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Daily Mountain
47 years, Australia
The man who fell 60 feet while scrambling the Boulder Flatirons in April said he is preparing to leave rehabilitation and has healed “surprisingly quickly.”
Kyle Walker, 26, captured video of his harrowing fall on a GoPro camera.
Walker was critically injured after he fell about 60 feet while scrambling the Second Flatiron on April 16. He broke both wrists, eight ribs and his pelvis, and punctured a lung. But he said he is close to being released from Boulder Community Health’s Foothills Hospital.
“I am very much OK despite the long road of recovery ahead,” Walker wrote in an email to the Daily Camera. “I’m getting out of rehab tomorrow and healed surprisingly quickly.”
Walker said he was scrambling the Flatirons as he had done “hundreds” of times before when he decided to try a new route.
“In the middle of my final move I realize I’m tiring quickly and I have one chance to explode over the rock to a resting place,” Walker wrote. “Instead, my feet slipped on the lichen-covered section of the wall and I was in free fall before I knew what had happened.
“Accepting that I was dead, I didn’t flail or grab, I just fell,” Walker wrote.
Walker said he wound up in a gully for about an hour fading in an out of consciousness before he was found by a passing hiker. Rescue crews responded and performed a technical vertical litter evacuation and then a scree evacuation, which means the litter carriers used a rope to assist in the evacuation.
“I consider myself beyond lucky and wouldn’t recommend climbing new routes without practice or ropes to anyone,” Walker wrote.
This article first appeared on http://www.denverpost.com. The original can be read here.
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