Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. Today's podcast features three stories about people who, by all accounts, should be dead.
The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.
The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.
The first story you'll hear is called The Void, and it is one of the greatest survival stories of all time.
The second story you'll hear is called Bats, and it's about a race that is so brutal, runners must sign a document accepting that they could die.
And the third and final story you'll hear is called Head in the Clouds, and it's about the only person to ever reach truly extreme altitudes and live to tell the tale.
But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Deliberate in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please secretly follow the Amazon Music Follow button into a grocery store and then ram the back of their heels with your cart.
Okay, let's get into our first story called The Void.
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By 1985, the remote and extremely dangerous west face of the Ciudad Grande in the Peruvian Andes was still unclimbed.
But in 1985, two very ambitious climbers, 25-year-old Joe Simpson and 21-year-old Simon Yates, decided they were going to be the first to conquer it.
And by all accounts, they seemed up for the job, having already conquered numerous difficult Scottish ice cliffs as well as a number of large mountain faces in the Alps.
So in early June of that year, the pair flew to Peru and they arrived at the base camp that was nearest to the Sioux La Grande, but it was still five miles away.
So they couldn't actually see what they were going to be climbing yet.
On June 5th, when the weather was good enough, the pair left camp and worked their way around the huge lake across the glacier to the base of this cliff they're about to climb.
And when they saw it for the first time, they couldn't believe how steep and dangerous it looked.
But over the next three days, they managed to make it up this cliff despite a blizzard hitting them halfway through, and they reached the summit.
To them, this was a crowning achievement.
They had done it. They had written their names in the history books.
But in reality, the thing that people would remember them for was not for reaching the top of Ciudad Grande.
It was for what happened when they started going down.
Because of how steep this mountain was and because of the blizzard that was not going away, it was actually getting worse, the descent was going to be much more challenging than the ascent.
So shortly after 10 a.m. on June 8th, Joe and Simon left the summit and began very carefully making their way down the mountain.
At 11 a.m., disaster struck when Joe lost his footing and fell to the bottom of an ice cliff and shattered his leg.
Initially, they both assumed this was a death sentence for Joe because there's no way he can actually climb down the mountain now.
And certainly Simon can't actually carry him down the mountain.
They were so high up and it's so steep. There's just no way.
But Simon wanted to at least try to save his friend.
So he climbed down to him. He gave him some mild painkillers that he had.
Then he attached his rope to Joe. And then Simon anchored himself in the snow and he began lowering Joe down the mountain, all 300 feet of his rope.
And when he would stop, Joe, at the other end, would anchor himself in the snow with his ice picks, and then Simon would climb down to Joe and he'd repeat the process, over and over and over again, lowering Joe 300 feet at a time.
This went on for hours and hours and hours, just backbreaking work for Simon, and Joe, meanwhile, is in excruciating pain from his broken leg.
And to make matters worse, the storm had gotten so bad that the visibility between Simon and Joe was zero.
So as Simon is lowering Joe, he can't see what he's lowering Joe onto, but they had no other choice.
That was the only way they could get him down.
And so at 5 p.m. that night, Simon accidentally lowers Joe over a cliff.
And Joe, as soon as he's hanging off the edge, all of his weight is on the rope and suddenly the rope is flying out of Simon's hands and he manages to self-arrest. and stop him from careening over the edge.
But now, Simon is the only thing holding Joe from tumbling to his death.
And Simon is being slowly drugged down the mountain.
He can't anchor himself in. And so they're in the middle of this inhospitable environment in the middle of the night.
A storm is raging. It's freezing cold. They can't communicate with each other.
They can't hear each other or see each other.
And Simon is just hoping that Joe is going to be able to grab onto something and kind of take his weight off the rope.
Otherwise, this is going to end badly for both of them.
But unfortunately, the cliff was at an angle.
So Joe was dangling off of it and he couldn't touch the wall.
He had nothing to grab onto. He was just dangling in the air.
And so as Simon tries to move the rope to try to signal to Joe to take your weight off the rope, Joe is trying to climb up the rope, but his hands are starting to get frostbit.
He's weak. He's in pain. He can't do anything about it.
So for the next two and a half hours, Simon is desperately trying to regain an anchor in the snow.
But every second that goes by, he's getting pulled farther and farther. and farther down the mountain.
He can't see how close he is to the edge.
He knows he's getting close. And so finally at 7.30 PM with no other option, he pulls out a knife and he cuts the rope.
