For the Flight For Life crew, time matters most. Whether helicopters are transporting a critically ill Covid-19 patient from a doctor’s office in Weld County to St. Anthony North Hospital, or whether they are flying an injured skier from Copper Mountain to a trauma room at St. Anthony Hospital, the entire mission revolves around a ticking clock.
For Jeff Ashby that clock started ticking just after nine on a July morning in 2019. The former NASA astronaut and avid mountaineer had just summited La Plata Peak—Colorado’s fifth-highest mountain. Nearly a year later, from his couch in Twin Lakes, Jeff recounts that morning. “I had a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich and I was headed back down the mountain.” He remembers checking the time on his watch, a blue-faced Breitling. The watch had flown with him on his shuttle missions. “It had orbited the Earth 486 times,” Jeff says.
As he headed down, Jeff decided to reconnoiter a snowfield for possible ski descents later in the year. Jeff grew up in Evergreen at the base of the Mount Evans Wilderness Area, exploring high areas is in his blood. “I was going to take a quick look and then make it back to the house by noon.” Since he wasn’t intending to venture off-trail, Jeff had left his ice axe at home. He was just going to go to the edge of the snowfield. But then a footstep gave way. Jeff tried to flip onto his belly and self-arrest with his hands and feet, but within a second or two gravity and ice-hardened snow sent him pinballing 500 feet down the couloir. The fall broke both his legs in multiple places, shattered an arm and stripped him of his backpack, phone and emergency gear. When Jeff came out of a daze in a moat at the base of the snowfield and looked at his bloodied arms, he realized the mountain had even robbed him of his watch.
Even if he couldn’t tell time anymore, Jeff knew the clock had started. The weather was still mild, but he knew that come nightfall, the temperatures could plunge below freezing at 13,000 feet. Even worse, a storm could move in. He managed to splint his leg, drag himself out of the crevice to a nearby outcrop and shout for help. Hours later a hiker heard his cries and a rescue mission was launched.
But as the hours went by and the sun crept lower on the horizon, the search and rescue teams were unable to find Jeff. As darkness fell, he was finally able to signal a helicopter and ground crews with his headlamp. “I wasn’t doing so well by then,” Jeff says. Gusty winds and frozen rain had torn the emergency blanket he had wrapped around himself for shelter and warmth. Jeff, who had been in search-and-rescue with the Navy, felt himself slipping into hypothermia. In severe pain, and shivering uncontrollably, he knew time was running out. “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through the night.”
Donny Smith, with Chaffee County Search and Rescue, eventually managed to reach Jeff and give him warmth and pain medication. When the sun rose, a National Guard Blackhawk helicopter was able to extract both men off the mountain. When Jeff reflects on his journey back from the brink of death, Flight For Life looms large. “The Blackhawk set me down in a meadow and then Flight For Life picked me up,” he says. “The crew—all female—were fantastic.” It’s high praise from a fighter pilot who flew 65 combat missions over Iraq in a single-seat F-18.
Transported to the hospital, he spent four weeks undergoing surgeries and recuperating. Back at his home under the gaze of La Plata Peak, he rubs his right ankle, still swollen from the accident. As an experienced mountaineer he’s contrite about the accident but grateful for Donny’s rescue and his transport by Flight For Life.
And what the mountain took away from him during his 24-hour-ordeal, it gave back. He twists his wrist and shows off a blue-faced Breitling watch. The same watch that orbited the Earth 486 times with him.” When he heard about the sentimental value of the watch, Jeff says, Donny, the man who saved his life, climbed right back up La Plata Peak, found it and brought it back.