Paraglider Ben Lewis remembers spinning around wildly as he got pulled up higher and higher into the violent storm. That was when he realized, about 6,700 metres up in the sky and still rising, that he was not likely to see his family again.
“It basically was a hopeless situation. It was just so powerful, and I felt like there’s essentially nothing I could do to save myself,” he recalled.
“I mean, I was very, very sad. I knew I was gonna die. And I just felt so bad for my family, that I was leaving them like this.”
Then he went unconscious.
A few weeks later now, Lewis is back home in Watson Lake, Yukon, nursing some wounds and counting himself incredibly lucky for surviving his dizzying, high-altitude encounter with a Himalayan storm, his plummet back to earth, and his grueling trek out of the jungle.
“I still have aches and pains from the rib fractures and stuff. And my eyes, my vision’s kind of slowly returning,” he said.
“But no, things are just overall good. I’m happy to be alive.”
‘There was no escape’
Lewis’s terrifying misadventure began a few weeks ago when he and a couple of Yukon friends, brothers Dave and Trace McDonald from Dawson City, were in the middle of one of their regular trips to go paragliding somewhere new. In the past they’d gone to Mexico, Colombia, and Spain, and this time they decided to go to Bir, the “paragliding capital of India.”
They had been having some great days, paragliding long distances over the rugged Himalayan terrain. Then one day, in mid-October, the weather seemed to turn.
Lewis was flying on his own that afternoon and was making his way back for the day when a dark storm “just kind of appeared.”
“I don’t think I had enough experience in the mountains, and I didn’t realize the early warning signs. And basically I got too close to this thing before I realized what was happening and tried to escape. And by the time I realized, there was no escape,” he recalled.
“It was just so, so strong and violent and yeah, it just basically sucked me in.”
That’s when he found himself being pulled higher and higher into the dark air, amid hail and thunder and lightning. He was spinning out of control and the blood was rushing to his head.
“It was just crazy. And then I passed out.”
Meanwhile, his Yukon friends were back in Bir, waiting for Lewis’s return. They’d seen the storm moving in and knew that it wasn’t safe to be up in the air — but they had no idea where Lewis was.
They tried phoning and texting him, but nothing went through.
“You know, you just have a little bit of a bad feeling at that point,” recalled Dave McDonald.
Hours passed and they still couldn’t reach Lewis. They were getting more and more worried until, finally, their texts seems to go through. Minutes later, a text arrived from Lewis.
“All it says is, ‘guys I’m in trouble.'” McDonald recalled.
“My heart just sank at that point. I was like, ‘noooo.’ Like, we were kinda worried about the worst, and now I’m like, ‘f–k, what’s happened. This isn’t good.'”
Lewis, incredibly, after passing out way up in the middle of the storm, had woken some time later to find himself hanging in the jungle foliage, a few feet off the ground.
“Basically the glider just kind of fell out of the sky,” he recalled. “I probably fell at, you know, 50 or 60 kilometres an hour straight to the trees.”
He wasn’t safe yet. He had some broken ribs, and a separated shoulder, and had broken his neck as he would learn later. He couldn’t hear anything because of a ruptured ear drum. He was also blind in one eye from a retinal hemorrhage. He was alone, and still a long way from safety.
“I kind of pulled out a tarp and I sat there in a hailstorm and blew on my hands to warm them up for about half an hour,” he recalled.
“I had to make a decision to get going. I was pretty sure I was going to die in the jungle that night. It was pretty cold and I was soaking wet.”
He knew where he was on the map though, and he eventually managed to stagger to an area where he was able to send that text, and then connect with the McDonalds by phone.
Dave McDonald recalls the relief he felt at finally hearing from Lewis, but also the anxiety from realizing his friend was in bad shape.
“Ben’s a tough, stoic guy, but he’s like, ‘I’m not gonna make it through the night,’ McDonald said.
“I could hear the concern for himself in his voice. For me, it was a bit alarming. It was scary.”
Lewis was able to mark his location on the map for the McDonalds to see, and they immediately set about trying to get to him as fast as possible.
It took some time, and a lot of help from other local paragliders, before a local family managed to hike out to where Lewis was staggering and stumbling through the jungle and bring him back to their home. The family warmed him up and tended to his wounds until the McDonald brothers got there to retrieve him.
“Ben is so remarkably lucky to be alive. Like, he’s luckier than a seven-leaf clover with a horseshoe up its ass. It’s insane,” McDonald said.
“It was definitely, in all honesty, probably the most stressful day of my life so far. It was pretty scary.”
Lewis, who’s a doctor back in Watson Lake, says the experience definitely gave him a new perspective on things. He says it’s made “every little moment just extra-precious.”
Still, he’s not about to quit paragliding.
“These trips with the guys have been, you know, some of the best things you can do, really. So I plan to fly again, for sure.”