As soon as the rope was cut, Simon fell backwards, he was safe, nothing was pulling him off the cliff any longer, but he knew he had just sent Joe to his death.
Except Joe didn't die. When that rope was cut, he fell 150 feet and smashed into the ground, except what he hit was a thin sheet of ice that broke from his weight, and he fell another 80 feet into this massive ice crevasse.
Joe was knocked unconscious from the fall, but when he woke up, he was laying on his side.
He opened his eyes and he looked around and he couldn't believe he was alive.
And he's looking around, he doesn't know where he is, it's totally dark.
He turns on his headlamp and he realizes he's fallen into an ice crevasse and he looks down and he's on this little ledge that's overlooking a much, much deeper fall.
He looks down and this ice crevasse seems to just go on infinitely into this black chasm.
And he realizes when he fell, had he fallen a foot over, that's where he would have gone.
So it's a miracle he's alive, but now he's trapped in the middle of an ice crevasse 80 feet down.
He can't go down and he can't go up. At the time, Joe didn't know if Simon had fallen off the cliff with him or if he had cut the rope.
But the rope was still attached to his waist and it fed up and out of the ice crevasse.
And so he grabbed it and pulled on it until it all came tumbling back down and he saw it was frayed.
And so sure enough, Simon had cut the rope.
Now, even though Joe wasn't mad at Simon for the decision he made because he understood it was the right one, Joe still became very emotional when he saw this.
He felt so alone. He was so sad. And for a little while, he just kind of freaked out and screamed and yelled and really just didn't know what he was going to do.
And then after that, he sat down knowing he wasn't getting out of here and that he was going to die a slow, horrible, painful death.
Joe remembers reaching up and turning off his headlamp, which retrospectively he thought was kind of goofy because he's just realized he's about to die inside of this crevasse and he's saving batteries.
But with the light off, he's sitting on the ledge and he hears all the sounds that are coming from inside of this crevasse.
It was this awful grinding sound, like a moaning sound, and he said it was so terrifying sitting in the darkness listening to the sound that he reached up and turned his light back on just for comfort.
Back up on the mountain, Simon was devastated.
He felt like he had just killed his friend.
And even though he understood why he did it and understood it was probably the right decision, it didn't change the fact that he felt incredibly guilty about it.
And so that night, he didn't even move from the position he was.
He dug a little snow cave and he laid down and eventually fell asleep.
The next morning when he got up, he began moving his way down the mountain and he finally rounded the area where Joe had been hanging off of that cliff and he got a chance to look down and see where Joe might have wound up.
And to his horror, he's looking down and he sees this massive opening to a crevasse that seemed almost bottomless.
And now this confirms that Joe definitely has died because he fell in there.
But nonetheless, Simon goes down and goes to the edge of the crevasse and yells into Joe.
He's screaming for him to call out if he's still alive.
But after a while, he never heard anything from Joe.
And with a heavy heart, Simon turned around and started heading back to base camp.
A little while after Simon had left, Joe finally woke up.
He had been asleep when Simon was yelling down for him.
And so Joe wakes up, he's looking around.
He can't believe this wasn't a bad dream.
He starts yelling for Simon because he doesn't know what else to do.
But after a while, he realized Simon's not going to come down here to get me.
He cut the rope. He thinks I'm dead already.
At this point, Joe decides he needs to try to climb out of the crevasse, even with a broken leg.
And so he gets himself in position, he gets his ice picks, and he starts making his way up this ice wall, but he can't put any weight on his broken leg, and he keeps falling down, and he's realizing, I can't climb this.
I probably couldn't climb this with two good legs, let alone with this broken one.
And so Joe had two choices. He could wait on the ledge and hope to be rescued, but by his calculations, it was unlikely someone was going to come out here and rescue him anytime soon, because Simon is going to say he's dead.
So wait on the ledge and probably die a slow, painful death. or he can go down deeper into the crevasse, which he has no idea where it goes, and hope somewhere down in that black void there's an opening that leads back out to the outside of the mountain.
So he made his choice, screwed an anchor into the ice, put his rope through it, He tested it to make sure it would hold his weight.
He looked down into the void one last time and knew that as soon as he stepped off of this ledge, he could not come back up again.
This was a one-way trip. And if he made it to the bottom of his 300-foot rope and he didn't find a ledge or a tunnel or something to put his feet on, he would slip off and fall to his death.
On purpose, he did not put a knot at the end of his rope because he figured either I'll find a way out or I won't, but at least it'll be quick.
Down he went about 80 feet into this pitch black crevasse.
