Danelle Ballengee was 5 miles (8 km) into her 8-mile (12.9 km) run
through a canyon in the Moab backcountry when something went horrifyingly wrong.
This is her story.
[music]
For many people, a single mile (1.61 km) is a long run
and the time it takes for the average person to run a mile is close to 10 minutes.
The next interval up is a 5-kilometer run, which is run in about half an hour for most people.
Next is the 10K, which takes a little over an hour.
And then for some people, their lifetime goal is to complete a marathon
which is 26 miles or 42 kilometers.
To complete this distance, it takes on average over four hours of running to complete.
Imagine running straight for four hours, the endurance and willpower it takes to keep going that entire time.
In the world of ultra-distance endurance events,
the marathon is a breeze.
And then when you add an elevation and other variables,
ultra-distance endurance races are some of the most grueling events that exist in any sport.
For example, the Pikes Peak Marathon is the same distance as a regular marathon
but goes up to the top of the 14,000-foot (4,267.2 m) Mount Pike.
Over the 26-mile (41.8 km) course, runners have to climb up an additional 7,800 vertical feet (2,377.4 m) to complete the race.
To give you context for just how much more difficult this is than a regular marathon,
the marathon world record is just over two hours whereas Pikes Peak Marathon
is more than three hours and 15 minutes.
So it takes an additional hour due to how difficult it is.
But despite how grueling this event is,
there are some people that are simply as tough and as fit as they get.
As of Wednesday, December 13 2006,
Danelle Ballangee had won the Pikes Peak Marathon four times.
Not only that, she completed all of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks in less than 15 days
which is faster than any other woman at the time.
In her career as an endurance athlete, she had completed 441 endurance events
and finished in the top 3 in 390 of them.
The events that she participated in were as short as one hour, but were up to 10 days in length.
Three times, she was part of the team that won a race called Primal Quest
which is a grueling 400-mile (643.7 km) trek over land, water, mountain and desert.
In her illustrious career, she'd won Athlete of the Year in four separate endurance sports.
Danelle was one of the best endurance athletes in the entire world.
On that Wednesday, she spent the morning sending out emails to sponsors and personal training clients
and then at around 10 AM, she left her house in Moab, Utah to run some errands.
Finally, once she had finished all that other stuff, she could go do what she really wants to do for the day which was run.
Accompanying her as he often did was her 3-year-old Reddish-Brown Mutt Taz.
When she first went to the pound to pick out a dog three years prior,
one dog in particular stuck out to her.
The puppy was running around and had a lot more energy than the rest of the puppies there
which was something she strongly identified with.
Then, when another woman picked up the high energy puppy, without even realizing it,
Danelle instinctively thought to herself, "She's picking up my dog."
So as soon as the woman left the dog, Danelle scooped him up right away and adopted him.
That dog would grow up to have a long jaw and broad chest and would be spoiled from the day to now pick him up from the pound.
That morning after completing the errands, she hopped into her white Ford Ranger and then set off for the trail.
On the way, she picked up some food because she had forgotten to eat breakfast and obviously shared some with Taz.
The weather that day was cloudy but not too cold, which is the perfect for her training session.
She pulled into the parking lot of the Amasa back trail five miles outside of Moab
and then hopped out of her truck to take a quick inventory of her gear.
She had on some running pants, a thin fleece jacket and a fleece hat
because the temperature that day was only going to be mid 40s or around 7 degrees Celsius.
Next, she put on some sunglasses and grabbed her MP3 player and her water bottle that had some water mixed with an energy gel packet.
Just before she locked her phone and wallet inside her truck,
she grabbed a small fanny pack from the back, slipped her water bottle into it, and then took off running.
The route that she was gonna be running that day was an eight-mile loop that started along the Amasa back trail.
A few miles in, she would veer off the trail just before the top of Amasa
onto a seldomly used jeep trail known as Mind Seeker.
This trail would take her into a canyon and then scrambling up some rocks towards another jeep trail.
This will take her back into another canyon and then up some more rocks
before finally heading down a final jeep trail back to where she parked.
Essentially, the route that she was gonna be running was a route that most people didn't use
and it was actually more like a few different routes she'd strung together.
