Kevin was crushed by a boulder

What Was That Like - True Stories. Real People.

Kevin recounts a harrowing experience in the remote Inyo Mountains where he was crushed by an 8,000-pound boulder while rock hounding with h

Key takeaways

• Even experienced adventurers can underestimate the risks of remote environments.

Main topics

• Rock climbing and mineral hunting
• Survival in remote wilderness

Notable quotes

"In that moment, I literally thought, this is how I die."

Conclusion

Kevin's story underscores the fragility of human safety even in seemingly routine

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:01) A lot of people have a serious fear. They can't stand the feeling of being trapped in some way. And really, there are a variety of ways this can present itself. It could be a really crowded, small room where the exits are not easy to access. Or it could be when you're on your back and going into an MRI machine and the top surface is like an inch from your face. Speaker 6 (0:32) Some people fear being in a stuck elevator. I remember having that feeling once in high school PE class. We had a few classes where the boys were taught wrestling. So one by one, we'd get paired up with an opponent who was hopefully somewhat similar in size on a large mat in the gym. Speaker 6 (0:56) And whenever I happened to be underneath the other guy, feeling his weight holding me down, unable to move, I'd briefly get a real panicky feeling until I was able to get up. Did not like that at all, and I was only there for a few seconds. My guest today, Kevin, knows that feeling. Except in his case, he was stuck there for a lot longer than a few seconds. and what had trapped him weighed about 8,000 pounds. Real people in unreal situations. Speaker 7 (1:44) The eerie silence when I walked in and he's just staring at me. I Speaker 8 (1:49) was like, hello, like, are you okay? And then I had to tell him it was me. Speaker 2 (1:55) There was just blood everywhere. They're shouting, they're screaming, Speaker 8 (1:59) they're being hit by bullets, they're hitting the ground. Speaker 3 (2:02) And in that moment, I literally thought, this is how I die. Speaker 8 (2:05) Everything changed then. And I just thought to myself, this isn't happening. Speaker 2 (2:11) Every single story deserves to be heard. Speaker 6 (2:15) I'm Scott Johnson, and this is What Was That Like? Speaker 1 (2:28) Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention. And then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Speaker 8 (3:18) I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight... And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. A man who robbed a bank when he was 14 years old. And a centenarian rediscovers a love lost 80 years ago. Speaker 7 (3:34) How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? Speaker 8 (3:41) Listen to Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (3:49) This happened in the Inyo Speaker 3 (3:52) Mountains. Where is that? The Inyo Mountains are located in the eastern Sierra, basically the most eastern part of California. And it almost acts as kind of like a border between California and Nevada. And that's where you live out in eastern California? Yes. Yeah, currently living in Mammoth Lakes, but I spend a lot of time down in Bishop as well. You are the... Speaker 6 (4:17) stereotypical adventure seeker, it seems like. Is that a title you would give yourself? I Speaker 3 (4:24) like that title because people always try to put me in a box. Is he a rock climber? Is he a mountaineer? I'm just an adventurist. And you were with your friend Josh that Speaker 6 (4:34) day. How did you guys meet originally? Speaker 3 (4:38) Originally, we met kind of in a bouldering area called the Happy and Sad Boulders, just outside of Bishop. And I kind of saw him bouldering with someone else. And I said something to him like, hey, are you guys having the best day ever or something? And I didn't really think much of it till I was in a coffee shop called the Looney Bean about like a week or two later. And I was kind of just walking right past him and he pulled me aside. He's like, hey, you're the guy from the boulders. And he's like. He's like, hey, what are you doing after this? I'm like, nothing, man. He's like, you're coming climbing with me. So he kind of recruited me to be his climbing partner because his other buddy bailed on him. So we went and climbed in the gorge right after that. And I was kind of new to rock climbing outside with a rope. And so he kind of acted as my mentor and kind of showed me the rope, so to say. How much older is he than you? I think Josh is 40 now and I'm 29. So like 10, 10 year difference. Okay. Speaker 6 (5:38) So Speaker 3 (5:38) he's got a little more experience Speaker 6 (5:39) in these kinds of things. Right, Speaker 3 (5:41) right. Not to expose his age on here or anything, but yeah, he's been doing it for a while. Speaker 6 (5:48) At the time you were living in your van. Do you ever get jokes living in the van down by the river? Speaker 3 (5:56) Oh, yeah. Yeah. What's