Depending on how you look at it, Margaux Cohen is either very lucky or incredibly unlucky.
She chooses to focus on her good fortune.
Athlete and avid hiker Cohen, who often shares her mountain adventures on her social media channels, had just finished summiting Tricouni Peak, north of Squamish, with her friend Max Stobbe and his cousin on Aug. 24, when her day literally took a turn for the worse.
The trio was about 200 metres below the summit when they found themselves off the trail. They checked a map to get back onto the trail. Nearby, there was what Cohen described as a “little wall.”
“It seemed pretty easy to come down from that,” she said, adding that Stobbe went first and she handed him her dog.
“Then I go second ... I guess my dog, Zion, slipped, lost his footing in a way, and he just started sliding down. And I had this instinct to just grab his harness. But I did not realize that by doing this, and because of his weight, I was just going to fall,” she said.
She fell a total of about 18 metres (60 feet).
“It wasn't a straight fall. I tumbled down like, four times. So I probably fell 20 feet, and then hit my face on rocks, and then fell again and again and again,” she recalled from her Lions Gate Hospital bed, where she remains for at least another week.
Thankfully, during the fall, she didn’t lose consciousness.
When the falling stopped, she realized she was still alive.
“Which was pretty incredible, and I was conscious, and then I looked at my leg, and I was like, there's something wrong with my leg. My leg was not in the right shape. I started screaming.”
The screams were a welcome sound to Stobbe, who couldn’t see, from where he was above, where Cohen had ended up, and feared the worst, according to Cohen.
He made his way down to her, and they called 911.
As for Zion, he was right beside her, with an injured paw, but not more worse for wear.
“My dog was like, sitting next to me, just wagging his tail, like nothing happened, like he just had the time of his life,” Cohen recalled, with a laugh.
She, however, was not having a good time.
It took Squamish Search and Rescue two hours to reach her, not a long time in retrospect, Cohen said—stressing how grateful she was for their gentle and expert help—but it felt like a long time in close to 33 C heat, with significant injuries.
“The weekend was really hot, and there was no shade. So waiting two hours with no shade on rocks where you have the injury that I had was a really long time,” she said, adding she was in a lot of pain and panicking about her situation while they waited.
“First of all, I hit my face probably three times. So my nose and the left side of my face was really swollen. And, I could not really feel it. It was really numb ... I could also feel that it was really big. I was pissing blood from my nose, and my leg—I could not find a position where it didn't hurt because I had misplaced one of my bones,” said Cohen.
She was airlifted out and transferred to the hospital. She has had one surgery on her leg already and is waiting for her second, which is scheduled for Tuesday.
Her good friend Emily Kasal has launched a GoFundMe for Vancouver-based Cohen, who is from France, because she is not a permanent resident. Her quickly ramping-up medical bills are not all covered, nor the coming months when she won’t be able to work her bartending job.
“The recovery is going to be pretty long, unfortunately, because the injury—it's not just a broken bone where I can just have a cast and then be fine. They have to put plates and screws in my leg. It is going to take a long time until I can actually have weight on my leg. So I'm going to need a lot of help for the first two months or so, and then I'm going to need a lot of physio. I'm looking at probably at least four months until I can do any type of physical activities,” she said.
The funds raised by the campaign will also cover the vet bill for Zion’s injury.
“Margaux is one of the most kindhearted, adventurous, and resilient people I know,” said Kasal, on the GoFundMe page. “She has always been there to support others, and now she needs our help. Any donation, no matter the size, will make a huge difference for her and her furry best friend.”
This was a dramatic summer for Cohen and Stobbe. In June, their TikTok of coming face-to-face with a cougar while they were returning from Garibaldi Lake went viral, prompting headlines about the pair's encounter.
Cohen said she didn’t call and tell her mom back home about her fall until three days after the event.
Like her daughter, her mom saw the positive in the situation.
“She was just like, ‘Well, it's an accident. ... People get into car accidents all the time, and you had an accident in the mountains, because you spend all of your time in the mountains,’” Cohen recalled. “And she was like, ‘Over the seven years that you've been hiking, you've never had an accident. It just happens.’ She's just obviously really happy that it's not something more serious.”
*Please note that this story has been corrected since it was first posted to say Cohen fell 60 feet, (18 metres), not 60 metres, as first stated.
