Professional beach volleyball player and avid hiker Heather Friesen fell 50-feet into a gorge and survived, but it wasn't easy.
While the entire fall on video lasts only a few seconds, it will be a lifetime of harsh memory for one young and athletic woman named Heather Friesen, who wasn't out of the woods after she found herself in the water below.
The fall happened in 2016 while she was hiking in Hawaii with friends above a waterfall that had purportedly been deadly to several other people in the past. Unfortunately, Friesen hadn't taken heed to the danger.
As she steps up to the edge of the waterfall, her GoPro took footage of the beautiful but dangerous view. The last thing the you can hear is her reaction in the form a "whoaaa!" before she slipped and went over the edge, but that wasn't the only sound she made that day.
Caution: the video may be difficult to watch for young viewers.
Heather Friesen ended up with 10 broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a fractured scapula or shoulder blade. She can be heard struggling not only to breathe, but to talk so that she could call for help.
When her friends found her in the shallow water groaning, they had to help her to shore and wait for a helicopter recovery team to airlift her from the area and deliver her to a local hospital where she began to recover from her wounds.
Heather can be heard on the podcast "In the World of Female Sports" saying, "I found out there had been others before me who fell from the same spot and died, and I know that God saved my life that day."
Thankfully she survived the ordeal and renewed her journey towards becoming a professional athlete, reminding us that just one fateful footstep can be the difference between a great day out hiking and the end of a beautiful life.
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