He has no idea what's down there. And he gets to a point where the walls kind of come together and he was able to squeeze through it.
And he realized once he got through that point, it was like the center of an hourglass where below it, it kind of opened up.
And as soon as he pushed through, he could actually see to the ground.
He saw flat ground and there was light shining on it, which meant there was a hole leading out into the mountains somewhere down there.
And so he went all the way down. He touched the bottom.
It was solid ground. He disconnected from his rope and he climbed his way up this incline to where the sun was coming in, which was this hole that led right back out onto the mountain.
And sure enough, he crawled out and tumbled out and the sun is shining on him.
And he remembers just laying on the mountain, looking at the sun and laughing.
He couldn't believe it. But after the initial relief of not dying wore off, he realized he was not out of the woods yet.
He still needed to climb down the rest of the mountain.
And there wasn't that much left to climb.
He was towards the bottom and it wasn't that steep.
But after that, he would need to navigate five miles back to base camp.
But over several delirious, painful, miserable days, he managed to crawl all the way back to base camp and he got there right as Simon was packing up the tent and getting ready to leave.
He could not believe he saw Joe alive. Joe said Simon just swore.
He just endlessly swore. He was cussing.
He couldn't even speak. He didn't understand.
It was like he was looking at a ghost. But after that kind of crazy initial interaction, Simon just gave Joe a big hug and Joe and Simon just cried and held each other.
Joe underwent six surgical operations to repair the damage done to his leg and doctors would tell him that you're never gonna climb again and you're probably gonna struggle with walking for the rest of your life.
But after two years of intense rehabilitation, Joe was not only walking just fine, he was mountain climbing.
As for Simon, he managed to leave the mountain without any serious physical injury, but he carried with him an enormous sense of guilt that he still carries today.
Joe consistently says Simon made the right decision.
In every interview he does, he always makes sure to say, Simon is not at fault.
It was an impossible situation. He made the right call.
Joe wrote a book about the experience called Touching the Void and it sold millions of copies worldwide and has since been adapted into a major motion picture.
As for Joe and Simon, apparently they've drifted apart over the years, but they still consider each other friends.
Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. I'm excited to tell you about something special.
For the first time, my show, Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted, Declassified Mysteries with Luke Lamanna, to tell a story so complex it required our combined storytelling styles.
This special episode is called A Redacted Medical Mystery.
In it, unexplained symptoms after a routine surgery quickly unravel into something much darker, leading straight to classified government operations hidden for decades.
To listen and uncover the truth alongside us, head to either the Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries or Redacted show pages right now. or search for A Redacted Medical Mystery in the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're fascinated by unexplained medical stories, well, stick around on Medical Mysteries.
Every week, we dive deep into cases that will leave you questioning everything you know about the human body.
And if government conspiracies are more your style, Redacted is your go-to for stories that unravel secrets never meant to see the light of day.
Remember, you can listen to both shows early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus.
Hey, listeners, big news for true crime lovers.
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That's amazon.com slash b-a-l-l-e-n. Dive into uninterrupted true crime stories today.
Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. For the first time, my show, Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted for a special episode.
A Redacted Medical Mystery uncovers how routine surgery leads to classified government operations.
Listen now on the Medical Mysteries or Redacted feeds, or search A Redacted Medical Mystery wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey listeners, Mr. Ballin here. What if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories happening right now are all connected to what might be the biggest crime of our generation?
You know I'm always on the hunt for the most chilling and perplexing tales out there.
Well, I've discovered a new podcast that uncovers real-world mysteries unfolding right now. much like how another Ballin' Studios podcast, redacted Declassified Mysteries, brings hidden government secrets to light.
And it's called Lawless Planet. Host Zach Goldbaum reveals how shocking tales of murder, cover-ups, and mysterious deaths are all part of something bigger. the systematic destruction of our planet.
From activists who vanish in the Amazon to whistleblowers uncovering billion-dollar environmental crimes, these aren't just stories about the environment.
They're real-life thrillers about people caught between powerful forces willing to kill to keep their secrets buried.
Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.
Our next story is called Bats. In 1994, 39-year-old Mauro Prosperi took part in the brutal Marathon des Sables, which is a six-day endurance race covering 155 miles through the Sahara Desert.
The competition was known as one of the toughest in the world, but Prosperi was a former Olympic athlete, and he kept himself in unbelievable physical shape.
He was also a police officer back in Italy, which kept him even more active, so he felt ready.
The competition's desert terrain was so dangerous that participants had to indicate where they wanted their bodies sent if they did not survive the race.
