She Fell 30 Feet Into an Abandoned Mine on a Trail Run. Here’s How She Got Out – runnersworld.com
She Fell 30 Feet Into an Abandoned Mine on a Trail Run. Here’s How She Got Out runnersworld.com
With a rattlesnake guarding the opening, trying to climb out on her own was not an option.
Around noon on Sunday, March 31, Alicia Judy, 40, left her home in Scottsdale to run 16 to 18 miles on the Spur Cross Trail, which would lead her to Skull Mesa, a breathtaking summit surrounded by towering cactus trees.
The path was very familiar to Judy, an experienced trail runner and nurse who has been running through the parks in her area regularly since moving to Arizona five years ago. Still, she studied the map before she left, double-checked her route with a fellow hiker on the trailhead, and made sure to pack her phone, compass, water, and maps with her.
[Smash your goals with a Runner’s World Training Plan, designed for any speed and any distance.]
She reached Skull Mesa about 9 to 10 miles into her run, and snapped a photo of the top to send to her dad, Leonard Judy, to let him know she made it.
On the return trip, however, things turned south.
“It was like a jungle, and I just lost the trail. It wasn’t marked,” Judy told Runner’s World. “Then I started doing all of the things I know to do to try and find a trail.”
After hours of searching her surroundings and communicating back-and-forth by phone with her dad, she finally made her way out of cell reception, and became unreachable. He called the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, who sent a rescue team to contact her and track her location. They arrived at around 9 p.m.
It seemed like Judy was saved. But just as she was waving her hands to get their attention, she stepped on some brush—and fell 30 feet below into an abandoned mine shaft.
“They were screaming ‘We’re here! We can’t see you! We can’t see you!’ And I’m screaming in the hole, ‘I’m in here! I’m in here!’” Judy told Runner’s World. “But they couldn’t hear me.”
The fall left her bruised and scratched with cactus needles, but miraculously without any broken bones. Still, she was trapped: The structure of the hole wouldn’t allow her to climb out, and her cell phone had run out of battery. A rattlesnake guarded the top of the hole in the ground.
Through the entire ordeal, Judy maintained her poise and a prepared approach—something which ultimately saved her life.
Many experts believe that Arizona has the most abandoned mines in the country. But with very little resources to fix the problem, they have become a hazard in the remote areas of the state.
According to an investigative report conducted by Cronkite News, Arizona officials lack funds to find and secure at least 100,000 mines abandoned by prospectors many years ago. Only 19,000 of those mines have been identified, and even fewer have been secured by officials.
Roger Yensen, commander of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office’s volunteer Mountain Rescue Posse, told Cronkite News that their team alone rescues somebody once every 12-16 months.
Judy became one of those unlucky trail goers, but possessed the necessary knowledge and tools to survive thanks in part to her running partner Margaret de Hesse. The owner of Rim Rim Runners running specialty shop in Payson, Arizona, de Hesse has helped guide countless runners to prepare themselves to safely use the trails in the area.
“You can never underestimate what you can run into,” de Hesse said. “There’s a tremendous amount of education that’s needed for people venturing out on trails.”
So when Judy found herself on the ground after her 30-foot fall, she thought back to what she had learned from de Hesse: She quickly realized that in order to make it out of the hole alive, she needed to keep herself—as well as the rattlesnake—calm.
“I’m down here,” Judy recalled from the moment she realized the danger of her situation. “Okay. Let’s figure out how we’re getting out.”
She knew she had to make her presence known, since the makeup of the mine shaft (about six feet in diameter at the bottom that gradually narrowed closer to the top)—and the rattlesnake guarding the hole—made it impossible to try to climb out.
So she blew the whistle attached to her pack and continued to scream for help.
“With trail running, you have to do some problem solving, but also with my job, I’m used to walking into a room and figuring out what I need to do and what needs to happen,” Judy said. “That’s just where my mind goes. I switch over into a damage control type of thing.”
While Judy had faith that the rescue team saw her before she disappeared and wouldn’t give up the search, she did experience a moment of doubt, wondering if they’d abandon her until morning. In those moments, she chose to focus on the task at hand–being heard. Judy screamed and blew her whistle so much that she lost her voice for a few days and had to see a doctor for inhalation pneumonitis, a lung infection caused by inhaling contents into the lungs.
Eventually, almost two hours later, the rescue team found her. After calling the fire department, they were able to hoist her out of the hole around midnight, an hour after they discovered her location.
“I’m definitely grateful. I don’t know how I didn’t break anything or get bitten, but here we are,” Judy said as she reflected on her experience. “I’m a blessed chica for sure.”
Despite her harrowing ordeal on the trails, Judy had no plans on staying away for long. Just several days after her rescue, she made her way back to the trails for a race. On April 13, she finished as the fifth female overall in the 60K at the Whisky Basin Trail Run in Prescott, Arizona.