A 29-year-old man who fell 100 feet off a cliff in the upper Hermosa Creek area earlier this week is lucky to be alive, said San Juan County Sheriff Bruce Conrad.
“There were two people involved,” Conrad told The Durango Herald on Thursday. “And they were just drunk as hell.”
Around 9:25 p.m. Monday, authorities were alerted that a man had activated his GPS tracking device to report a friend, with whom he was camping, had fallen off a cliff and required rescue.
The story was first reported in the Silverton Standard & the Miner.
Conrad was unable to identify the man who fell or the man who reported the incident. He did say the man who reported the incident is from Durango.
Conrad said incoming information was poor because of the man’s level of intoxication. When questioned about the extent of his friend’s injuries, the man who activated the GPS device responded only with “bad” and “I think death.”
Teams from San Juan County Search and Rescue, Silverton EMS and La Plata County Search and Rescue responded to the GPS location, which was located in the Hotel Draw area of Hermosa Creek, accessed behind Purgatory Resort.
The man who fell was located and then roped 100 feet up the cliff and transported by an all-terrain vehicle to a Flight for Life landing zone set up about a half-mile away from the campsite. He was taken to Mercy Regional Medical Center.
The rescue operation lasted until 4 a.m. Tuesday.
The man who fell suffered a head injury, broken ribs, a punctured lung and injuries to his spleen and liver, but he is expected to survive, Conrad said.
Conrad said the timeline of events is a bit hazy.
According to an account, the man who eventually ended up reporting the incident was sitting at a fire and looked over to his friend, who was standing at the edge of a cliff.
The man warned his friend not to fall off the cliff and then turned his attention back to the fire. But when the man looked back to his friend, he wasn’t there.
“So he walked around, yelled his friend’s name, said this is a bad dream and went to sleep,” Conrad said. “He woke up a little later, and his friend still wasn’t there.”
That’s when the man activated the GPS device, setting off the all-night rescue. Speaking to the Silverton Standard, Conrad summed it up: “If you’re too drunk to be camping, you’re too drunk.”
jromeo@durangoherald.com
