Gypsum men survive harrowing rollover accident on Red Hill, but are badly injured
Helicopter recovery required to rescue injured men
Courtesy photo
Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the name of one of the dogs involved.
Gabriel Velasquez is pretty sure he passed out a time or two climbing to find his phone, but knew he had to keep climbing. Finding his missing phone meant he’d survive.
Velasquez and his friend, Kody Jaramillo, were out on a late-night drive on the back side of Gypsum’s Red Hill the night of April 23. Just after midnight, the men pulled over, and the Jeep’s right wheels caught the road’s soft shoulder and the vehicle rolled several times into a sagebrush ravine. Both men and Velasquez’s three dogs were ejected from the vehicle. Velasquez’s youngest dog, Bourbon, didn’t make it, and Velasquez and Jaramillo were badly hurt.
Velasquez used his Garmin Fenix smart watch to try to connect with his phone. He started getting connections.
“I mustered every bit of strength I could” to climb back up the hill to find the phone to call 911, Velasquez recalled. Velasquez said he’s driven in the area before, and said it’s unlikely anyone would have spotted them.
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Reviewing the incident report, Gypsum Fire Chief Justin Kirkland said the first 911 call came in at 12:16 a.m. on April 24. An Eagle County Sheriff’s deputy was first on scene at 12:56 a.m., with six Gypsum firefighters on scene a few minutes later.
It was a complex rescue, Kirkland said. The back side of Red Hill is “huge,” he said. “There’s a lot of places to get lost.” And, he added, the place where Velasquez said they were didn’t match the GPS coordinates sent by his phone. Add in the fact that the vehicle had left the road, and the rescue became more complicated.
Eagle County Paramedics determined that the men were badly enough injured to require helicopter rescue. That required creating a landing zone for two aircraft.
Despite the time it took for the rescue, Velasquez said it seemed like everything went fairly quickly.
By the time Jaramillo and Velasquez landed in Grand Junction, Velasquez was “covered head to toe in blood,” he said. He didn’t know much at the time, just that “I knew I was in a better place than laying in that field.”
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Jaramillo suffered a broken neck in the accident, and as of Monday was still recovering in the hospital. Velasquez on Monday was recovering at home, but had sustained broken ribs, a broken collarbone and femur, a dislocated hip, a collapsed lung and a partially torn-off ear.
But, he said, he and his friend both believe “somebody was looking out for us.”
