So recently I had a very life-threatening experience.
The week prior, my cousins and i had been on a week-long road trip and our final stop of the trip was this mountain located in central oregon, and although it felt like we were on top of the world, We quickly realized we had hit rock bottom, quite literally, when we got stranded in the middle of nowhere for hours on end without any food or water all because of You see, I got a drone right before the road trips so I could film the road trips.
So during sunrise, when my drone crashed off of the cliff we had just spent the night on we decided to go look for it.
Right now we are hiking and hoping along the way we can find a path, or even just like a safe way, that leads to the section of the mountain my drone landed on
Little did we know the search for my drone would almost cost us all our lives.
But this experience would also leave me with one hell of a story.
Um, I'm Obviously off the mountain now safely alive.
I still can't really process the whole situation.
It's been like a couple weeks since it happened and believe me when I say I still can't believe it happened.
I've been kind of going back and forth whether or not I want to make this video for the past couple weeks, just because part of me feels like it's the right thing to do.
Part of me wants to make this video just because of how big of like an impact it had on me, but then the other part of me is really hesitant to make this video, just because, first of all, i don't do story times on my youtube channel and i don't really know if this is something you all are interested in, but also just because the story is very personal and like vulnerable and I don't know.
It was just a really really, really scary day and I've never been so close to death in my entire life.
So like I don't know.
I just still don't know how to feel about the whole thing, I guess.
When I was filming all that footage, I really had no intent in making a video about anything.
I was genuinely just recording that stuff because I thought I was going to die and if I did die, I wanted people to know what happened because obviously I was like all alone stranded in the middle of nowhere.
We'll get into that in a second.
Given the fact that I already should have made and uploaded a video about me climbing this mountain, and then I also have like footage of me almost dying on this mountain it felt wrong to like just not even mention it.
But the thing is is like if I'm gonna mention it, I have to go into detail with everything and I have to like really give you guys like the full rundown of everything that happened.
I feel like if I don't explain one thing right, then you guys aren't gonna get the next thing or any other things.
Like everything kind of just like ties itself together.
So I really need to explain this the best way I possibly can and I'm really gonna try to.
I suck at explaining stories and I'm probably gonna be all over the place in this video, so just try to bear with me And I will try to explain this the best way I possibly can.
Obviously, this whole story starts on this mountain that's like an hour away from my house.
I can actually see it like right outside my window.
Like it's literally right outside my window.
I have to look at this fucking mountain every day now.
Just a little bit of a backstory before we really get into detail about anything.
The day before this whole incident, me and my cousins had hiked up This mountain with our tents, our sleeping bags, food and like giant backpacks and everything and we spent the night on top of this mountain So we could wake up the next morning and watch sunrise and everything and get some like good videos and pictures.
I'm gonna pull out my drone to film the sunrise and I remember having this like weird feeling about the whole thing.
I was like why do I feel like I shouldn't fly my drone right now?
I even said out loud to my cousins Peyton and Madison.
I was like guys, should I even fly my drone?
I don't know, I was second guessing myself for some reason.
But obviously, I ended up flying it because that's how this whole story happened.
On the DJI Spark drone, the one that I have, the battery packs only last for up to 16 minutes of flight time.
So I had brought up two battery packs one for sunset, Which I had already used the previous night, and then one for sunrise.
After the battery on the drone gets down to like 30, they recommend you start flying it back to you, just so it has a Enough battery to get back to you.
So that's exactly what I started to try to do.
I was controlling like all the controls in the app like every single way I possibly could and this drone was just doing like random things in the sky and it wasn't like it's almost like the app like malfunctioned or something or like the connection was bad or lost or whatever, which is really weird, because the drone was still like relatively close to me and my cousins, like it's not like it was that far away, Like I still just don't know what ended up happening.
But the point is the drone was dying in the middle of the sky and obviously it wasn't gonna make it back to us in time, so I had to emergency land it below us off the cliff part we were staying on.
We all just kind of watched the drone slowly fall out of the sky right below us and there's nothing we can do about it besides, maybe go look for it.
So that's what we tried to do.
And this is what we call dumb bitch alert number one.
