“And what’s happened to you?” The triage nurse in the Emergency section of the Sunshine Coast University Hospital looked me up and down as I presented with lots of skin off. “I’ve had,” I replied, “a bit of a fall in the mountains.”
A bit of a fall indeed. Yesterday, I had been out alone on Eagle’s Ridge on Mt Barney, and was bypassing a cliff by descending a steep chute. Two or three steps in, I lost my footing. Suddenly, I was sliding face down, picking up speed. I snapped off a callistemon sapling as I sped past, sliding five, ten, fifteen metres down the chute at an accelerating pace.
And then I was free-falling.
As I tumbled through space, I had a clear thought: “Is this how it ends?” I was strangely calm. I had no idea how high the cliff I was falling over was, but I knew that all around were drops of potentially hundreds of metres. I’d been around mountains for long enough to understand that falls like this don’t usually end well.
Then I slammed into rocks, landing flat on my back. I was alive. Miraculously. I lay there, shaken, and, strangely, relatively unhurt. My trusty backpack, a 40-year-old Macpac Cerro Torre, had broken my fall. I unbuckled my pack and carefully stood up, checking that I hadn’t broken any arms or legs. My neck was sore, but I could still move my head a bit, so I convinced myself that it was just a bad sprain.
But the next day—after hobbling off the mountain alone during a long and agonising overnight epic—here I was, being questioned by the triage nurse. Within minutes, I’d jumped the queue of Sunday-afternoon outpatients and was lying on my back on a clinic bed. Because while I
