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PROVO CANYON — Though Utah’s litany of snowstorms isn't known to make anything safer, they may have recently saved one Utah man’s life.
Devin Stratton was skiing with his friend, Matt Reeves, on Tuesday, Jan. 18 through the Aspen Grove route to the Mount Timpanogos summit when he misinterpreted the route and skied right off the edge of a 150-foot cliff, nearly the equivalent of falling off the Kimball Tower at Brigham Young University.
Stratton did not suffer so much as a bruise, but was skiing with a GoPro and captured the footage of his fall, which Stratton's other friend Matt Galland later posted on Facebook where it spread quickly.
“I hit that little jump before the cliff and I was in mid-air thinking I had a landing, and I see the cliff so I turn sideways trying to stop," Stratton said. "I thought about my cousin who is quadriplegic from a car accident, and I thought I was going to be paralyzed for sure. And then as I skied further, I thought I was dead for sure because I saw how big the cliff actually was.”
As Stratton went over the side of the cliff, his skis clipped some branches protruding from the mountain face and flipped him over, causing him to land on his back in the snow below.
“I couldn’t see for a second, (but) as I started to see, I yelled for my friend to watch out cause I was scared he was going to land on me and kill both of us,” Stratton said. “And yeah, obviously, I was sore but I didn’t have a bruise.”
Stratton and Reeves then dug through the snow for five hours afterward trying to find Stratton’s missing ski, which had come off in the fall. They ultimately found it buried in the snow about 30 feet from where he landed and Stratton skied the rest of the way back with no problem.
After the fall, however, Stratton went to get an X-ray, since he was participating in an ice climbing competition the next day. The X-ray checked out and Stratton won the competition the next day.
"I’d broken a lot of my equipment, including my backpack. I had ripped the strap," Stratton said. "And they had a pull-up contest at the Ice Festival and they were giving away a free backpack to the winner, so I decided I was going to win. So I did 910 pull-ups, not consecutive, but in the next day and a half after that, so I won that backpack, which was nice."
And, according to Stratton, he's had no lasting side effects, from either the 150-foot drop or the 910 pull-ups.
"My neck is a little sore, but that’s to be expected," he said. "It’s a lot less than I was expecting."
Stratton has since posted the video of his fall to Instagram and Facebook and his cousins, a couple of experienced YouTubers, edited a video of the fall that shows a little more explicitly what happened, according to Stratton.
