A climber who survived a “rollercoaster” 300m fall in the Scottish Highlands today said he felt “extremely lucky” to be alive.
Adam Potter (35) fell down a steep slope after slipping near the top of Sgurr Choinnich Mor, about 8km east of Ben Nevis in the Scottish Highlands, on January 29th.
A Royal Navy helicopter crew was stunned to find Mr Potter standing up reading a map when they arrived on the scene.
The landfill site manager was winched on board and flown to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, where he was treated for a broken rib, back fractures in three places, whiplash and facial injuries.
Today, he and his girlfriend Kate Berry travelled to HMS Gannet at Prestwick, Ayrshire, where the crew who rescued him is based.
Mr Potter spent two days in hospital but still has his sights set on another adventure - climbing Everest in just under five weeks' time. "I wanted to meet the crew again and meet them when I could remember them. The one key point is I just feel absolutely lucky, extremely lucky," he said.
"I've always lived life to the full and I will just continue to do so. I will certainly be careful up on the mountains, I always am, but this was one unlucky slip which resulted in me going to the hospital.
"I'm still planning to go to Everest. I've done a year of building up to the expedition and I still feel I will be ready in time," he said.
Mr Potter, from Glasgow, was climbing with three friends and his dog when he slipped and fell as he crossed an icy patch.
The crew who rescued Mr Potter were amazed that he survived the fall. Petty Officer Taff Ashman was the paramedic winched down to pick him up from the slope. "We were expecting the worst. We've been to a lot of guys that have fallen and more often than not anything over a couple of hundred feet you are expecting the worst. We were actually quite amazed when we eventually found Adam," he said.
"I would rate him as one of the luckier rescues. There's been lots of people a lot worse injured falling nowhere near as far. He was very very lucky that day, the sort of topography he went down. He had a bit of a rollercoaster ride on the way down and he walked away relatively unscathed."
On the day of Mr Potter's accident Dr Niall McMahon, from the emergency medical retrieval service in Glasgow, was onboard the helicopter on a training day and treated him.
He said: "Being in the aircraft when we got that call and knowing roughly how far he could have fallen and the area that he had fallen in, myself and the rest of the crew were concerned we were dealing with something very serious and potentially worst-case scenario.
"When we actually got on scene and were able to see where he'd fallen from, and actually see the path in the snow he had created when he had fallen and see him standing at the bottom, that was quite remarkable."
Agencies