In preparation for the race, Prosperi would run 25 miles a day for weeks leading up to it, and he would give himself less and less water as he was running to get accustomed to dehydration.
But despite how much he was training and his incredible athletic resume that showed he's someone that can probably do this, his wife was very concerned.
But he would tell her, you know, the worst thing that's going to happen to me is I'll get a little sunburned.
The race kicked off at its starting point in Morocco on April 10th.
And initially it was going very smoothly.
Prosperi was always at the front of the pack and he was always the first Italian to finish that day's stage.
And so when he would finish, he would go to his tent and he'd put an Italian flag on the outside to show the other Italians doing the race where they could find him to come inside and chat.
And he would say that part of the race was really fun.
Then things went wrong on the fourth day during the longest and most difficult phase of the race.
When he set out that morning, it was already very windy and he found himself in the section between these two big sand dunes and the pace setters had already gone way ahead, so he's totally alone.
And then out of nowhere, this massive sandstorm kicks up and completely blinds him.
He can't go anywhere because he can't see where he's going.
And so he manages to kind of feel his way to this rock where he gets down behind this rock and he thinks to himself, I'll just wait it out and then continue on.
But the sandstorm raged for eight hours.
And when it was finally done, it was totally dark outside.
So Prosperi couldn't see anything. So he decides, you know what, I'm gonna have to sleep on the dunes and tomorrow morning I'll have to get up and keep going.
And his biggest concern at this point was not that he was in a survival situation.
It was, man, I was in fourth place in this race.
And now with this huge setback, I'm probably going to finish last.
And so when he went to sleep that night, all he was thinking about is, man, I got to get up and go as fast as I can so I don't finish last tomorrow.
But when the sun came up the next morning, Prosperi looked around and he realized he had a much bigger problem.
The sandstorm had been so strong, it had completely altered the landscape.
The dunes had all moved around. He had no points of reference.
And so even though he had a map and he had a compass, he had no way to orient himself.
So he had no idea what direction to go. Anybody that competed in this race really needed to be self-sufficient.
And so Prosperi had a knife, he had plenty of dehydrated food, he had a sleeping bag, but he had very little water.
He had about a half bottle of water. Because at each of the checkpoints during the day, the race officials would give you all of this water, and the idea was you would drink it all by the time you got to your next checkpoint.
And he had not made it to the next checkpoint, and so was very low on water.
As he's looking around, realizing this is a really bad situation, he thinks to himself, you know, other runners must have had this same thing happen to them.
They probably had to hunker down yesterday during the sandstorm and they're just waking up now.
They're looking around. I'm bound to find someone.
We'll link up and we will get to the end of this race and we'll be just fine.
And so he runs to the top of a sand dune and looks around expecting to see someone and he doesn't.
There's no one in all directions. It's just completely barren desert.
And so he leaves that sand dune, goes up another one and does the same thing.
He's looking around and there's nobody there.
And over the course of several hours, he was just running to the peaks of these different sand dunes, expecting to see someone, not seeing anyone, becoming more panicked and expending more energy.
And finally, by the late afternoon, when he's sweating profusely and the sun is bearing down on him and he still hasn't seen anyone, He realizes he's going to die if he keeps doing this and he needs to be smart about this.
And so at this point he went into survival mode and he decided that the only times he's going to move are going to be at night and in the early morning hours because those are the times when the sun is not up and it's still pretty cool and he can conserve energy that way.
He also began peeing into bottles and began conserving his urine to drink later when he did run out of water.
And so over the next two days, he conserved his energy, but he was just kind of drifting through the desert and he wasn't really getting anywhere.
He didn't know if he was making progress because he had nothing to go to.
He wasn't seeing anyone and he was starting to realize the situation is getting worse and worse by the minute.
And then in an incredible stroke of luck, he comes across this Muslim shrine in the middle of nowhere that Bedouins would use as they traveled across the desert.
And he ran inside hoping that there'd be a person in there.
And there was a person in there, but they were dead inside of a coffin. but he was happy that he now had shelter over his head, and this felt like progress.
He began taking stock of his new surroundings, and when he was inside the shrine looking up into the ceiling, he saw it was lined with hundreds of bats.
And at this point, he's really hungry, he's really thirsty, and so he climbed up into the rafters and began grabbing handfuls of bats and drinking their blood.
After drinking the blood of 20 bats, he used some of the wood that was inside of the shrine and he built a fire outside.
And that would be his way to signal planes and helicopters going overhead that he assumed would be out looking for him.