There's gonna be a lot of these throughout this whole story, not gonna lie.
From what we could see up at the top, the bottom looked like relatively flat.
It didn't look dangerous at all.
Like we really thought it was just gonna be like an easy quick hike, grab the drone and then get off the mountain, no problem.
So to kind of give you guys like a better understanding of what the setting was, we were up at like this little hill part on the top and the side my drone crashed on was just like a straight Cliff off the side.
So we obviously couldn't go that way to go get it.
We went back down the way we came up, obviously because that was like the trail.
We hiked all the way down and instead of following the trail out to the parking lot again, We decided to get off the trail to go look for the drone and hike all the way around this mountain and somewhere around the side of the mountain.
We were getting super, super tired, obviously of hiking and the sun was coming out and it was getting super hot.
So, dumb bitch, alert number two we decided to put all of our backpacks down, with all of our water, all of our food, everything we needed to survive.
We decided to put it down and keep hiking around the mountain.
Believe me when I say we were all so convinced this hike was gonna take us maybe an hour at most.
We had no idea the conditions we were going to be under, which is obviously why we put the backpacks down.
We really just didn't think it was going to get bad at all.
If any of us would have known what the situation was going to turn into, what it ended up turning into, we would have never even considered going to look for the drone in the first place because honestly, it just wasn't worth it.
Also, i forgot to mention that like we were tracking where my drone was because we first of all had pinned the location where we stayed the night before and also we had, like the coordinates of my drone on the app, so we were just like following where it told us to go through the drone app that i have.
When we first started kind of scaling like the lower part of the mountain, there was all these like huge hills with just like loose gravel and our dumbasses climbed up them and were going up and down and sliding down them.
Going up them like it was just really unsafe and they weren't like huge hills, like they were definitely climbable.
But the thing is is that we didn't realize how many hills there was.
There was just hill after hill after hill and you couldn't see What was over the hill until you climbed the hill.
So we kept climbing the hill.
I feel like the more we did it, the more dangerous we realized it was becoming.
But we also didn't Want to turn back because we had all done like so much work to get where we were.
So why would we turn back now?
I want to say after like two, maybe three hours of hiking, we finally made it to the section of the mountain that we had stayed above.
So we were below it now.
It has to be somewhere down here.
On the drone app, it's saying it should be somewhere down here.
Coming up over that last hill, we all kind of like thought that was it.
We thought we had finally made it to where the drone was.
I was just gonna go down and grab the drone super quick.
Dumb bitch alert number three is right here.
We decide to split up.
Went down alone on this part of the mountain.
We were all still under the impression that, like I was gonna go find this drone No problem at the bottom, really quick, and we were gonna hike back, get in the car and go home and chill, like we just really underestimated this whole thing.
If anything though, I am kind of glad we split up and Peyton Madison didn't come with me, because this is where things start to get like really extreme, and I feel like I already had like endangered their lives.
Enough looking for my stupid drone.
I appreciated them like coming all the way out with me anyways.
So I was just thinking like I would go down to this flat part, go find the drone, because it said it was close now and then we'd be on our way out of there, right?
Yeah, that's not what happened.
I did not realize how big this part of the mountain was, obviously until I saw this video Peyton took of me in comparison to the size of even just like the rocks.
The more I explain the story, the more like dumb I feel, because I know how dumb it sounds and it looks and it is in certain aspects.
But when you're looking at a mountain from a distance, it really does not look as big as it actually is, if that makes any sense.
Dumb bitch alert number... three, four, I don't- I've lost track at this point.
Like, this whole story is just a giant dumb bitch alert.
The only things I had on me was my phone and my camera.
