In hindsight, journalist Alec Luhn made "a couple of bad decisions" during his solo hike in Norway's Folgefonna National Park, which stretched on for six long days after the Wisconsin native fell and broke numerous bones, leaving him unable to stand. Just a few hours after setting out on July 31, the sole of his left boot started to come off, Luhn tells the New York Times in a phone interview from a Bergen hospital, where he continues to recover from the ordeal. Luhn says he should've gone back to town to get some new boots. Instead, he fixed the torn boot with athletic tape, which affected his traction.
By 10pm, Luhn had found a good camping spot, but he decided to push on—another mistake. Tired and walking in "very steep terrain," he slipped and fell and "started bouncing around, like a pinball heading down the mountain," he tells the Times. Then he blacked out. He awoke with a fractured femur, pelvis, and two vertebrae and could barely move. He'd also lost his water, cellphone, and most of his food during the fall, per ABC News. Pretty soon, he began drinking his urine and sucking the blood from a blister just to wet his mouth, per the Times.
After three days, rain began to fall, quenching Luhn's thirst but leaving him wet and cold, leading to severe frostbite on both feet. Though rescuers began to assemble the next day after he'd missed his flight to the UK, it wasn't until the morning of Luhn's sixth day on the mountain that he got his first sight of a helicopter. Unfortunately, it left without any sign of having seen him. "I thought: OK, well, I may have just missed my only shot," he says. But less than an hour later, a helicopter appeared again. This time, the pilot returned Luhn's wave. "That was the moment that I knew that I was going to be able to make it through," he says.
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