And so he sets the fire and he comes back inside expecting, you know, over the next couple of days someone's bound to find him.
But nobody does. And four days go by and three separate times a plane or helicopter flew directly over him.
He's got his fire going. He's out there flagging him down.
But nobody saw him. And so at the end of those four days, he's now been out in the desert roaming around for nearly a week.
And he's starting to realize that this is the end.
He's not going to survive this. No one knows where he is.
No one's seen him so far. He's running out of supplies.
This is it. And so knowing he was staring down a long, painful death, either by dehydration or starvation, he decided he was going to expedite it.
And he would say later that he did not feel sad about this.
It just was a logical choice he was making.
He figured this way, if he died inside of the shrine, the shrine was more likely to be found than if he had died somewhere out in the desert where sand would cover him up.
And so he said it was more likely people would find the shrine and therefore find him.
And so there'd be closure for his family.
And so Prosperi took a piece of charcoal from the fire, wrote a message to his wife and then cut his wrists and laid down expecting never to wake up again.
But the next morning he woke up and he had barely bled because his blood was too thick.
He literally could not bleed to death. He took this as a sign that he was supposed to live, and he suddenly felt motivated to survive.
He decided to leave the shrine and follow the advice that one of the race organizers had given all of them at the start, which was, if you get lost, follow the clouds you can see just beyond the horizon at dawn.
There you will find civilization. So Prosperi hopped up and began heading towards what he believed were those clouds.
He walked for days in the desert, grabbing snakes and lizards off the ground and eating them raw.
He said his inner caveman came out, like his primal desire to live, and he had no problems eating the things he was eating.
Prosperi grew so dehydrated he couldn't even urinate anymore.
So he began drinking the liquid inside of succulents that grew inside of dried-up riverbeds, and he also began sucking out the moisture in his wet wipes that were in his backpack.
On the ninth day, Prosperi saw a little shepherd girl off in the distance and she saw him and she was scared of him and she turned and ran away.
And at first, Prosperi is devastated because he has no strength to chase after her, but she had actually gone down to her tribe and told them about this strange man wandering the desert and they came running up over the dunes and they brought him in and they gave him food and drink and they sent someone to get police.
After police picked him up and brought him back to their headquarters, he discovered he had walked over 181 miles from where he had gotten lost on the course all the way to Algeria.
His family and race organizers had gone out looking for him after he went missing, but all they ever found was his shoelace, and so they assumed he was dead.
It would take him two years to fully recover from this ordeal, but after he did, he went on to run eight more desert races.
The next and final story of today's episode is called Head in the Clouds.
In 2007, 35-year-old Eva Wisniewska was a member of the German national paragliding team.
Over the previous two years, Eva had competed in 10 of the world's biggest paragliding competitions, and she had won six of them, making her the top female paraglider in the world.
So coming into that year, Eva was very motivated to work extra hard to make sure she retained that title as world champion.
On February 24th of that year, Ava was preparing her gear alongside 200 other paragliders on Mount Bora in New South Wales, Australia.
This was Ava's last training opportunity before her first major competition of that year which was scheduled for the next week.
As they were getting ready to launch, one of the coaches walked in front of the group and made an announcement.
He said storm clouds had been spotted to the north, but the forecast was a little bit ambiguous.
It wasn't clear if the storm was going to move over their training area or not.
So it was up to each of the paragliders if they still wanted to launch that day and risk the bad weather.
Eva, who was really eager to get this training flight in, looked at the sky and saw that it was pretty gray, but decided that she was going to do it.
Worst case scenario, she would have to cut it short.
The rest of the German national team, they didn't want to take the risk, and so they stayed grounded that day.
Eva took a little bit longer preparing her gear, so by the time she was lining up on the cliff, she was only one of a handful of people that remained.
And so strapped into her glider, she took a good run forward and launched herself up into the air.
On the ground, the rest of the German national team followed in a van to track her progress and checked in with her from time to time with their radio.
The first part of Ava's journey was incredibly calm.
She followed the ridge line from Mount Bora for 12 miles until it ended.
At that point, she entered into the skies over the vast savanna.
As her GPS and tracking log ticked, tracking her progress, two large thunderstorm clouds appeared in front of her, one larger than the other.
The vast majority of the other paragliders that had launched that day had launched ahead of Ava, and so when these clouds appeared, they had already passed that section, and so they didn't need to contend with the storm.
As for Eva and the other two people she was with, which was an Austrian team member and a Chinese team member, they had a decision to make.
