Bleeding and battered, Jamin Camp crawled to the top of the ridge and looked back at the spot where his life almost came to an end.
He saw a bloody trail of palm prints leading from a patch of snow that minutes earlier had stopped his slide down Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.
“Another 15 feet, and it would have been curtains,” he recalled last week of the Jan. 20 accident. He doesn’t remember coming to a stop just before the drop-off.
Now, after multiple surgeries and continuing rehabilitation, Camp is on the mend. On Tuesday, he returned to his job as security officer and counselor at the Lookout Mountain Youth Services Center in Golden. “The boys. I want to get back to the boys,” he said.
John Ferullo, Camp’s manager at Lookout, said they’re eager to have him back.
“He is a great employee,” Ferullo said. “I’m grateful he’s coming back.”
Several weeks ago, Camp visited the youth center on crutches. “He’s a warrior. He wanted to come back right then and there,” Ferullo said.
Head and facial injuries left Camp covered in blood that day in January. He suffered broken bones in his legs and wrists.
His right knee was obliterated. The only thing connecting his lower leg, below the knee, to his upper leg was his skin and a sliver of tendon.
Two other climbers, an off- duty Denver police officer and a mountain-school guide, found Camp on the frozen trail in the dark and summoned help.
His condition has been improving ever since.
He rides a stationary bike, walks in a swimming pool and works his legs on a flat sled as part of his regimen to recover. He’s careful not to overextend himself.
“This is the frustrating thing: I can’t push my body to the point of being sweaty,” he said during a recent interview at an Aurora gym.
The day of the accident, when he crawled back up to the trail, Camp knew he’d have to keep going down the mountain if he wanted to survive.
With the sun about to set and no one else in sight, he was worried about freezing to death in the darkness.
Camp relied on images from his life – family, friends, his work – to motivate him to keep moving down the mountain.
“I’d have to be a fool not to get up to go back to the life I had,” Camp said. “I’m surrounded by people who care.”
Prior to the fall, Camp sometimes hiked and trained for high-altitude races in the high country with his wife.
But he had been alone that day on Longs Peak, training for the annual Leadville 100, a high-altitude race.
Camp and his wife, Brenda, who live in Aurora, have known each other since high school in Cheyenne and were married in July 2003.
After the accident, as Camp struggled to recover, he sometimes became frustrated with his lack of progress.
His wife was his guiding, positive influence.
“I knew he’d get better,” she said. “I just told him he’d have to be patient and work hard, and everything would be all right.”
Camp could regain up to 90 percent use of his right leg, his doctors have told him. Based on current stationary-bike training, Camps feels he has recovered about 60 percent of his pre-injury strength, he said. Head and facial injuries have left no lingering effects.
What he remembers of the fall runs through his mind every day.
“Some days, I wake up thinking about it, I go to bed thinking about it,” he said. “I’ve spent hundreds of hours replaying the whole thing. Until I get back there and have some closure with the mountain, it will be an ongoing thing.”
He hopes to revisit the site next month.
“I want to redo everything (except the fall),” Camp said.
Meanwhile, his brush with death has given him a new outlook on life.
“I’ve been able to find joy in little things,” such as feeling the warmth of sunshine on his face or stopping to look at a flowering tree, he said. “Maybe it was a rebirth for me.”
Staff writer Kieran Nicholson can be reached at 303-820-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com.
