Hello again All, I just wanted to give you an update on Mark and Amy's story.
Firstly though, please let me offer my sincere and deepest thanks to you all who have shown your support and well-wishes. This not only means a tremendous amount to Mark and Amy, but also means the world to me that we can come together as a community to support each other when we are in need. Some of you have asked where the donations will go. Any donations will be used for expenses associated with this incident and the medical care from this. Mark has said that he will keep a record of everything associated with this. Already it cost hundreds of dollars for Mark to simply tow Amy's car back home. This cost has now been taken care of for them, fortunately. So thank you all! :) You all are making a real difference here so I'm truly grateful to you!… Now, I'd like to share Mark's email address here so that you may send your support to him. If you cannot offer financial support then please do consider offering Amy and him your most valuable emotional support. It is truly welcome… Below I'll first share Mark's email address and then a copy of the recent article in a local Oregon paper about this incident which also offers an update on Amy's condition. If you would like to know more, please do write directly to Mark if you would? Now that this is known here, please let me suggest that we now move this to a more personal level off the lists. Feel free to write me or Mark and do be assured that any developments, I will share. Otherwise, I'm happy (and will now encourage us) to continue this off the lists. Thanks so very, very much to you all for your support! I cannot express enough how much this means to them and to me. Y'all are AWESOME!!! Have a wonderful weekend! Info and article follow… Sincerely, Cara --- Email Mark Baxter markbaxte...@gmail.com The Article The Curry Coastal Pilot - Couple survives hiking ordeal Mark Baxter and his girlfriend Amy Regan with their dogs, who were instrumental in efforts to rescue Amy after a hiking accident. Submitted photo Brookings resident Mark Baxter still isn’t sure what to make of what he calls his misadventure along Damnation Creek near Klamath last weekend — an afternoon jaunt that landed his girlfriend, Amy Regan, in ICU in Portland with a broken back and no feeling in her arms and legs. “There was a bunch of stupid decisions all down the line,” Baxter said Wednesday of what was supposed to have been an easy afternoon hike. “I got lucky. I got damn lucky.” The two didn’t bring a survival kit, and were wearing sweatpants and T-shirts. A friend has since reassured them that their clothing sounded appropriate for a two-hour hike along a popular trail. The 3.4-mile trek threads through a redwood forest down 1,000 vertical feet into a rocky, secluded beach. It’s rated “easy,” and the couple are experienced hikers. “At first, the trail was great, so we continued,” Baxter said. “By the time it got narrow and steep again, and Amy could see the ocean through the trees ahead, we needed to turn back; it was getting dark.” When they did, Regan and her dog, Luke, slipped and fell from the steep embankment. Baxter later learned she likely slipped on rotting timbers left from an old footbridge. “I heard her fall, cry out, then a crash, then nothing,” Baxter said. “I called out, ‘Amy! Can you answer me!’ And I heard nothing … for minutes.” When he did hear something, he didn’t think it was human. But it was, and it was Amy. “I do not think I have ever in my life witnessed that much suffering and agony,” he said. “It is a sound I hope never to hear again.” Baxter and his dog, Ezra, scrambled down the hill to rescue her. “She’d landed on her back, on the rocks at the bottom of an old creek bed,” Baxter said. “And she kept saying, ‘No! No! No!’ over and over ... and told me she couldn’t feel her legs.” Baxter struggled back up the incline and worked his way about a quarter-mile down the dark path until his iPhone finally got one bar. It took at least four 911 calls — and disconnects due to poor reception in the valley — before he was able to relay their situation to Del Norte’s Search and Rescue team. He gave them the name of the trail; he told them about the footbridge. But, no, he didn’t think he could get back to his vehicle. No, he couldn’t describe where he was. They ascertained his GPS coordinates, and Baxter’s phone died. A few hours later, he was getting cold. He had the dogs with him, but he’d left his sweatshirt with Regan. And he couldn’t tell if rescue crews were approaching through the thick trees and the dark night. Baxter is blind. Mark and Amy The 44-year-old Brookings man met his girlfriend on Facebook — he the disillusioned musician and she looking for a new life away from the strip-mine town of Butte, Mont. She joined him here six months ago. Amy has her own challenges, Baxter said, with psychiatric issues and a condition that leaves her in constant pain. Hence her service dog, a lanky German shepherd with steely copper eyes. “But we instinctively knew we were real (emotionally) close,” Baxter said. “She is the most loving, caring, intense person I know. She is the bravest person I’ve ever known.” Saturday, Baxter wasn’t feeling so brave, he said. He periodically shouted out for the rescue team. He huddled with the dogs. He listened. “I’d done all I could do,” he said. Four hours later, he heard someone calling his name. In many ways, it was just the beginning of their travails. It took hours to get Regan backboarded, up the cliff and back down to the trailhead, 3 miles away. It was 3:30 a.m., about 