Hiker dies after falling 700ft down mountain as witness describes final moments
A hiker has sadly died after falling down a mountain in Utah, authorities have confirmed.
On Saturday (July 19) at around 8.45am local time, Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office responded to an incident at Bell's Canyon, Utah, US, following reports of a man being caught in a rockslide.
After arriving at the scene they discovered a 49-year-old man unresponsive.
A doctor happened to be hiking in the area and found the injured hiker first and attempted to revive him.
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Sadly his efforts were in vain and the man was pronounced dead at the scene.
It's believed he'd plummeted 700 feet before meeting his fate after getting caught in a rockslide.
The Sheriff's Office conducted further searches at the scene and found that nobody else had been injured in the ordeal.
Heather Hayes witnessed the hiker fall and said that it took two hours for a helicopter to arrive to help the injured man.
Heather had been walking around the same trail with her husband on the fateful day and had passed the now-deceased hiker on a few occasions. They had a few conversations with him but she said she never learnt his name.
The trio had a chat at the peak before Heather and her husband proceeded to make their way down the mountain.
It was a steep ridge with loose rocks, says Heather, and as she cautiously made her way down she noticed one particularly wobbly rock.
After spotting it, she stepped on a different stone not realising that the man they'd been chatting to wasn't far behind them.
He proceeded to stand on the same wobbly rock Heather had done just moments earlier.
"I watched him as it loosened on him and he fell backwards," she recalled to KSL.
"It started a cascade of rocks and he called out to me for help, but I couldn't even process what was happening as the rocks around us loosened and he fell backwards and started rolling down the mountain with the rock slide."
Heather's husband and another good samaritan who happened to be a student nurse starting climbing down to try and help the man and administered CPR when they eventually got to him 10 minutes later. Her spouse knew it was going to be a fatal outcome for the hiker, however.
While administering CPR another rockslide began.
Heather said: "They continued CPR, but we screamed at them to move out of the way because another rockslide was starting. More chair-sized rocks and some larger boulders were flying down the same path towards them so my husband and the other man ran out of the rock path."
Heather was the last person the fellow hiker had spoken to before his death.
Noting this, she shared: "I was the last person he spoke to, and I think I was the only one close enough to him to see exactly what happened."
Niamh Shackleton