An Alaska man survived being pinned face-down by a 700-pound boulder in a creek after his wife held his head above water to prevent him from drowning, officials say.
The harrowing incident involving Kell Morris happened last Saturday as he was hiking near Godwin Glacier outside of Seward on an isolated and undeveloped trail behind a state prison, according to Seward Fire Chief Clinton Crites.
“The patient was found lying in the creek on his stomach with an approximately 700 lb. boulder on top of him with his spouse holding his head out of water. The patient was hypothermic and in and out of consciousness,” the Seward Fire Department said. “Crews used air bags, ropes, and brute force to lift the boulder off the patient and pull him to safety. Once out of the water, the crew re-warmed the patient, and he became more alert, and his vitals improved.”
Morris, 61, who was trapped for about three hours, later told the Associated Press that “I was very lucky” and “God was looking out for me.”
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His wife, Jo Roop, is a retired Alaska State Trooper. They moved to Seward, about 120 miles south of Anchorage, from Idaho last fall when she took a job with the local police department.
The trail the couple was hiking on was a rocky creek bed lined with large boulders deposited by the glacier.
Morris told the AP he noticed dangerous boulders — some weighing up to 1,000 pounds — along the banks of the creek and avoided them the best he could, until he ran into an area he couldn’t pass.
“I was coming back and everything, the whole side slid out from under me,” he said.
Morris described how things became a blur as he tumbled down an embankment about 20 feet, landing face down in the water.
Then he immediately felt a boulder hit his back in what Crites described as “basically an avalanche of boulders.”
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Morris recounted to the AP how he felt an intense pain in his left leg and waited for his femur to snap.
“When it first happened, I was doubtful that there was going to be a good outcome,” Morris said.
His wife tried to free him for about 30 minutes, putting rocks under the boulder and trying to roll it off him, before she left to find a cell signal to call 911. She used her law enforcement experience to send exact GPS coordinates to dispatch.
The Seward Fire Department said a volunteer at the nearby Bear Creek Fire Department who works for Seward Helicopter Tours then heard the call “while working and he and a pilot volunteered to respond to the scene and pick up six firefighters via helicopter and transport them to the patient, thus cutting down 45 minutes of travel time.
“The patient was in a boulder field and the helicopter could only hover while firefighters had to jump from the helicopter to the ground as the helicopter could not land safely,” it said.
The Seward Fire Department said Morris was airlifted to a local hospital where he is now expected to make a full recovery, but “it is now doubt that without the help from the Seward Helicopter Tours this incident could have had a much different and potentially fatal outcome.”
Firefighters who carried out the rescue used two air bags normally reserved to extract people from wrecked vehicles to slightly lift the boulder.
“It just became an all-hands brute force of ‘one, two, three, push,’” Crites told the AP. “And seven guys were able to lift it enough to pull the victim out.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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