

But then the heart was always the snow.

You know, how was the snow changing?

“The purpose of this trip to the Himalayas is to measure the speed in which glacial ice”

is melting. One of my colleagues actually was working with NASA and so NASA was going to fly a satellite directly overhead. So while we were collecting snow samples on the ground, they would measure the reflectance up.

And of course, the reflectance, the more that reflects, the less absorbed in the less glacial melts. So that really lets us directly measure how fast glaciers are disappearing. So it's just wonderful scientific expedition we had all planned out. Now, after the tragedy on Everest and the delays that followed that expedition is back

on track, albeit behind schedule. John and his lean team of two researchers, plus a few local porters and cooks, make their way up the lowest slopes of the Himland Massive.

But ominous reminders of the advancing season are never far away.

We start heading up and there's a snowfall of about half a meter. We're all kind of nervous about it. As the snow continues to cascade down, the group forges on. They are sand fast, quickly reaching these 6,000 m or 20,000 feet camp situated on a snow field above the upper glacier.

They've made excellent progress, but as they set up their tents, the consequence of their haste comes clear. One of the researchers is suffering from altitude sickness due to not acclimatizing properly. She's in a bad way, and it leaves John as expedition lead with the tough decision. And so we were sort of stuck with this, what the heck are we going to do?

kind of a nice safe area in the camp.

“I agree to stay up high at 6,000 m and collect the samples that we're collecting, and they'll”

go down for a day, eat a bunch of food, kind of recover a little bit, and then come back up. John watches, as is two, fellow researchers, accompanied by the Nepalese guides, make their way back down to base camp.

The first time in weeks, he's alone.

He crawls into his tent and hunkers down in his sleeping bag. After a long day's climbing, sleep quickly over Texan. The next morning John rises at around 8.30. He sits up, yawning, his breath misting the air inside the tent. Markling frost clings to the inner canvas.

He unzips the doorflap to reveal a magnificent vista, sprawled out beneath him.

“The mountains framed against an impossibly blue sky.”

Aside from the wisps of spin drift, blowing from the peaks across the valley, nothing stirs.

The panorama is a still and silent as a photograph, John stretches and smiles.

And I've got the whole day, I've got nothing to do, it's a beautiful day, beautiful views, I can see it in a permanent, I can see Everest, I can see all this stuff. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to go out, collect some snow to melt for coffee. John gets dressed, pulling on his climbing trousers, t-shirt gloves, and a thin, lightweight shell.

He doesn't bother with a hat or down jacket, he'll only be outside for a few minutes. He grabs a pair of ice axes to dig up snow. Then he trudges away from the tent, crampons crunching.

“The air is thin, and lungs scorchingly cold.”

John shields his eyes, blinded by the sun's dazzling reflection of the glacier. As he walks, his steps are confident, self assured, the strides of a man in his element. But there is something he doesn't know.

This area appears at first glance like an unbroken field of snow, but it isn't.

And if the fresh powder lies a crack, a slender, jagged seam carved into the glaciers frigid bulk, and he's headed straight for it. It was just this one little hidden crevasse, and it was hidden because of that meter of snow that was on top. So it's kind of like a tiger trap.

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Available in all good bookshops, and wherever you get your audiobooks. It's the morning of May 22nd, 2014, in the Himalayas. On the slopes of Mount Himland, 44-year-old John Oall has just inadvertently stepped into a concealed crevasse. The ground opens up beneath his feet, and swallows him in a single swift gong.

One moment is there, the next is gone. Vanished in a blur of flailing arms and a scattering of ice shards. Below the surface, John plummets through the dark, stunned by the disorienting whiplash of sensation.

Now he's falling through black space.

“I mean, it's bright sunlight to the point that's hurting my eyes, to effectively darkness.”

You feel the Virgo, and we're human beings, we know what Virgo means. And so it's one of those things where it's just like, "I'm falling." This is how I die, you know? John bumps, scrapes, and creases his way down the crevasse. His knees and elbows clattering against the walls.

I start bouncing off the one side in my reaction, like I always thought, "Well, if I fall

on a crevasse, kind of like you're seeing a movie, you're going to like catch yourself." He's still gripping both his eye-saxis. He throws out a desperate right hand, slamming the blade into the wall. The axe pierces the ice, but it doesn't stop his dissent. Instead, the sudden jolt of resistance snaps his arm and yanks the bone from its socket.

And then...

