Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Man Survives 1,000ft Fall Off Scottish Mountain

Posted by samzenpus on from the broke-his-crown dept.

36-year-old Adam Potter is either the luckiest man alive or the subject of the next M.Night Shyamalan movie. Adam fell approximately 1,000 feet down Sgurr Choinnich Mor suffering only minor injuries. From the article: "The crew found him standing up and reading his map when they reached the scene. Lieutenant Tim Barker, the crew's observer, said: 'We began to hover-taxi down the slope and spotted a man at the bottom, standing up. We honestly thought it couldn't have been him, as he was on his feet, reading a map. Above him was a series of three high craggy outcrops. It seemed impossible. So we retraced our path back up the mountain and, sure enough, there were bits of his kit in a vertical line all the way up where he had obviously lost them during the fall. It was quite incredible. He must have literally glanced off the outcrops as he fell, almost flying.'"

3 comments

  1. WoW by Yvan256 · · Score: 1

    Dude that's overkill, you only needed 195 feet to get the Going Down? achievement.

  2. Lucky guy ... by RockDoctor · · Score: 1
    But not as lucky as the headlines make out (not that this is terribly surprising - the Torygraph is published approaching a thousand kilometres away, and this was in their "politics" section, not their "mountaineering" section ; they may even not have a mountaineering section!). While it's a relatively steep hill, with lots of lumpy bits, it's by no means the vertical drop that the "gosh wow!" tone of the story implies.

    To get 1000ft (305m) vertically down from this summit, he'd have to have covered around 1500ft (500m) horizontally. Which makes for a pretty lumpy bum slide, to judge from his injuries, but puts things into perspective a little bit.

    More importantly, what was he doing on the hill at this time of year when he appears incompetent at performing an ice-axe brake? My mountaineering instructors would (quite rightly) have ripped as much skin off me as he appears to have lost for such a display of incompetence. (And not having an ice axe is not an acceptable excuse either at this time of the year in that area.)

    --
    Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  3. Technology these days by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "We began to hover-taxi down the slope"

    And all this time I've been riding around in car taxis.