If someone were to get lost along this route, rescue teams would have a much harder time locating them because it's not a direct path.
About an hour into the run, she'd finished about half of her water and traveled about five miles.
Taz panted happily alongside her as she started to scramble up one of the rock sections of the canyon.
Overall, it was a beautiful day and Danelle was one of the best endurance athletes in the world
doing what she loved to do.
And the next second, she was sliding down the rocks.
She felt the lichens and the rocks and the sand as she grasped at anything to try to stop herself.
There was a small bump, and then another bump,
and now, she was going really fast and then, there was nothing but air.
The final section was a 20-foot (6.1 m) overhang and Danelle plummeted down to a ledge below.
From the second she landed, she knew that she had been hurt badly.
Her immediate reaction was to place her hands on her legs to check if they still had feeling.
Thankfully, they did, so she knew she wasn't paralyzed,
but at the very least, it was going to be a long walk back to her truck.
Then, she tried to stand up but she screamed out in pain.
In the fall, Danelle had shattered her pelvis into multiple pieces
to the point that the only thing connecting her legs to her body was soft tissue.
The bones on either side of her pelvis were completely separated from the rest of her skeleton.
Now, realizing that she couldn't walk,
Danelle thought about the fact that she had another two and a half miles (4.02 km) left to go on the trail
to get back to her truck.
It also started to set in that she was hurt very badly.
She needed to get back to her truck to get to her cell phone and get to a hospital as soon as possible.
To make things worse, she landed on a ledge that was part of the way up the canyon.
In either direction, the ledge continued without ascending up to where she had fallen from
or descending further into the canyon, so she had no idea which direction to go.
Then, she realized she had forgotten about Taz.
She knew that he couldn't come down the route she did because it was just a sheer wall.
But with no way to get to him and no other options, Danelle started to drag herself in the direction she hoped would lead her out,
literally pulling her shattered skeleton behind her with every painstaking reach.
Then, out of nowhere, Taz came running toward her.
He had somehow found a way down to where she was and immediately came up to her and started licking her face.
Not only did she now have Taz with her, she knew that the direction he came from was a route off the ledge that she'd fallen onto.
First, she crawled to the bottom of the canyon over rocks and through bushes
and then, after the adrenaline wore off, the pain started to become almost unbearable.
She looked back to where she'd come from, and it was just a few dozen feet and it had taken her two hours to pull herself that distance.
Then, another three hours passed and the sun started to set.
In the wintertime in Moab, the temperature drops below freezing and even all the way down into the 20s
or below -5 degrees Celsius.
Too tired to continue, Danelle stopped for the night.
But she also couldn't go to sleep either.
If she did, she might die due to hypothermia over the course of the night.
She had to fight to stay awake and it was so cold, she couldn't just lie there.
She had to do crunches to stay warm.
Eventually, she settled into a rhythm of doing one crunch every five seconds
and she would do this for the next six hours until the sun finally crept over the horizon again.
Once it was light again, Danelle tried to keep going but with the adrenaline completely worn off,
the pain was beyond excruciating.
It was so bad that she slowly came to the realization that she probably wouldn't be able to make it out on her own.
But when would someone notice that she was gone? Danelle lived alone.
It was possible that no one was looking for her and no one even knew she was gone.
When her family finally realized she was missing, it would probably be too late.
She was running out of water and her injuries were much worse than she realized.
There was an area in her abdomen that had started to swell up
and didn't feel like normal inflammation.
It felt like a jelly roll that was lodged below her belly button.
In the initial fall, her shattered pelvis had also severed some blood vessels and now, she was bleeding internally.
Over the course of the last day, the bleeding had continued to the point that it was pushing up against her abdomen.
Danelle was slowly bleeding to death.
Over the course of the second day, she slowly filled her water bottle up in a small dirty puddle next to where she was lying down.
The water was dirty and filled with sediment and she had to drink it sparingly.
If she had too much, she would eventually have to pee on herself because there was no way she could maneuver herself to use the bathroom.
At nighttime, the freezing temperatures would be much worse with wet clothes.
As the sunset on the second day, Danelle started to get very tired.
At this point, she'd been up for over 24 hours and the crunches were much harder to do
with all of the inflammation in her abdomen.