“John lies in a tangled heap, stunned the breath smashed from his lungs, little specks of light”

dance across his vision. Slowly, his senses flicker back to life.

I'm just laying there on my side, I'm on top of the arm that I just ripped out, and my legs

are dangling over the edge, and then I feel the agony, but then it's also like, "Whoa, wait, I'm alive." It feels improbable, miraculous, even. It also feels like something heavy is pressing down on his diaphragm. John strains, using all his strength to force a trickle of air into his lungs.

Once he's breathing more normally, he attempts to sit up and get his bearings. He is landed on a block of ice, suspended between the walls of the chasm. During over the edge, it seems the crevice continues down, the 300 feet more at least.

“If his ice block hadn't broken his fall, it would be dead no question, swallowed without”

a trace.

Gasping in pain, he tips his head back and pears up towards the surface.

The walls of the crevice don't rise in a straight line. They undulate with kinks and crags and overhags, but at the very top, 70 feet above his head, a faint beam of sunlight trickles through the hole he fell through, roughly the height of a seven-story building. John stares for a while, and as the facts of his situation become clear, disbelief turns

to dismay. He isn't carrying sat-like phone or any other means of calling for help. He can't just sit and wait, because the others won't get here until tomorrow afternoon, and there's no way he'd survive the night, not down here. And I could just feel the cold penetrating, because all I had on was just a thin liner

glove, and a t-shirt, and then just a shell. Because again, it was bright sunlight, that was only going to be out of the tent for 20 minutes. And so it was like I was in a deep freezer. I mean, it was cold, cold. It's pretty obvious, John's only hope of surviving is by climbing out himself, an almost

inconceivable prospect. He looks around for his eye-saxis, he let go of them during the fall, and without them, he'll have no chance of scaling the crevasse. He feels around in the gloom. No sign, a pang of dread shutters through him.

The tools could easily have bounced off the ledge and gone tumbling down into the abyss. His hands scrabble about desperate, until relief. John closes his grip around the handle of one axe, then another, both lying beside him in the darkness. It's a big stroke of luck.

But as he turns to the 70-foot edifice looming over him, he sees that the wall is covered in a thick layer of slushy snow. And so I reached up and sort of put my axe in, and it just slides down without any resistance at all. And what I realized had happened was as moist air came over before the snowfall hit, came

over and went down the crevasse, it quick froze, it pulled the water out against his

And so there was just no way of climate. It's about 9 a.m.

“With the crevasse wall above John manifestly unclamable, he's flummaged.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something he always brings with him on research

expeditions, his video camera. He turns the lens on himself and starts narrating. The fall is broken arm, the apparent impossibility of escape. Partly John does this out of habit. When he's out in the field, he records his observations and ideas for reference later.

On this occasion, he can't be certain if there'll be a later. But one thing's for sure, he has never needed a good idea more than now. He speaks slowly into the lens, his breath fogging the glass as he describes the layout of the cousin.

"To my left, the crevasse is wider and wider and wider.

It's not much I can do with that."

“He swivels the camera around in the other direction and there, a glimmer of hope.”

Several hundred feet to his right, the chasm narrows. It's walls tapering until they almost touch. If he could get there, he might be able to wedge himself between both sides and shimmy his way to the surface. Crucially, the wall along this horizontal stretch isn't completely smooth.

Use chunks of ice and broken boulders are wedged in the crevasse, intermittently filling the hollow space. With any luck, John could use them as makeshift stepping stones, moving from block to block and climb his way out that way. It's a plan.

Whether or not it's a good one, only time will tell.

“He switches off the camera and stows it away in his pocket.”

Using his teeth, he tries to move his right arm, that's a non-starter. He is going to have to maneuver along the wall without the use of his right hand. You'll have to devise a makeshift solution. So unfortunately I was moving to my right and my arm wasn't working. So what I had to do was I would take one ice axe and reach over as far across my body

as I could, sink it into the wall and then pull myself over and tell I was kind of leaning up against it and then I would reach back and grab the other ice axe. It's going to be slow and perilous. John will have to dig the points of his crampons into the ice and reach across his body with his good left arm.

Your plant, one axe, then lean against it as he reaches back for the other, repeating this difficult move over and over. Redding himself, John sets off, stepping cautiously from his narrow perch, driving metal spikes into the glassy crevass wall. One armed, he inches his way along the slippery face.

It takes him over half an hour to reach the first block of ice.

