3 Short Survival Stories

A good survival story can tell the tale of someone fighting for life over weeks or even months, struggling for food, and being stranded in the wilderness, but the majority of stories don’t go like this. Sometimes people are simply “stuck” somewhere in critical condition and make it out with hours of life left or inches away from death, and here are three such stories.

Corine Bastide – 6 days trapped in a car

(Corine’s car after being recovered from the site of the accident)

On 23 July 2019, Corine Bastide was driving near Liège in Belgium when she lost control and swerved into a ditch. The car flipped over several times and Corine was severely hurt in the accident, which left her with injuries to her spine, stopping her from being able to leave the crushed vehicle. She was in a remote area and there were few cars passing by, and no one saw her go off the road but she did have a phone with her.

She wasn’t able to move out of her seat and the phone was on the floor on the other side of the car. “The first night, my mobile didn’t stop ringing. I tried to answer it but I couldn’t because my arm was too sore,” she later said in an interview. “The next day the telephone stopped ringing. I knew the battery had run out. I tried screaming when I heard people, but apparently no one could hear me,” she said.

There was no food or water in the car at the time of the crash, but she managed to stay alive by collecting rainwater in a small chewing gum box and sucking moisture from a nearby tree branch. She later said she didn’t actually feel hungry and the heat was worse than the lack of food, and no one knew of the 40C heatwave that would hit the area two days into her ordeal.

“The heat was stifling at first. I managed to open a door with my foot. Then it started to rain over the weekend and that was nice. On the other hand, I had to sleep in water for two nights. It was cold and I was shaking all the time,”

Six days after she crashed, one of the search teams found her, and she was taken to hospital. She made a full recovery and said that the main thing that kept her going was the thought of leaving her children behind.

Two kayakers get swallowed and spat out by a whale

Julie McSorley was a keen kayaker and enjoyed going out into the sea near her home in San Luis Obispo, California to see the dolphins and whales. She would often go out with her husband and friends and sit there with the other kayakers and watch all the glorious sea creatures jump out of the water and come up for air, creating huge waves as their enormous bodies slashed back down again.

It was November of 2020 and Julie had one of her friends staying over for a few days. Noticing the whales were being especially active, she invited her friend out for a kayaking trip to see them, and after some persuasion, her friend agreed.

The pair paddled out into the water towards the group of whales who seemed to be chasing fish, but Julie thought she would take her friend a little closer for a better look. She later learned that you are supposed to stay at least 300 feet away from feeding whales, but she didn’t know this at the time and got within 60 feet.

Suddenly a bait ball, the name given to a small group of fish being hunted by whales, jumped onto their kayaks. The hundreds of tiny fish splashed over them, bouncing off the side of their small plastic vessels in their desperate attempt to get away from the whale. Suddenly a huge bulge appeared out of the water and knocked Julie and her friend out of their kayaks and into the mouth of a whale. It closed its mouth and began to dive with the pair still in the front portion of its mouth, with Julie’s entire body inside the creature except for her arm, which fortunately didn’t get crushed off when the whale closed its enormous jaws.

The whale began to dive with their pair fearing for their lives and not knowing how deep they were being taken. Luckily whales may have huge mouths, but only tiny throats, and when they eat something too big to swallow, they will quickly spit it back out again. Even though it may have seemed a long time, they were only in the whale’s mouth for a few seconds and found themselves right next to each other when they surfaced. Some concerned kayakers came over to see if they were ok but the pair were uninjured, just in a mild state of shock.

Gurbaz Singh – 600-foot fall down a mountain

(Mount Hood in Oregon – With a peak elevation of 11,240 feet)

Gurbaz Singh started climbing mountains at a young age, and by the time he was 16 had conquered over 100 peaks. His parents were happy he’d found something he liked and thought the exercise would do him good, as he was quite overweight at the time of his accident. Two years ago when he was 16, he met a climbing buddy on a website called Mel Olsen, and the two of them agreed to try and tackle the 11,240-foot-high Mount Hood in Oregon.

They drove to the mountain together and arrived in the early hours to start their climb before the sun came up, a common method with cold weather mountain climbing because the sun melts ice and can cause break-offs and snow slides. They met two other climbers on the way up and the four of them managed to make it to a plateau called the Devil’s Kitchen, a point at 10,000 feet which is a common stopping area before the final push to the top.

By now the weather had turned bad and high winds caused the other two they met to turn back, leaving Singh and Olsen to carry on alone. A few hours later when the path had become much steeper and narrower, the pair found themselves faced with a large block of ice about 4 feet tall they had to climb over. Singh went first and upon trying to dig his crampon into the center, it broke off from the rocks and pushed him down the hill. Olsen was calling his name as he tumbled and slid over 600 feet back down the mountain.

He remained conscious during the fall and tried to grab onto anything he could to stop himself from rolling around and getting knocked out. He managed to stop himself from tumbling but couldn’t stop sliding, bouncing off rocks, and being taken with the flow of the mountainside. He eventually came to a stop back at the Devil’s Kitchen where he checked himself for injuries. Luckily he was in good shape for someone who just slid 600 feet down a mountain, but his left leg was badly hurt and he later learned he’d broken a bone that was stabbing into a muscle.

He called for help and attracted the attention of some other climbers, two of whom just so happened to be trained EMT’s. They splinted his leg and called for assistance, which due to their location didn’t arrive for four hours. He was put onto a stretcher and carried down the mountain to a waiting ambulance which took him to hospital where he spent four days before being released. He was told it would be a year before he’d be able to climb again, but he was hiking within 6 months of his accident.