On the first night, Taz had laid beside her almost like he was comforting her
but on the second night, his demeanor had changed.
He seemed to be frustrated by the lack of action or frustrated by the fact that he'd also been without food
or just confused about why his owner refused to leave the canyon.
But despite everything, Danelle made it through the night once again,
painstakingly performing crunches for hours until the sun came up.
And although she'd made it through the night, she started to lose hope that she'd make it much longer.
However, her situation was not as hopeless as she realized.
On the evening that she'd gotten hurt,
her 76-year-old neighbor looked over to Danelle's house and saw her truck was gone and her drapes were open.
Inside, the lights were on and her computer screens were lit.
The two of them had gotten acquainted because Taz came over every day to get to biscuits
and over her time getting to know Danelle, this wasn't abnormal.
Danelle was frequently away on one outing or another,
but the state of her house seemed to be different this time.
On the second night with her drapes open and her house fully illuminated,
her neighbor contacted Danelle's parents to let them know she was worried.
Something seemed off.
Within a few hours, police were inside Danelle's house searching for anything that might give them a clue about her whereabouts.
But after three hours, they came up with nothing.
She hadn't left any trace of where she was going that day.
Officers put out an attempt to locate order and then went home for the night.
Moab is also a bit of a hub for the adventurer type
and people frequently went off for days at a time and then returned without any issue.
There wasn't even any clear indication that Danelle was in trouble.
To top off the fact that she was a world class athlete,
she was highly experienced in the wild and had years of endurance races to back it up.
On Friday morning, almost 48 hours after Danelle had fallen,
the attempt to locate order was being discussed at one of the local police departments.
An officer named Craig Shumway heard about the report but wasn't particularly worried either.
He finished his paperwork for the morning and then just before heading out for lunch,
he decided to go for a quick drive to help out.
It wasn't his job or even his jurisdiction, but he knew how big the desert was and how many trails were out there to scour.
He made a quick stop at her house and then drove 10 miles (16.1 km) out to Moab to the sovereign trailhead.
On his way back to Moab, he just had a feeling that he should go and check out the Amasa back trail.
When he got there, he went right past the parking lot and continued up to the top of the hill
and what do you know? There was a white Ford Ranger.
Weirdly enough, two days earlier, Danelle hadn't parked in the main parking lot.
She had gone up the hill to cut a quarter mile (0.4 km) off of her run for the day.
Had Craig not gone up the hill, he would have missed her truck entirely.
Soon enough, police were on the scene and discovered the receipt from the foods she had two days earlier.
This meant that she'd spent the last two days and cold nights somewhere outside
so they knew that they needed to work quickly to find her.
In the canyon, Danelle was on the verge of death.
Three pints of blood had leaked into her abdomen and for context,
the average adult human has between 9 and 12 pints.
She screamed for help as she had done for the past two days,
but by that day, she had lost all hope of being rescued.
The pain was bad enough that even getting water from the puddle had become an almost impossible task.
Between the dehydration and the blood loss, she was getting pretty delirious.
Over the course of the day, Taz kept wandering off and coming back and each time,
it seemed like he was gone for longer and longer.
Although she couldn't be sure if it was actually longer or if it was just her mind playing tricks on her.
As she screamed for help, she knew it was going to be dark again soon and she knew no one was coming.
She screamed, because she knew it was going to be her last night and there was still so much she wanted to do with her life.
She thought about her friends and family and Taz
and how he was going to be alone soon and worried what would happen to him.
And then as she screamed, Taz was gone also.
By mid afternoon, the search and rescue team arrived at the trailhead led by a man named John Marshall.
He had actually met to know that year where he was working as an official of a Primal Quest race.
When she ran into his tent at the checkpoint, she had just finished a 46-mile (74 km) trek across the desert
in 105 Fahrenheit or 40 Celsius heat.
She had been without water for four hours and her feet were covered in blisters.
He suggested that she gets some IV fluids, but she declined and grabbed some water
and then raced on like it was no big deal.
John knew that this was no ordinary person who was missing.
For her to be stuck out there, something serious must have happened.
When he pulled up to where her truck was, Taz was there, running in circles.
Most dogs won't leave their owner if their owner is still alive, and so he was devastated to see that.