funny about that is it used to be, hey, if you if you keep your crap up, you're going to end up in a van down by the river. And now it's, hey, if you get your shit together, maybe you could end up in a van down by the river. So it's funny Speaker 6 (6:10) how that kind of flipped. Speaker 3 (6:11) It's Speaker 6 (6:12) a goal. Yeah, it's Speaker 3 (6:13) a Speaker 6 (6:13) goal. Yeah. You were just doing odd jobs and you also had like a remote work position as well. Right. Speaker 3 (6:19) Right. I was working for a company called The Math Company. It's based out of Chicago with roots in India. And so I was fully remote at the time. And I was basically doing data analytics and coding and stuff like that. So, yeah, you got to make some money to Speaker 6 (6:35) support your outdoor activities, right? Speaker 3 (6:37) Absolutely. Yeah. By any means necessary. The Inyo Mountains is where you were Speaker 6 (6:42) at that day. How far is this from any kind of large city? Speaker 3 (6:48) It's very remote in that aspect. The closest towns would probably be Big Pine or Independence, which are pretty small. So in the grand scheme of things, I'd say that the closest big city is probably Reno. And then the closest medium city is probably Ridgecrest. And these are both more than two hours away from there. So it's pretty far out there. Were Speaker 6 (7:12) you concerned at all with being so far away from any kind of help? You know, if something should happen, did it ever cross your mind? You Speaker 3 (7:19) know, what's funny is I tend to do a lot of remote stuff. And a lot of the times I'm alone and it never really occurred to me the dangers that could happen out there while you're alone or how you how really remote you are out there. You're more likely to run into a mountain lion than a human out there, which is pretty wild. And so it never really occurred to me. Speaker 6 (7:45) Wow. You must have thought about that since then, though. Yeah. You had been alone when this happened. Speaker 3 (7:51) Yeah. So it's funny not to jump into the future, but being in the hospital bed, that was one of the things that really struck me. And I started thinking about all these crazy remote places that I'd spent time in alone. And it blew my mind. It actually kind of like almost scared me in a way, because you don't realize until you're like not out there how wild some of this stuff can get. Yeah. Speaker 6 (8:14) All right. Well, let's talk about what happened on that day. You and Josh, you were out digging. What were you looking for? We Speaker 3 (8:23) like to go up into the mountains and we search for various minerals, whether it be hematite, epidote, quartz crystals, stuff of that nature. I mean, there's it's really endless sort of stuff out there. There's a ton of old mines all over the place. People have been mining for different types of minerals for probably like over 100 years up there. And there are old mining claims everywhere. And so it's kind of shot in the dark when you're walking around out there. You can come across many different cool minerals. And we're big rock hounds, so anything is interesting to us. And sometimes one mineral leads to another because they mineralize together. So there's stuff called chrysocolla up there, all sorts of things. Speaker 6 (9:11) And are these, when you find something really cool, is it something valuable, like you're going to sell it, or is it just for your own collection? Speaker 3 (9:19) To be honest, a lot of times it's just for our own collection. I'm sure you could sell some of the stuff, but when you get your hands on it, it's so appealing that you kind of just put it in a collection and keep it for yourself most of the time. Speaker 6 (9:33) So on that day, you brought Josh to this particular spot. And you had been there before, right? Right, right. What was this place like? Can you just describe what the conditions were there? Speaker 3 (9:47) Yeah, it's basically like a very rugged terrain. For people that are familiar with Joshua Tree, I guess I could paint a picture. It's basically full of these giant jumbo boulders scattered all over the place. There's a ton of sagebrush on the ground. And it's these very steep... rugged, sandy slopes. It's like basically a barren wasteland in the mountains. And Speaker 6 (10:12) you said boulders, so it's very rocky then. Yes, Speaker 3 (10:16) it's extremely rocky. And like I said, there's just these big granite boulders up there that have just been sitting for thousands of years on these very steep hillsides. Have you ever seen one Speaker 6 (10:28) roll down before? Speaker 3 (10:29) Before the incident, I have never seen a boulder roll down the hill like that. I've pictured it. I could imagine that it could happen, but I've and I've kicked rocks down like climbing peaks and stuff like that. But never a boulder that big have I ever seen shift like that. I Speaker 6 (10:47) guess you could look at these big, huge boulders and assume it's been there for hundreds of years, probably maybe thousands of years. Speaker 3 (10:58) Why would it move now? Exactly. Sitting for thousands of years and just being like kind of weathered into the sand as well. Like these things haven't moved. Yeah. And it feels like since the dawn of time, really. Speaker 6 (11:10) Take us through what happened that day. Speaker 3 (11:13) I'll start off the day. I'll just give you sort of the background. I had been going up there for a few days prior. So before the day, basically, I had spent the entire summer up in Alaska. And I had just gotten back to the area. And I was kind of figuring out the next stage of my life. I didn't have a job at the time. I was kind of just screwing around and adventuring around and just having fun before the winter hit. I had climbed Mount Tom a few days prior. And so I decided, you know, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to look for cool rocks and just pass the time. I think I had like 200 bucks to my name at the time. And so I went up there as a means to kind of kill time. And I started finding some pretty cool stuff. And Josh had originally showed me the spot. And he kind of showed me all about the rockhounding and whatnot. And so I came across this like very cool location. And I told him and he's like, hey, we got to get up there. At the time, he was like, I don't remember what he was sick from. He had like strep throat or something, something nasty. But we decided he was all fired up and we're like, we're going to go do this. We're going up there tomorrow. So I went and stopped back into town. I grabbed myself. I remember this very vividly. I grabbed myself a tuna sandwich and a couple Snickers bars. And so we met early in the morning and we loaded up our packs with. ton of gear like i don't know how much weight probably like like 30 to 40 pounds at least of you know all these random pickaxes chisels rockhounding tools shovels and we kind of split the load because he was in pretty bad shape as far as being sick goes like i said these hills are extremely rugged So you want to start kind of early in the morning, even in the winter when it is cooler, because you're kind of just humping up these like sandy slopes. It's not enjoyable by any means. So Speaker 6 (13:18) this is a place you have to hike to. Speaker 3 (13:21) Exactly. Speaker 6 (13:22) Right. You're not going to drive here. Or did you drive Speaker 3 (13:24) partway and then get out and walk? Yeah, you kind of drive to the base of the foothills and then it's up to you to get. up into the hills, essentially. And so you use geographic features to get up there, but there's no trail or anything. It's just completely off-grid, really. Is there any chance you could get lost? You could get lost real easily. It's kind of like a big room full of mirrors up there. Everything looks the same. And so I had been up there so many times, and you still kind of look around and lose your orientation up there. It's kind of funny how it works up there. Everything kind of looks the same. Speaker 6 (14:00) How do you keep from that happening, from getting lost? Do you carry a compass? A Speaker 3 (14:04) little, yeah. Do you have phones with you? Yes, luckily we had phones and the phone is honestly what ended up saving my life. And most of the time you won't have service up there, which is another great point to add. And so, yeah, I just, I use like apps on my phone. And just from going up there enough times, I'm pretty familiar with the geographic features as far as like which way we came up and which way we were going to go back down. So how long did you hike up the rocks to get to where you were going? I'd say probably a little over an hour, maybe close to an hour and a half, something like that. We're going up this hill. You know, Josh is kind of suffering because he's got the whole sickness going on. We got a huge bag full of tools, each of us. Speaker 3 (14:51) We finally got to the spot, and when you get there, you kind of set up camp, throw all your stuff on the ground, and just take a quick breather and admire the beauty. Because you can kind of see a huge chunk of the Sierra Nevada mountains from up there. It's like this big panorama of the mountain range. So you're rewarded with these awesome views up there. How long were you planning to be there? Sometimes we go all day. It kind of depends on... What we're finding, if we're getting really excited, we're like, hey, we're going to camp up here, you know? Not actually, but you get pretty fired up and you kind of lose track of time. And in the winter, the days are a lot shorter, too. And mind you, the sun sets in the west, so it sets down over the Sierra and it probably happens around like five. Oh, wow. So it gets dark. It gets dark quick, yeah. And then you kind of want to get out of there because once the sun goes down, it gets pretty cold, too. Cold, yeah, and you can't really see as well to navigate all the rocky terrain. That too is a big part of it. Speaker 6 (15:55) All right, so you guys found your spot and took the sites in for a little bit Speaker 3 (15:59) and then started digging. Then we