A base jumper recently survived a deadly fall in the Provo Canyon. A persistent twelve-year-old girl noticed his initial jump and demanded that her parents contact the police.
Her father Warren Osborn proceeded to follow his daughter’s intuition and scaled up the canyon to find the tangled jumper.
“He was just dangling; no foot holdings or hand holdings, only ropes pulling on his legs,”Warren said.
The Osborns were coming home from a family activity in Sundance when their daughter Lauren suddenly asked for her parents to pull over because she saw a parachute hit the canyon wall.
'I saw him and then we were just about to turn the corner and he just whacked (into) the cliff,' Lauren said.
The jumper fell over 300 feet before his parachute snagged on a cliff, suspending him over the floor of the canyon.
Warren Osborn and his son talked with the base jumper Adam Gardner while he waited in the Provo Canyon for the Utah County Search and Rescue team.
'We sat there and talked with him and when we get done talking, he would go, ‘Could you talk with me some more.' He needed to connect. He was hanging, cold, alone, bleeding and we didn't know if he would fall at any given moment,” he said.
The rescue team secured Gardner with another rope to lower him from dangling 150 feet off the ground after he was suspended in the air for over four hours.
'This was just crazy...Even the search and rescue...guys had hardly seen anything so technical or so difficult,' Warren said.
Lauren says she is proud that she kept persisting with her parents to pull over and call the police.
'I think it was meant for me to look out the other window. I could have been watching TV. If I hadn't been looking, it wouldn't have happened,' she said.
Warren awaits word on gardener’s recovery as the jumper remains in the Utah Valley Medical Center, recovering from serious conditions and a possible broken ankle.