He claps his onto it, his body's screaming, his lungs burning. After a brief rest, John looks for the next solid platform. His heart sinks. It's separated from him by a 50 foot golf, more than double what he's just traversed with nothing to cling to but share, featureless ice.

He rallies his courage and continues on. Did he soon, he's established a kind of lavered rhythm, strike, heave, swing, kick, on and on. He's about halfway across the gap when he pauses to catch his breath. His muscles are on fire, every tendon stretched to breaking point.

Teasuring on the points of his crampons, John glances down between his quivering legs. A few ice chips come loose and swell down into the darkness. There's nothing below me, so it's a 100 meter fall down into the very bowels of the glacier. I'm on my front points, so I'm on two pieces of metal on my feet and one hand, and that's all that's holding me up from a 100 meter fall.

This stirs into the abyss. Glasses are active, moving objects, not just static blocks of ice.

From the blackness, John can almost hear the ice groaning and shifting, the wind shivering through its dark channels.

“I'm looking down and it's sort of as angelating I can see how the water had flowed down”

and I could just visualize my body flowing down it. I started just getting nervous or whatever, and then I had this vision of my mom and

I was like, "If I fall in here, they're never going to find my body.

Nobody's going to be able to figure out what happened to me or I went and I couldn't do that tour." It was kind of amazing, it just slammed the motion shut and just re-invigorated me. John pulls his eyes away. He summons the strength and redirects his focus into his hand movements, his feet positioning.

On he goes, side stepping along the vortigenous ice, one foot over the other, until eventually. He reaches the second platform, panting, John pulls out his camera, time for an update. He looks down the lens and describes his journey so far. His words coming in short, breathless gasps. He points the camera left to show the distance he's come and then up and right to show

the distance still left to climb.

“The video was nice because it was me talking myself through what I was doing, you know?”

I was like, "All right, well I can't go that way, I still can't go up yet. This way I can see so I was thinking it through at every time I would stop." But he can't stop for long. It's not just the code. At this altitude, the air he's breathing contains dangerously low levels of oxygen, roughly

45% of that found at sea level. Pilots generally turn on supplemental oxygen at around 10,000 feet. John is twice that high. It makes everything he's doing that much harder. I was like, I was running marathon at a full sprint.

I'm breathing as hard as I could breathe the entire time and since the every time I would reach a platform, I would just stop and spend like five minutes catching my breath.

“After further enormous effort, John makes it three quarters of the way along the horizontal”

stretch. Almost at the point where he can start climbing straight up, pain, riots down his right side. But by pouring all of his concentration into what he's doing, he manages to suppress old other distractions. It was a computer.

It was this axe goes into that spot. This axe goes into that spot. That foot goes there. That foot goes there. There was no emotion.

I mean, there was just no way your mind could take the overwhelming impossibility of what I was doing unless you just work computer. It's about 2pm, almost five hours since John fell.

Finally, with acid coursing through his muscles, he has reached the place where the Kravass

narrows. It's walls close enough that he can balance his back against one while digging his crampons into the other. He hacks at the pale blue ice, chiseling off glassy sheets. The texture of the walls here is different.

Less moisture flows through the narrow opening, resulting in a harder, brittle consistency. It makes it difficult to get a firm purchase. So, it's super slow and time consuming, but on the positive side, there was actually little edges. And so I could sort of stem between it and I'm slowly starting to just climb my way through

that broken, stemmy ice. John looks up. The surface can't be more than 40 feet away. With his back pressed against the one wall, he kicks his spikes into the opposite wall and chimneys his way up the Kravass.

As he gets higher, the light changes around him, going from a blueish black to a kind of deep aquamarine. He's getting closer. Lost in his rhythm, John reaches up with his left hand and hammers his axe into the ice.

He hears a crack and feels a sudden luch, as a huge chunk of glassyer breaks off the wall. It smashes into him, knocking one leg from its foothold. John braces himself.

he just pushed me into the wall and bounced off and fell down.

“Otherwise, if I had been lower, it would have knocked me off and I did that.”

He shakes it off, can't lose concentration now. On he goes and automaton, kick, shimmy, kick, shimmy. Every inch bringing him closer to daylight. He can see the blue sky through the opening now, can practically feel the sun warming his frozen skin, guiding him towards the light.

His broken bones grinds together as he scrambles higher and higher.

And then finally, break through.

So I get then to the top of the actual crevasse, and there's this hole, and it felt like digging myself out of my grave, because I had to reach up then and clear all that snow. So that there was a hole big enough for me to crawl through.

