Skier's 1K-Foot Plunge Will Make Your Heart Stop

Angel Collinson takes jaw-dropping tumble in Alaska's Neacola Mountains
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 29, 2016 9:28 AM CST

Even world-class freeskiers can have a bad day in the powder—and a heart-stopping video that's now circulating shows how that happened to Angel Collinson last spring during a movie shoot. The video, taken in Alaska’s Neacola Mountains, was footage to be used in Teton Gravity Research's film Paradise Waits, but the mountain had other plans for the 26-year-old Utah skier, reports the Alaska Dispatch News. The video shows Collinson start her run, only to hit a patch of icy snow and tumble 1,000 vertical feet down the mountain, careening for 25 white-knuckle seconds. "Being the badass that she is, Angel came out unscathed, but the footage will leave you wondering how she escaped without injury," reads the description posted by TGR under the YouTube video, promoted during the company's Safety Week 2016 to inform other backcountry athletes of such dangers.

It's doubtful Collinson felt especially badass during her tumble. "The fall was absolutely terrifying—without question," she says in a release. "You have no idea what you are going to tumble over and there is basically nothing you can do but hang on." And that's what she did, telling Good Morning America earlier this week that she covered up her face, used her arms to protect her head as best she could, and "kind of just held on until I stopped." What she had to show for her death-defying plunge: two injured fingers, a few bruises, and the loss of whatever was in her pack, which spilled open as she pitched and rolled in the snow. "I'm OK, I'm OK," an out-of-breath, miked-up Collinson says in the video when she finally comes to a full stop. "I'm fine. … I can go back up and get my s--t, too." (It's not the first crazy fall caught on video by Teton Gravity Research.)

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