Reader's Digest Australia Feb/Mar 2026

used to dislodge heavy objects in car crashes, under the boulder and inflated them, helping stabilize everything and protect Morris if the boulder slipped. The time had come to apply some brute force. Four men gripped the edges of the 700-pounder and, on the count of three, lifted it as high as they could on one side—not much, just an inch or so in the air. “Hold it, steady!” Harrington yelled. Three smaller rocks pinned down Mor- ris’s left leg, so two rescuers reached in and moved them. Roop’s job was to pull Morris out, but when the moment arrived, she was too exhausted to drag him against the flow of the creek. She moved him a bit—but now, if the rescuers lost their grip on the boulder, it would probably cut his legs off at the thigh. “I need help!” Roop called out. One of the firefighters moving the smaller rocks grabbed Morris under the arm- pits and, while the other men kept the giant boulder elevated, pulled him out. After three hours trapped under the rock, Morris was free. The RescueRs ThoughT they needed to tend to his mangled left leg, but quickly realized that his boot hadn’t been on his foot. It had come off in the fall, twisted around and filled with water— which had made it feel as if there was a foot inside it. Far from being horribly twisted and mangled, Morris’s leg had suffered only a few scratches. 84 february/march 2026 JOANNA ROOP He wasn’t out of danger yet, though— the team had to warm him up. The first step was getting him out of his wet clothes. Much to Morris’s dismay, they cut him out of one of his better pairs of hiking pants. “I have his long johns and dry clothes in my bag,” Roop said. They put them on him, then added thermal blankets, a sleeping bag and a full-body vacuum splint, which wrapped around Morris’s body and immobilized him. As his tem- perature rose, he became more alert, and his pulse and heart rate improved. It took about another hour before a 176th Wing Alaska Air National Guard pararescue squadron helicopter, which was equipped to airlift Morris, arrived. He was then carried in a basket across Resurrection Bay to Providence Seward Medical Center, where he spent two nights. The hospital stay was purely a pre- caution. Morris was, somehow, largely unscathed. He had a nasty bruise on one shoulder and minor scratches all over, but that was about it. “For him to have no significant inju- ries,” Harrington says, “that was shock- ing—in a good way.” Youwouldn’t normallY think of a man who gets caught in a rock slide, falls 20 feet, and lands face down in a creek under a boulder as lucky, but in a num- ber of ways, Kell Morris was. If he’d banged his head on a hard surface on the way down, if the boulder hadn’t landed just so on a scattering of other rocks, if Roop hadn’t been able to get a cell signal so quickly, if Sam Paperman and his helicopter hadn’t been avail- able to ferry the firefighters quickly to the scene … “Every star aligned in this case,” Fire Chief Crites reflects. Morris and Roop believe it was more than that. “I don’t feel like luck had any- thing to do with it,” Roop says. “I feel like God’s plan had everything to do with it.” Morris was back to work three days after the accident, and he and Roop plan to keep up their busy schedule of hiking, backcountry skiing and other outdoor adventures. “We are definitely going to get to that glacier,” Morris says. “There’s no way that thing’s going to get the best of us. But probably we won’t go up the creek— we know some folks who can get us there by helicopter.” Kell Morris and Joanna Roop plan to keep exploring Alaska’s wilderness. readersdigest.com.au 85 Drama in Real Life reader ’ s digest