No water, no food, nothing like i just decided to bring my phone and my freaking camera with me so i'm down on this flat part and the drone app is telling me that like i'm getting really really close and obviously i knew i was getting close because this looked like the area that the drone had landed at this point it was saying my location was like literally this far away from the drone so i was kind of looking around for it seeing if i could even find it in the area but eventually i kind of realized it was telling me to go more up dumb bitch alert number five or something i went up the mountain i was literally having to like use my hands to like drag me up this part of the mountain because that's where it was saying this drone was Once again, I didn't want to turn back obviously I had already made it all the way there and I was so close to getting it I eventually make it to where it says my drone is on the app and My location is right next to its location like they're literally right on top of each other but the only thing is I was on the side of the mountain and Looking up at the mountain and there was more layers of the mountain if that makes any sense so I finally make it to my drone but Look up and I realize the drone is above me on a different part of the mountain But like literally you have to fucking like rock climb to get so I'm like really freaking out at this point I'm starting to have like a full-fledged panic attack because I realized that I'm either gonna have to like rock climb this shit or i'm just gonna have to go back down without the drone and all this was for nothing i remember kind of going up the mountain a little bit more to see if there was a safer part to hike up to get to the next level of rocks above me but there really wasn't so i tried to go back down and that's when i realized i was stuck i kept falling a lot when i tried to go down and that I couldn't get down, I realized I wasn't gonna be able to get down without, like, literally just sliding down and probably dying in the midst of all this happening all of a sudden rocks like rock avalanches start happening right near me like on the side of the mountain that the sun was shining on and even though the rocks were like relatively in the distance the part that freaked me out is that i was stuck up there and the sun was slowly coming towards the shaded part i was under and once the sun reached me that's when the rocks were going to start falling right where i was when the rock avalanches started happening that's when like i really really really started to realize how intense and extreme the situation was and how like not okay this whole thing was.
It's like at this point is when I feel like I really started to enter full panic mode, so I don't remember things specifically that happened and I don't have like a timeline of the events that were happening up on there.
One moment I remember very distinctly though, is the moment after I, kind of like, accepted the fact that this was happening, because the entire time that this was happening,
I feel like I wasn't processing that it was, if that makes any sense.
I literally remember, like looking up and just taking a second to look around at me, like it was like something out of a movie.
I feel like i don't even know how to explain it, but i just looked around me and i genuinely, genuinely thought that was it, like i really accepted the fact that i was going to die.
My cousins also couldn't see me at this point, by the way, They were still at the bottom.
They had no idea what was going on.
I had been gone for like probably an hour at that point and they were just waiting.
They thought I was going to come back within like 20 minutes, but it had been like an hour and they still did not know where I was or what was happening.
I had service but they didn't.
So I was trying to call them and they weren't picking up and apparently they went looking for me and they couldn't find me and they thought that I had died from the rock avalanches that kept happening, because they saw those but they couldn't see me.
To be real, I didn't think 911 was gonna be able to help.
I didn't want to call 911 because I know how stupid the story sounds and looks.
Like three teenagers on a mountain looking for a drone that got lost or something like I feel like that's something you would see on like the news or something and laugh at because you think like oh, I'd never fucking do that.
But like, no, that's what happened to me.
Like my dumb ass did that.
So yeah, that's great.
I didn't know what else to do though, so i called 9-1-1, and luckily i had 13 left on my phone and i had service to call 9-1-1, so i did.
The 911 operator somehow got my coordinates of where i was on the mountain and then they sent it to the search and rescue team that volunteers up at brokenthal, and i'm pretty sure my phone number was like transferred to the search and rescue team, because I got a call from them after I hung up with the 911 operator and they were just saying like hey, like we heard your situation, we're coming to rescue you off this mountain, which was so like relieving and good to hear, until they asked me in a very concerned voice How much food and water do you have with you?
Which kind of implies that like they're not going to be able to rescue me for like a long time.
So we kind of started to examine our other options, because It sounded like the search and rescue people were like really far away and it was going to obviously take them like a really, really long time to get to us.
Since the search and rescue.
People are actually smart and they like kind of know what they're doing when it comes to like hiking mountains and stuff.
They told me that I was right below the trail.
You're just below the trail.
Am I really?
You really are, but the problem is So I kind of knew I only had like two options at that point.
One of them being I stay out until it's like pitch black, waiting for people to come rescue me off this mountain and possibly even get killed by a rock falling off the mountain during another avalanche.
Or I just keep climbing up the really, really steep part of the mountain until I hopefully make it to a trail, or I fall to my death.
