If anyone knows about miracles, it is Canadian Carol Grant Sullivan, author of ‘Fall Line’, released by Shore Publishing.

Three years ago, Mrs. Sullivan fell 6,000 feet from a jagged mountain peak during a ski vacation in the Andes in South America.

Not only did she survive, but through sheer determination to live, managed to ski to safety despite suffering nerve damage, a neck injury, numerous broken bones, and severe physical shock.

“A lot of people would wonder why a woman who was 47 years old, mother of two children, wife of a corporate CEO, businesswoman herself, ever put herself in a position to fall 6,000 feet off a mountain in a horrific accident,” Mrs. Sullivan told the Bookworm Beat. “What makes a woman want to do such a thing?”

Mrs. Sullivan said the answer lies in her childhood. She was raised in Northern Canada, the ninth of 11 children in a large outdoorsy, athletic family.

“My father was a lumber baron and he taught us kids to be risk-takers,” Mrs. Sullivan said.

As an adult she enjoyed skiing with husband Brian, but soon grew bored with skiing on well-worn routes. They took to skiing “off-piste” (out of bounds), and extreme skied in various parts of Canada, Colorado, the Rocky Mountains and in Europe.

“I learned to love the mountains,” she said. “Skiing in bounds no longer charged us up the way it once did. We enjoyed skiing the outback. You rarely see anyone else out there, especially not women. It is getting better now, but 20 years ago there were very few female out-of-bounds skiers.”

Mrs. Sullivan is an independent marketing consultant specialising in the credit card arena in Toronto. She is also a private equity investor in real estate and consumer packaged goods.

“When you live a very busy life and you get wrapped up in your work it is just nice to get away,” she said. “You lose all your troubles and worries when you are in the back country. When you get into it you get that rush of adrenaline.”

For the Sullivans, going to the Andes was one of the ultimate extreme skiing destinations, and it seemed a natural progression. They decided to go there in the summer of 2004, to celebrate their 21st anniversary and son Hudson’s graduation from high school.

“We had been down the summer before and had a fantastic skiing trip,” she said. “My son had to go back to Canada to get ready for entry into Notre Dame University in the United States. We stayed on to celebrate for another ten days.”

Along a particularly dangerous chute, Mrs. Sullivan was holding back a bit, while her husband had already gone down to a lower point. Unbeknownst to her, someone had already radioed her husband to say this particular chute was in a dangerous state.

At about 14,000 feet up on an extreme ski area known as a “no drop area”. Mrs. Sullivan was holding onto a particularly icy cornice. Then the unimaginable happened. She lost her grip.

In ‘Fall Line’, she wrote of this fateful moment: “It’s a wild vertical, icy and unforgiving. Six turns into the chute, I can’t hold on, I’ve lost my balance, I am in space, back diving, eyes wide open, staring backward down the narrow chute. I am airborne. I have fallen off the mountain.

“They say that in the moment before death your life flashes before your eyes. Not for me. My body is taken over by a fierce primal instinct: the survival instinct. It grabs me with a power that would be frightening if it wasn’t such a familiar ally.”

As she fell Mrs. Sullivan deliberately relaxed her body, instead of going into an instinctive, stiff, foetal position. She credits this amazing moment of forethought with saving her life.

“I free fell for about 500 to 600 feet,” she said. “I was pretty sure as I left the mountain and began to fall that I was going to my death. There are such narrow rock bands around me, and in that situation you want to tighten up. But my instinct to survive was so strong, that I turned my foetal position into a backwards swan dive. When I hit the first point of impact, I hit this bank and I started to catapult down this mountain, going head over heels.”

She flew over her husband’s head going 90 miles an hour. She was so far above him that he didn’t see her until she was almost on top of him.”

“Fortunately, I was so far above my husband that he couldn’t connect with me,” said Mrs. Sullivan. “If our bodies had ever connected we would both be dead. I just continued to jack-knife and tomahawk down this mountain at break-neck speed, hitting this mountain over and over again.”

From a long way off, a local mountain ranger saw her body hurtling through space, and automatically recorded that a death had happened on the mountain.

Every time she struck the mountain, in the early hits, she told herself her rag-doll strategy was working, because she was still alive. When she opened her eyes having finally come to a horrendous stop, her first thought that there was snow in heaven.

“I stopped down here and I opened my eyes up,” she said. “I woke up and I thought I’d died. I noticed there was snow all around me, and I thought, oh, there’s snow in heaven. I tried one hand and then the other. I couldn’t feel one of them, it was numb. Then suddenly my body and brain reconnected and I was screaming in pain.”

It wasn’t until late afternoon that her husband and their mountain guide were able to reach her. While she lay there, she thought the numbness on one side of her body was caused by even though it was a relatively warm sunny day.

“When the guide showed up, I refused to remain in the snow,” she said. “I thought I was suffering from hypothermia. Actually, I had nerve damage. I still to this day have a tremor on one side of my body. But I didn’t know that at the time. I said, ‘you don’t understand I am getting out of here tonight, I am leaving now’.”

So reluctantly, her husband and guide got her skiis back on her feet. She asked for one pole to pull herself along with.

“It took us hours to ski out to a medical facility, which is pretty rudimentary in those parts,” she said. “Through monitoring the back country, they’d heard about the fall, but it had been registered as a death.”

For this reason, medical personnel were shocked when Mrs. Sullivan dragged herself in, relatively unscathed considering she’d fallen 6,000 feet.

“I had nerve damage, my shoulder was dislocated, I had crushed vertebrae in my neck and broken ribs, but I was alive,” she said.

When she was physically well-enough she was flown home to Canada to spend a long time in a recovery hospital. While her bones healed with relative ease, it took much longer for her emotional self to recover. For a long time afterward she suffered flashbacks to the accident.

“Writing this book was very difficult,” she said. “I self-published, because I wasn’t really sure that I could release the book to the public. It wasn’t until I pushed the button on the self-publishing website, that I knew I could.”

Mrs. Sullivan is now back at work, and also back skiing with her family.

“I wanted to get right back on that horse,” she said. “My husband and son have been back to that mountain in the Andes, but I don’t think I could go. It would be traumatic. Maybe I could if someone made a movie about the book.”

What impelled her to release the book in the end, was the idea that her story might inspire other people going through traumas in their lives.

“The book is available in Canada now, and has been selling quite well,” she said. “There has been some interest from American booksellers, and it will soon be available in Bermuda bookstores.”

She said she and her husband have been coming to Bermuda for many years. In fact, her husband has been visiting Bermuda since he was a little boy.

“This is a place to relax and unwind,” she said. “We have some very good friends here, including Norm and Alice Mastalir. I have been doing quite a bit of public speaking about my experiences, and I will be speaking for Alice’s bookclub, while I am in Bermuda.”To contact Mrs. Sullivan, email letitsnow@look.ca .

To contact the Bookworm Beat, email bookwormbeat1@hotmail.com .

She fell 6,000 feet and lived to write about it