Car Crash! (Not us)

Today we were doing some geocaching and had stopped for our 2nd cache of the morning. We were beside Colorado 160, west of Durango. Some call the area ‘Mancos Hill’. It’s a very steep area and the road winds up the hill here.

So anyway, we’re pulled over on a dirt road and so I’m maybe 200′ away from the highway looking for a geocache when I hear skidding and crashing, so I whip around in time to see the ass end of a car sailing, literally flying off the side of a cliff beside the road.

So I run to the truck and Tira zooms back down the dirt road the highway where the car went off. Two other cars were stopped and it only took a minute to locate where she left the roadway because of the damage to a fence, but we couldn’t see any more tracks or the car. One other guy and myself headed down the hill to start looking while Tira and his wife stayed up with the third couple who were calling 911.

We looked for 10 minutes or more going up and down the hill and couldn’t figure out where her car could have gone until at one point I looked up. Up in a tree about 5′ over my head was a car part. We couldn’t believe it and headed down the hill following the trail of destruction in the tree tops. It looked like the car bounced once or twice, hard, before flying further down and across the hillside. We eventually found her about 150′ or more down the hillside, and 400 to 500 feet across the hill side from where she left the roadway, which is why it took so long to find her. She was probably doing 60 when she left the road, according to one of the guys who stopped.

This is from the Durango Herald, “On July 5, at mile marker 62, a New Mexico woman was injured after she crashed 150 feet down an embankment. The rescue was described as “challenging,” and the woman was extricated from the vehicle. She was taken by helicopter to Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango.”

According to the paper, this was the 3d crash in nearly the same place in 8 days, with 2 fatalities and 6 injuries. The woman in this accident survived.

….and this was her car when they pulled it up about 4 hours later. The driver was medivacced out earlier.

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