“The anchors' crampons, and thrusts himself up through the hole.”

His head and arms out, all he has to do now is plant his axe and pull the rest of his body from the crevasse. But at the final hurdle, John finds that he has nothing left to give, and I'm just like shake, and I'm so tired, and I'm screwed, because it's loose thick snow, I'm like raking through it.

I couldn't get out. I sit there for a minute or two, I'm like, "Oh, look, crap, I get all the way here. I'm going to fall back down." John's muscles quiver, every fiber on the verge of collapse. It's impossible to get any traction in this loose, powdery snow.

“It's like trying to hammer a nail into quicksand, and any second, his crampons could lose”

their purchase on the ice. I'm just going to have to jump for it, and so I just push off as hard as I can with my right leg, and like kind of dive forward with my axe and try to like sink it as deep as I can. With the last drop of energy he can muster, he propels himself forward. He leaps from the jaws of the crevice, and flings out his left arm, bringing the axe down

hard into the snow, and hoping, praying, that it bites. And it does. John crawls as far as he can, eager to put more distance between himself and the gaping black hole behind him.

Finally, unable to go another inch, he collapses face down in the snow.

I try and stand up, and I stand up for like a split second and me in the collapse. I've reached the point where I've just, I've spent everything that's in my body. Trumbling, John lifts his head. His tent is agonizingly close, just a few dozen feet. But even the short crawl over to it might be more than his exhausted body can handle.

I thought I'd completed this and could move on to being rescued and heading home for some food, but instead I'm, I've still got a long way to go. It's almost six p.m. As daylight fades over the Himalayas, the ice cliffs and ridges of the Himalayan massive fall into shadow.

On a remote platter, perched high above the glacier, John drags himself through the snow, his long blonde hair matted with frozen blood. After staggering, stumbling and crawling the short distance from the mouth of the

crevasse, he finally reaches his tent.

He unzipped the door and crawls inside, he's made it. He's intensely thirsty, but even though he can see the water sloshing around inside his bottle, he can't get the lid off with one functioning hand. It is just another torture he must endure. John reaches for his painkillers and swallows them dry.

Next, he opens his backpack and pulls out his only communication tool, a small hand-held in-reach device. He can't place calls, but it can send and receive texts via satellite. It can also access social media, and this might be the most efficient way of raising the alarm. And so I just posted in our Facebook, I'm like, "Hey, this is John Fallen, a crevasse.

If we can really help for, we can start a rescue type deal."

“John taps out his post and sends it off, a digital flare into the ether.”

Within minutes, the in-reach screen lights up. His hail Mary has been seen by a colleague, a fellow academic at the Climate Science Program. The colleague informs John that she is called global rescue, an international crisis response company that will soon initiate his extraction. This is, once his team has waited through all the red tape.

That takes a lot of good stuff to organize. Now, the helicopters fly all the time, but back then there was just a few helicopters. So, it was going to take time to negotiate with them in terms of the cost for the rescue company.

So, yeah, I knew I was stuck there overnight.

At least help his on its way.

“John picks up the in-reach again and sends off a few more messages to his girlfriend, his”

mum, and some of his close friends and colleagues, telling them how much they mean to him. Soon the device vibrates with a flurry of replies, messages of encouragement and affection. He draws strength from their words. But even now, surrounded by the support of his loved ones, he keeps his emotions strictly in check.

"I'm still just very analytical, and it makes me feel good that they're talking to me and that they love me, but at the same time, I just, if I let myself feel, I'll feel the agony, you know, I'll feel the recognition that my body is totally broken." As the night draws in, John hunkers down. The painkillers have taken the edge of his injuries, but sleep feels unlikely.

Besides, there is still the possibility that if he does drift off, he might not wake up.

“As he sits there, listening to the wind howl outside his tent, it's not just his broken”

bones that are of concern. "I knew I was bleeding in turn like I could feel my stomach filling with, you know, look with it, and so I was sitting up on the packs that an angle with my feet kind of hanging down into the little vestibule area, which is a sleeping bagel, and over the top, thankfully it was warm otherwise I'd have fried frozen the death.

As long as not in my life, unquestionably." Finally, Don lightens the edge of his tent. The new day is caused for optimism. By now, the rescue operation will surely have clicked into gear. So maybe five in the morning, it starts getting light, and I'm like, "Yes, I'm gonna be here soon.