started digging. At first, we were kind of just digging into the ground and not really finding much. It's kind of funny how this works. A lot of the time... A lot of the cool minerals are kind of right underneath of these huge boulders. I don't know entirely why. But eventually the digging led to underneath this boulder. We didn't really think much of it. It was kind of this oblong-shaped, kind of circular boulder on this very, very steep hill that we were basically right underneath. How Speaker 6 (16:37) big is this boulder? Like, if you were standing next to it, where would it come to you? Speaker 3 (16:43) It's bigger than a washing machine, but probably a little bit smaller than a grand-sized piano. So something like that. Probably at least up to your hip, I'd say. A rock that's bigger Speaker 6 (16:55) than a washing machine. That's a big rock. It was a big rock, yeah. So you were digging kind of under it? Speaker 3 (17:04) Yeah, basically, like, we were looking uphill, and as the boulder kind of comes down, we were, like, at the point of it. So, like, in a perfect position for it to roll right on top of you. In other words, which we didn't really think of at the time. I can imagine people hearing Speaker 6 (17:22) this right now thinking, are these guys idiots? Why didn't they think of this? Speaker 3 (17:29) And I've definitely been called an idiot before because of this, for sure. But you got to understand, folks at home viewing, when you're doing this, you are like completely zoned out. You're just kind of focused on digging and what you're doing, especially when you're finding cool stuff. You kind of lose track of your whole surroundings. You lose track of time. You lose track of homeostasis almost. You're kind of just in the zone doing your thing. You dug for a while. How long were you there digging? I'd say probably like a little over a half an hour to an hour, something like that. And, you know, we started finding some really cool stuff and we were getting really excited. Josh was digging, you know, with this like little scraper tool. He was kind of the one that started finding a lot of the cool stuff up there. Then it was my turn and I got in there and I started using the scraper tool. Mind you, like we've dug under a ton of rocks. Never once have any of them really shifted. And so we felt pretty safe. You know, we weren't really thinking, oh, this could roll at any point. Speaker 6 (18:35) I mean, there is a degree of logic to that. You know, I mean, this this rock has been sitting here for so long. It's going to take a lot to move it. We're just a couple of guys digging with our little tools. Why would why would that have any effect? But gravity is a pretty big thing. Speaker 3 (18:53) Absolutely. And it just so happened to be the last straw that broke the camel's back. It's kind of like the last grain of sand, almost. I don't remember entirely how much we actually dug under it, but like I said, we were pulling specimens out of underneath of the boulder, which probably didn't help. We were kind of sitting back and admiring what we were finding, and it gets to a certain point where Josh is finding so much cool stuff. He's like, hey, Kev, you hop in there and get some now. And so I was kind of doing my thing. Josh was kind of off to the side recovering because you have to get in these like crazy positions also to dig under these boulders. You're like, it helps to almost bring some sort of gardening pad or something to lay on or like a foam pad or something. And you are like so zoned in that when you get out, sometimes you like pull a muscle a little bit because you're in these weird positions trying to reach up in there. And so he was kind of resting on the side. I was finding some cool stuff and I decided to rest for a second too. And I think he was on the right side of it. I was on the left facing uphill. I don't remember whether I was admiring one of the finds or what was happening, but I was kind of looking at the ground. And I remember him saying, Hey, Kevo, look out. And before I could even get off my feet, I was on my knees. So before I could even get off the ground, this boulder knocks me back, hits me in both of my legs and lands directly on top of both of my legs and is kind of teetering on my chest, threatening to keep rolling down and crush my entire body, my skull and everything. You were on your back with your head facing downhill. Is that right? My orientation was still facing uphill. It's almost like I was laying down faced uphill. And to paint more of a picture, we were kind of digging this big pit in front of the boulder. And so I basically got knocked into the pit with the boulder on top of me. Speaker 6 (21:04) Okay. So if it's going downhill, Speaker 3 (21:07) how did it hit your legs first? Speaker 3 (21:11) Since I was on my knees and my torso was kind of positioned in a way, basically the underside of the boulder flipped and knocked me back. Kind of like how a football player would hit another football player. And I kind of went flying back from the impact and I ended up