12 hours since they’d set out on the hike. As they walked, a search and rescue volunteer quickly learned Baxter and Ezra could navigate the dark path far better than he and his flashlight, and let the two take the lead. They talked about the dogs, the school that had trained Ezra, dogs in general. “I think he was mostly just trying to take my mind off what had just happened,” Baxter said. “And as beat-up and tired as I was, I cannot imagine what it was like for Amy to be stretcher-borne out of there.” Baxter said the dogs were the heroes that night. Luke led the rescue team to Regan; Ezra, limping from his flight down the hill, led Baxter and the search team carrying Amy out of the woods. He got a ride home from a park ranger; Amy remains in intensive care at Oregon Health Sciences in Portland with a broken thoracic spine, three broken ribs and a collapsed lung. Ezra is sore and tired; Luke is confused and sad. “It’s very possible Amy could recover from this,” Baxter said. “It’s too early to tell. They’re just caring for her day to day. I don’t know anything about her prognosis. And I have not yet stopped sending my gratitude to ‘Dog’ for walking with me, for saving our lives.” Deep in the dark Numerous elements resulted in their survival that night. “The reason we got through that was my martial arts skills, keeping a level head, and doing what you have to do,” Baxter said. “It’s been a theme of mine throughout my life.” “It is horrifying, and also amazing,” said Dawn Nelson, a friend of the couple who lives in Nevada. “It’s a testament to the power of love, the abilities of guide dogs, the service of others, and the ability to do what needs to be done, despite nearly insurmountable obstacles.” Baxter, born blind into a sighted world, has always refused to think that way. “When it came to anything at all — from high school and passing an exam, from riding a bike to going camping — I had to blaze the trail,” he said. “I had to tell everybody that, ‘Yes, I can do this; don’t put me in that box.’” He sought out experiences, began “collecting skills,” overcompensating to prove to the sighted people that he had no weaknesses, no disabilities, that he was no different than them. “If I had been sighted, I would have been immobilized,” he said of the couple’s ordeal last weekend. “How a species can evolve with a dominant sense that is useless 12 hours a day ... I just don’t get it. My skills don’t involve sight at all. “Hearing,” he said, “is a more beautiful and useful sense.” That comment, from a man who is also profoundly deaf. He is a tactile human, feeling the world around him through his feet as he walks, through pressure changes in the air as surroundings change. “Ask the land where to go,” he said. “It’s getting in nature, sitting with Earth. Am I getting too New-Agey here?” He attributes that to Sensei Toda Yoshi, Baxter’s martial arts instructor. With the attitude of ‘just do it,” the then-26-year-old learned the ancient Japanese tradition of Shaolin Kempo Karate. There are a lot of fist, foot and body moves in karate, but there are also the soft skills of the warrior: focusing the heart, power and energy through the mind and into the body, Baxter explained. “I credit him with helping me save Amy because without his teaching, I would not have been able to channel the panic in my heart, through my mind, into my body, into actions, that got us out,” Baxter said. “Without what I know about balance, and the strength that I have through keeping up my exercises, I would not have had the physical ability to get out.” Other skills he learned through Tom Brown Jr.’s “tracker school,” a nature and wilderness survival school based in New Jersey, where participants gain a “closer attachment to the Earth and the skills and philosophy to live in harmony and balance with creation.” “That’s what helped me stay on the trail, stay safe, and be calm enough in the dark, in the night, in the woods, to use the skills I had to get us out,” Baxter said. Amy Even though Regan’s out of the California woods, she isn’t out of the medical woods. The most recent report Baxter has on Amy is that she has a shattered thoracic vertebrae near her neck — surgeons put a permanent metal rod in her spine for stability — and while she cannot move her arms or legs, she can wiggle her hands and toes. She has five broken ribs and a ruptured lung. “With rehab, we hope this will get a lot better,” he said. “I constantly send my gratitude to the great spirit for the intervention I know I received, information from the land and my dogs and the night itself, which allowed me to stay oriented, sane, and on the path to rescuing her. This will all get better; it’s the waiting for Amy to come back that’s the hardest part for me. “It’s far from over,” he added. “I frankly have no idea what comes next. I will not consider her rescued until she is back with me.” --- View my Online Portfolio at: http://www.onemodelplace.com/CaraQuinn Follow me on Twitter! https://twitter.com/ModelCara -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "VIPhone" Google Group. Post a new message to VIPhone by emailing viphone@googlegroups.com. Search and view the VIPhone archives by visiting http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. Reach the VIPhone owner and moderators by emailing viphone+ow...@googlegroups.com. Unsubscribe and leave VIPhone by emailing viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. More VIPhone group options can be found by visiting http://groups.google.com/group/viphone?hl=en. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