They could either immediately ground their flight to avoid the storm, or they could attempt to dodge it.
They chose the latter. They knew it was too dangerous to try to fly underneath these clouds because of something called updraft.
At the beginning of storms, warm air is sucked up from the ground up into these clouds, and a paraglider, if they get caught in that, can get sucked up with the air into the storm.
And so Ava and the other two paragliders began aggressively flying around the outside of these clouds when all of the sudden the storm completely changed.
The big cloud overtook the small cloud, creating this 12-mile-wide cumulonimbus cloud that now all three paragliders were stuck inside of.
Any updraft is dangerous to a paraglider, but the updraft of a cumulonimbus cloud is famously dangerous because it's extremely powerful and it lasts for over an hour.
The Austrian man was able to pull down on one toggle, point his feet and begin spiraling all the way out of the grasp of this updraft.
And he said he turned to look at the other two and he didn't see the Chinese man, but he did see Ava and she was desperately trying to do what he was doing and spiral down, but she was clearly caught in the updraft and he watched her get pulled up into the black cloud out of view.
By the time the Austrian man hit the ground, he would say it had become the worst thunderstorm he had ever seen.
Huge hail balls hitting the ground all around him.
He took one more look up and he didn't see the Chinese man.
He didn't see Ava anywhere. And he took off running for a barn to seek shelter.
And when he was there, he pulled out his radio and he alerted the other teams of this emergency.
Inside the cloud, Ava was hurtling up like a rocket.
The storm was lifting her at a rate of 60 feet per second.
There was nothing she could do to get out of this wind tunnel.
Ava knew she was getting pulled towards the storm's eye in its vicious center because of the immense claps of thunder that just kept getting louder and louder, and it also kept getting darker and darker all around her.
In fact, it was pitch black, except for the occasional flash of lightning that came very close to electrocuting her.
As she desperately tried to keep her glider stable, she was able to place a radio call down to her team on the ground, but all she could say was, I can't see anything before it cut out.
And at some point Ava reached the eye of the storm where it's pitch black and the temperatures are freezing and hail balls the size of oranges are pelting her left and right.
And the updraft kept pulling her higher and higher and higher until she passed out from a lack of oxygen.
And at some point this updraft actually shot her up and out of the cloud.
And while this meant she was out of the storm, She was now in air that was 50 degrees below zero, which meant everything, her face, her gloves, her clothes, the wings of her glider, everything completely froze.
And to make matters worse, at the altitude she was at, there was almost no oxygen and she did not have a breathing apparatus.
So by all accounts, Ava should be dead. But somehow she didn't die.
She just kept floating around above the storm cloud for 45 minutes.
And then something happened. The ice on one side of the glider broke off, causing it to collapse, throwing her into a deadly free fall.
And she's not in control. She's still unconscious.
And she starts barreling back towards the ground like gravity has been turned back on again, going straight through the storm all over again.
And so through the storm, going at 90 feet per second, she clears the storm.
And then right after getting out from underneath it, her glider miraculously just opens back up again. the jerking motion of her suddenly stopping her free fall jolted her awake and so she's looking around totally confused as she's gradually regaining consciousness and she's taking stock of where she is and she's still in the storm cloud but right at the bottom of it but luckily the updraft had stopped and so she was steady and she was able to reach up and grab her toggles and she was able to fly herself down to the ground and crash land and then she curled into a ball grabbed her radio and she called her team When they heard her voice, they could not believe she was alive because the other paraglider that got sucked up by the updraft, the guy from the Chinese national team, he unfortunately was struck by lightning and was killed.
And so they were anticipating finding out that Ava had been struck by lightning as well.
But Ava had not just survived. When they brought her to the hospital, they discovered that virtually nothing was wrong with her.
She had some pretty bad bruises and cuts from the hail, and she had a little bit of frostbite on her face, but it was treatable.
And so the same day she was brought in, they discharged her.
After leaving the hospital, she and her teammates went back to the launch site so she could collect her gear.
And when they got there, she looked at her GPS, and the GPS had been tracking her entire flight the entire time she was up in that cloud. and she showed her teammates what it said, and they literally couldn't believe it.
The screen showed she had reached an altitude of 32,634 feet, which, to put this in perspective, is the same altitude you fly at inside of a commercial jet.
So imagine being outside of your plane in the middle of a flight, and that's how high she was.
Another reference point is she was approximately 4,000 feet higher than the summit of Mount Everest.
No human being had ever been that high unprotected and lived to tell the tale until Ava.
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