Six, I'm just an agony, I'm running low on. Pain killers, seven, eight, nine, ten." As the morning wears on, John's frustration grows.

He sends texts to global rescue, asking what's taking them so long, but the replies always

are saying, "We're working on it." The interminable weight goes on, until finally, at 11am, he hears it. The guttural thrum of rotor blades beating the air. A few moments later, the door of his tent unzips, and the face of a Nepalese man appears. John tries to speak, but his voice is a barely audible crook.

At this point, I'm close to that. I can't walk, I can't move, but I was kind of laying on a thermarest. And so, the sherbet just grabs both edges of the thermarest and just starts running across towards the helicopter, dragging me, bumping the whole way, breaking all my bones again on the ice.

Within minutes, he's in the helicopter. Once he's fully strapped in place, the pilot sparks the engine and guides the chopper down the mountain. Soon, they're below the snowline. Through his fluttering eyelids, John catches glimpses of lush green fields, rice paddies,

and terrorist foothills. As the elevation changes, so does the climate, going from sub-freezing to hotse and humid. And then all the sudden, I'm sweating like a pig, because I've got all this heavy stuff like trying to strip stuff off, and then we make it down, down the hospital. John is taken to a hospital in Kathmandu, and suddenly he's being stretched through

brightly lit corridors. He's wheeled into the x-ray room, where doctors and nurses swarm around him. Some hold him down, while others try to force his dislocated shoulder back into place.

are administered.

“The room blurs and fades to black, as he slips gently from consciousness.”

So he has broken 15 bones, including six vertebrae, John only spends a couple of days in

hospital in Kathmandu. Desperate to get back to his loved ones, he declines the doctors advice to have immediate surgery on his right arm. He just wants to go home. And within a week, his back in Kentucky, surrounded by friends and family, but still relying

heavily on pain killers. After surgeons eventually do operate on his broken bones, he is discharged from hospital and sent home to heal at his own pace. But as the physical pain slowly subsides, he finds that it's the emotional aftermath of

“his ordeal that might have the longer tail.”

Sadly, as John's recovery grinds on, his relationship with his girlfriend suffers. After the accident, you know, I'm totally broken and my body out could barely move. I'm an agony and everything else. Yes, you fairly quickly broke up with me and moved on to the next person and that was probably the hardest emotional part of the entire thing.

For John, life after the accident will never be the same. Though he recovers well from his injuries, the near-death experience forces him to reassess.

It basically was one of the things where before this moment, life had always been this vast

ocean of possibility. You know, I could go to Africa, I could go to Nepal, I could go to Central America. And suddenly, way off in the distance I saw Horizon, and realized it wasn't gonna go forever. But the Horizon doesn't just remind John of his limitations. But also points him in which direction to go.

Following his fall and escape from the crevasse, he decides to uproot his life in Kentucky and live closer to things he loves, climbing and being in the mountains. He lands in Washington State where he sets up the mountain environments research institute, an organization that focuses exclusively on high-altitude climate research. In the years since, John says other positives have come from his ordeal.

For one thing, the publicity his story receives, provides him with a platform to promote his field of research and inspire others. It just gave me the opportunity to really share my experiences studying climate change around the world. The dangers of doing it, but also the joys and the benefits of doing it, showed people

different ways to interact with the environment, different careers, and different ways to care

“for the environment I think, even if there is some risk involved.”

Ultimately, positivity and perseverance defined John, before and after the accident.

Now they are the qualities that gave him what he needed to survive. Former reasons I climbed out is that I'm eternally optimistic, and you know, as I go, of course I'm going to climb out of it, how would I not climb out, take deal, and I've essentially had to fight for every bit of strength, because until high school, I was the skinny, weak nerd.

And so when I hit an obstacle like this, it's like all my life, I've had to fight to become what I was, and to having to fight that whole time really, I think I'll build the abstinence to keep fighting. In the next episode, we meet Rob Roth, a journalist who gets trapped right in the middle of an incendiary story.

In 1991, the TV reporter is following up on a small wildfire in the forested hills surrounding Oakland, California, a blaze which firefighters got under control the day before. With his wife, due to give birth today, Rob is hoping to get home on time, but this routine assignment soon takes a hellish term. When the winds suddenly change, Rob will find himself trapped in a reagnited inferno, camera

still rolling in the middle of one of the worst fire storms in America's history. That's next time. Listen right now without waiting, and without ads, by joining Noiser Plas.