Colby Coombs – 9 days alone up a mountain with broken bones

Time stranded: 9 Days

Distance traveled: under 5 miles

Terrain types: Mountain

Deaths: 2

Situation ended: Spotted by search plane

Location: Mount Foraker, Alaska

Colby Coombs had always been the adventurous type who loved the wilderness, and at the age of 25 was working as an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership school. In June of 1992, his adventurous nature led him and 2 friends, Tom Walter and Ritt Kellogg to attempt a climb to the top of Mount Foraker, a 5300-meter-tall mountain located in south-central Alaska.

The initial climb went well, with the weather holding out and no accidents for the most part, but at one point when they were nearing a large cliff-band the weather started to change. Visibility was dropping fast and the wind was picking up at an unusually fast rate, then Coombs felt the rope go slack from Walter who was leading the climb, he quickly looked up to see a wave of snow smash him in the face.

Coombs says “I remember sliding really fast and trying to self-arrest, then hitting something and going airborne. That’s when I passed out.”

When he awoke he realised that 6 hours had passed and he was now about 240 metres further down the mountain than when the avalanche hit. He was also dangling from his safety rope and was in severe pain, barely able to move one of his feet and to make matters worse, his backpack was gone.

It turns out that the safety rope had hit a protruding piece of rock on the cliff face and caught the line they were all connected to, with Coombs on one end and his friend Tom Walter providing the counterweight on the other end. As for Kellogg, it seems he became disconnected at some point during the fall and fell further down the mountain.

Coombs could see that Walter was dead as his face was so frozen that he couldn’t make out his features. He managed to swing to a ledge and found Walters’s sleeping bag, which he climbed inside and went to sleep. It was later found that he had a concussion and could have died from going to sleep at that time, since he had several broken bones and could barely keep his eyes open he didn’t have a choice.

When he awoke he rappelled to a lower and much bigger ledge where he found the body of Kellogg, he then spent the next 2 and a half days trying to recover enough to make the climb down and also spent the time gathering up any equipment he could find scattered about in the snow.

When he was finally ready to try and start climbing down he headed for the south-east ridge of the mountain, a route that he was completely unfamiliar with. He spent the next 6 days slowly moving down the slope, stopping occasionally to melt snow into drinking water and to try and deal with the pain in his foot.

The only accident on the way down was a slip that forced him to quickly grab a rock, putting all his body weight on one arm. This normally wouldn’t be too bad but Coombs was suffering from a broken shoulder blade, a fractured ankle, and 2 fractured vertebrae in his neck.

Somehow he managed to keep going, later claiming he took inspiration from god and also forced himself into a “just keep going” mental state. After reaching the Kahiltna Glacier, Coombs headed for an airstrip he knew was in the area hoping to find someone. When he was close to the ridge top the airstrip was located on, a search plane spotted him and dispatched a rescue party.

Coombs was taken straight to the hospital where he spent the next 3 months in a wheelchair, followed by another 3 months on crutches. He made a full recovery and didn’t even lose any body parts to frostbite, he is now the owner of the adventure school he was working for at the time of the accident.