Alaska man survives being pinned face-down in a glacier creek by a massive boulder for 3 hours

An Alaska man who was pinned face to face in a stream frozen by a rock of 318 kilograms for three hours survived the test without major injuries, thanks in part to the rapid thought of his wife and a lot of luck.

Kell Morris’ wife held her head above the water to prevent him from drowning while waiting for the rescuers to arrive after Morris was pinned by the rock, who crashed on him during a hike near a distant glacier south of Anchorage.

Its second luck occurred when a sled dog tourism company operating on the glacier heard the distribution of 911 and offered its helicopter to ferry the rescuers on the scene, which was inaccessible to all-terrain vehicles.

Once the rescuers arrived, it took seven men and inflatable inflatable cushions to lift the rock while it was drifting and emerging from consciousness.

Morris, 61, said he realizes that he is probably the luckiest man. “And lucky than I have such a big wife,” he said on Thursday.

His wife, Jo Roop, is a retired soldier of the Alaska state. They moved to Seward, about 193 kilometers south of Anchorage, from Idaho last fall when she took a job with the local police service.

Last Saturday, they wanted to avoid the big crowds that converge on the community of the Kenai peninsula during the holidays and decided to hike near Godwin Glacier on an isolated path and not developed behind a state prison, said Clinton Crites de Seward.

Their path was actually a rocky bed of the stream bordered by large rocks deposited by the glacier.

Morris said that he had noticed dangerous rocks, some weighing up to 454 kilograms, along the shores of the stream and avoided them as best he could, until he comes up against an area he could not pass.

“I came back and everything, all the side, slipped under me,” he said.

He said things became blurred as he tumbled the embankment about six meters away, landing in front of the water.

Then he felt the rock hit his back.

Critics have described it as “essentially as an avalanche of rocks”.

The way Morris landed, there were rocks under him, between his legs and around him who took the weight of the rock, preventing him from being crushed, criticism said. But the massive rock had always pinned her, and Morris felt intense pain in his left leg and waited for his femur to slam.

“When this happened for the first time, I doubted there was a good result,” said Morris.

His wife tried to release him for about 30 minutes, putting rocks under the rock and trying to move him, before leaving to find a cell signal.

Surprisingly, she had to walk only about 274 meters to connect with the 911, and relied on her experience of the police to send exact GPS coordinates to shipping.

A volunteer from the neighboring fire service of Bear Creek heard the call while working on the tourist operation of the sled dog and diverted the helicopter used to transport tourists to the premises.

In the end, firefighters who could not navigate their all-terrain vehicles on the rock field jumped from the helicopter.

At that time, Morris was hypothermic of the cold water flowing from the glacier, said the criticism, and his wife was holding his head out of the water.

“I think that if we had not had this private helicopter to help us, it would have taken us at least 45 minutes to join him, and I’m not sure he had so much time,” said Crites.

The firefighters used two normally reserved inflatable cushions to extract people from the vehicles destroyed to slightly lift the rock.

“But then he became a raw force all the hands of” one, two, three, push “,” said Crites. “And seven guys were able to raise him enough to remove the victim.”

A helicopter from the Alaska National Guard took them out of the stream bed with a rescue basket.

Morris spent two nights at the local hospital for observation, but moved away unscathed.

“I fully expected a recovery from the body, not to move away from it without a scratch,” said Crites.

Morris, who is now thinking about his test at home, admitted that it could have been alarm to stop doing things like that at his age.

“I was very lucky. God took care of me,” he said.

When he and his wife hike this weekend, they will stick to the established trails.

“We are going to stop the pioneer,” he said.