Rescuers saved a parent who plunged off a 70-foot cliff in Utah’s Pritchett Canyon area of Moab while on a family vacation.
The Grand County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue detailed the rescue, which occurred on April 10. The family of four – two parents and two children – were on spring break and decided to explore.
“Visiting Moab for Spring Break, they had made the ride into Pritchett Canyon and had stopped to walk around. The place they stopped is only about 5 miles, as the crow flies, from Moab but this trail is so rough that driving here can take as long as 3 hours, one way,” the sheriff’s search and rescue said in a detailed Facebook post.
The family split in two during their walk, but they hoped to have a better look at Cummings Arch. At one point, one of the adults in the split group walked too close to the edge of the cliff and fell. While no one else in the group saw the parent fall, one of the children heard screaming and “rushed down the hiking route to alert the other parent that something had happened.”
The parent who fell was gravely injured, and “the other adult [w]as able to summon help via the satellite function on their iPhone and sent a text to 911.”
It was not made clear which parent fell.
“Grand County SAR and EMS (GCSAR and GCEMS) were paged to respond,” the sheriff’s search and rescue said, noting that a helicopter also came given the extent of the possible injuries. It arrived in 5 minutes and was able to land 150 yards from the patient.
It was a logistically difficult rescue:
Intermountain Health’s Moab asset, callsign Intermountain-20, was able to lift and was over the incident site in about 5 minutes. The helicopter was able to land within about 150 yards from the patient.
From the air, the scene was described to ground rescuers in Moab as in steep and sloping terrain with a short section of vertical terrain; technical rope rescue assets would be needed to assist in this rescue.
From the landing zone (LZ), medical and rescue personnel would have to cross a shallow wash and then scramble up to where the patient was lodged in a sloping sandstone gully. The gully was situated above an 8-10 foot dry fall just above the floor of the dry wash. The estimated distance of the fall was 70-80 feet followed by a 50 foot bouncing tumble, all on slickrock. Many hands would be needed for this rescue.
Intermountain-20 made several trips to drop off personnel as well as equipment to tend to the patient, whose body was described as “badly broken.” As a result, the patient had to be be moved via a rescue litter, and first responders did so successfully. The entire operation took about three hours, and the sheriff’s search and rescue said it would have taken 10-12 hours without the use of helicopters.
The patient was said to be in “critical condition.”
“As for the reason for the rescue, no one saw the patient fall,” first responders said, adding that the cliff edges are “deceptive” and transform to vertical rather quickly.
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