And since I already thought I was about to die anyways, I just took the risk and I just kept climbing up the super, super steep part of this mountain.
So I'm scaling this mountain even more now and I just keep going more up.
Like I am straight up climbing a mountain at this point.
Okay, so I have to put in a little voiceover at this part, because I really did not explain this part of the story that well.
I pulled up what this section of the mountain looks like on Google Maps and basically I was in this area right around here when I kind of realized I was going to have to like, rock climb these rocks right here.
I was not trying to go in this snow part right here, because in real life that was actually super, super steep and slippery and i probably would have just slid to my death.
But yeah, basically what i was trying to say is that i just needed to get over this huge rock right here to get back on the trail, and this rock was kind of like i guess the best way i could describe it was like it was super steep up but then it was kind of flat at the top, but also still kind of steep.
But somehow i managed to make it up to the point on this rock where like, my arms could go on the flat part.
But the problem was is that on the flat part there was obviously no place to grip.
It was just literally loose gravel parts of the rock.
I could put my feet in to Pull me up even more, but there really wasn't like a good grip anywhere.
So I was really really, really struggling.
I just had to use every last ounce of like force in my toes that were like keeping me afloat to push myself up over this rock, and somehow I did.
Somehow I didn't die and fall to my death off this mountain.
I genuinely do not know how I didn't fall off the side of this mountain.
In all honesty, it really shocks me that I even made it up because I didn't think I was going to.
After I made it up that part, I honestly just laid on all the gravel for a few minutes and let everything process and run through my mind.
Because it was so hard to process in the moment.
It's still hard to process now like what even happened.
But yeah, that kind of sums up like the main events in the story.
I know the rest of the time was just a lot of hiking.
Obviously, we were super sore the next day.
We hiked like a total of 15 miles in one day up and down hills and everything.
It wasn't just like a straight 15 miles.
I know at some point my cousins actually ended up getting service and they were in contact with search and rescue too, so they led us to a spot where we could link up again.
Search and rescue team on broken top was seriously so, so helpful.
Not only did they help me, peyton and madison, like link up together again, but they also like gave us food and water, everything we needed and they got us off the mountain safely, and also they found my drone for me.
And it's crazy too, because i feel like this experience obviously went terribly wrong, but also it could have gone so much worse.
Like considering the fact that i still got my drone back after all this, considering the fact that we're all like not injured or dead or anything like that is seriously so mind-boggling to me because it's it was a really like crazy day.
I also would just like to say in this video that we aren't the only ones this has happened to.
Apparently, the search and rescue people were telling us that, like a lot of people get in these situations where, like They get out to a part of the mountain and they don't really realize how big it is until they're out there and they're like stuck.
My voice is also going away.
It's very hard for me to talk right now because I've been talking for so long and I don't know why I keep talking, because it hurts to talk at this point.
I don't really know how to end this video, let alone this entire series, because this is supposed to be the third part to the whole thing, aka like the last part of the whole thing, and I don't want to end it on such like a bad note.
So I'm adding this part in at the end of the video like super last minute, because I didn't want the whole series to just end like super abruptly.
Originally I wanted to add in like a little like montage or a quick like recap, I guess, of everything that happened on the road trips.
But now I don't think I'm going to do that.
First of all, because it honestly just seems like really out of place in this video.
But second of all, because...
I'm gonna be honest, this is like the one video so far out of the whole road trip series that I have not gotten copyrighted on, so I would like to try to keep it that way and if I were to add in, like this ending montage, I'm gonna get copyrighted.
I just bite the bullet and take the copyright strike.
But with this one it just didn't really seem worth it and it just makes more sense to make this little thing.
So yeah, I hope you all don't mind.
I hope you understand the situation I'm in.
And the series.
Obviously, even though it's ending off like this, it also ends off with a lot of like great memories, despite you know everything that happened on Broken Talk.
So yeah, I'm sorry for kind of like the rough ending to this whole thing, but I'm definitely super happy with the way part one and part two turned out and like the trailer and everything.
So hopefully that makes up for whatever this is.
Anyways, make sure to like, comment, and subscribe.
Ew, I hate doing outros, so I'm gonna just end it.
