Cohen saw her dog was slipping, so she did what she had to do to make sure he made it. Photos: GoFundMe
Some people will do just about anything for their dogs, and Margaux Cohen is one of those people. After her dog Zion slipped on a trail on August 24, she grabbed his harness in an attempt to save him from falling. Unfortunately, the dog’s weight pulled her down with him. Amazingly, after falling nearly 60 feet, both Zion and Cohen are okay.
Cohen, who is an avid hiker, had just finished summiting Tricouni Peak near Squamish, a town north of Vancouver, British Columbia. She was with her friend Max Stobbe and his cousin when the accident happened. They’d come down from the summit when they realized they had strayed off the beaten path, so they decided they’d check the map and get themselves back to where they wanted to be. Cohen saw what appeared to be a slight outcropping that would be easy to scale to get to the trail, so after Stobbe climbed down, she and Zion made the attempt.
“Then I go second,” she told The Squamish Chief, a local publication. “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.”
Luckily, it wasn’t a sheer drop below them, but it was enough to make it impossible to recover from the slide. In all, she and Zion fell nearly 60 feet before coming to a halt.
“It wasn’t a straight fall. I tumbled down like, four times,” she said from the Lions Gate hospital, where she is recovering from her injuries. “So I probably fell 20 feet, and then hit my face on rocks, and then fell again and again and again.”
The fall did, however, break her leg, a fact that she realized almost immediately. “…I was conscious, and then I looked at my leg, and I was like, ‘there’s something wrong with my leg,'” she remembered. “My leg was not in the right shape. I started screaming.”
Stobbe, who was far above her, couldn’t see where she came to a stop. Her screams of pain were both welcoming and terrifying — he was glad she was able to yell, but knew that something was very wrong. He climbed down to her carefully, then called 911. Zion was sitting beside Cohen with an injured paw.
“My dog was like, sitting next to me, just wagging his tail, like nothing happened,” Cohen laughed. “like he just had the time of his life.”
Squamish Search and Rescue crews were activated by the 911 call, and over the next two hours, they worked tirelessly to extract her in the searing heat. The area was in the middle of a heat spell, and temperatures on the rock where Cohen and Zion were in the low 90s.
The rescue crews were able to pluck her from the mountain, and now she’s recovering in the hospital. Photos: GoFundMe
“The weekend was really hot, and there was no shade,” she said. “So waiting two hours with no shade on rocks where you have the injury that I had was a really long time. 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.”
Now, Cohen is recovering in the hospital. She underwent one surgery, and is scheduled for another one on Tuesday. Although Cohen is based in Vancouver, she’s not a permanent resident so her hospital costs aren’t entirely covered. A crowdfunding campaign has been launched to help her cover the cost of living as she recovers, her hospital bills, and Zion’s vet bill.
“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,” Cohen explained. “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.”