He knew that they'd simply be trying to recover a body now.
He called Taz over but Taz refused to come over.
He kind of circled the group and scooted out of the way of anyone to try to catch him and then just ran off.
Under normal circumstances, they'd go after him but right now, they couldn't waste time going after a dog
so they organized into three teams and then set off in different directions in search of Danelle.
Two teams set off on foot on the more difficult terrain and then a third team set off on ATVs up the Amasa back trail.
About a mile down the trail, the radios came on again and John yelled that Taz had been spotted again.
Out of nowhere, he came running past the first two ATVs and so one of the drivers got off and tried to follow him on foot.
Taz then run past the farthest ATV, stopped directly in front of it and then looked at the man on it --
a man named Bego Gerhart.
Bego watched as Taz went down the trail and up to a small mesa and then Bego got off and walked up to Taz.
He looked at Taz and Taz looked back at him and then Taz took off once again.
There was something odd about his behavior.
Two months earlier, Bego had been involved in another similar search for two missing men.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that they had been dressed in warmer clothing than what Danelle was wearing,
they had frozen to death before anyone got to them.
That's the unfortunate reality of many of these searches
and many of the searches that Bego had been a part of.
But something about Taz's behavior was giving him the urge to follow him.
Bego backtracked to where he had initially run into Taz and studied the ground to look for tracks.
Incredibly, he found two sets -- one belong to a dog and the other look to be small running shoe prints --
possibly a woman's footprints.
He followed them down the road toward a canyon until the trail started to get rocky.
Then, he went back and grabbed his ATV and drove toward the canyon, then into the canyon and then over the rocks.
And then he thought he heard something.
Danelle watched as Taz came running back over and right over to the puddle that was her only source of drinking water
and immediately started lapping it up.
She watched as he drank and drank and thought to herself, "Can't you find another puddle to drink from?"
She'd been awake for over 48 hours. She'd lost three pints of blood.
Her pelvis was shattered and now, Taz was drinking the last bit of water she had.
Then, she noticed that his demeanor had changed.
He was wagging his tail a little bit, and then he came over and licked her face.
This should have made her happy, but instead, she thought about how sad it would be that she wouldn't get to be with Taz anymore.
And then, she also heard a noise.
She wasn't sure if she was actually hearing something or if she was just losing her mind, but she called for help anyway.
She was practically begging for someone to come and get her out of the canyon
but she'd been calling for the last 50 hours. Of course, there was no one there.
Then, she heard the engine of an ATV cut off and Bego walked over to her
to find her lying on her back with Taz resting his snout on her chest.
Bego told her that she had one good dog and Danelle broke down into tears with relief.
Shortly after finding her, the whole search and rescue team arrived and got her onto a stretcher.
Shortly after that, she was airlifted to a hospital and almost directly into emergency surgery.
The first surgery she had was to repair the broken blood vessels and to stop the bleeding.
She underwent a second surgery shortly after that to pin her pelvis back together.
Throughout the course of her surgeries and her hospital stay, doctors gave status updates to the search and rescue team
and would later say that they couldn't believe that she was alive.
She'd lost so much blood and she had hypothermia. It was nearly impossible that she hadn't died yet.
After her surgeries, Danelle was awake and doctors confronted her with a new problem.
She was finally able to see her feet and she saw that they were completely black from frostbite.
But miraculously, once again, over the course of the next couple of days,
the color of her feet slowly returned to normal.
Unfortunately, the prognosis for her pelvis was not so good.
It had been so badly damaged that doctors weren't sure if she would ever walk again.
She went through months of recovery and physical therapy and incredibly,
within a few months, Danelle was out and running alongside Taz once again.
In fact, as of 2016, she still ran the route that she took the day of her fateful fall.
Doctors attribute her miraculous recovery and survival to the excellent shape she was in
and how tough mentally she was throughout the ordeal.
Search and rescue teams would also say that they might have still found her without Taz's help
but he definitely shaved off hours from their search, likely saving Danelle's life.
And for all of his efforts, he was later given the National Hero Dog Award fromthe Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Truly a good dog.
If you made it this far, I just wanted to thank you for watching.
My name is Sean and welcome to Scary Interesting.
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