"I know he was watched over and there was divine intervention from above," Katrina Kohler told Good 4 Utahabout her husband's near-fatal fall.
From his hospital bed Tuesday, Talon Kohler recalled the medical expertise and good humor that kept him going as he waited to be rescued off Mount Timpanogos after a near-fatal fall Saturday.
The accident played out in steps through his head, slipping, not being able to stop himself with his ice-axe, trying to catch a rocky outcropping and missing it.
"Once I started tumbling off that waterfall, that was kind of that moment that hit me like 'this is how people die mountaineering,'" Kohler said.
He and the other members of the Timpanogos Emergency Response Team were coming down from Emerald Lake, crossing a snow field along the upper Aspen Grove Trail when Kohler slid down a roughly 100-yard stretch of the slope before falling over the edge, landing 40 feet below in an icy crevasse.