LA GRANDE — Eric Valentine was hiking a Hells Canyon trail, a place nearly as familiar as his own yard, when a weed beside the path changed his life.

And might well have ended it.

Valentine, a retired judge who has lived in La Grande since 1970 and celebrated his 80th birthday in February, remembers falling.

He remembers how suddenly an ordinary walk, something he had done hundreds of times, became the sort of ordeal he had read about, and thought about, but never experienced.

He remembers how the sky and the rocky ground swapped places, over and over again, as he tumbled down the shale, powerless to stop.

“Sky, dirt, sky, dirt,” Valentine said during a phone interview from his bed in a Boise rehabilitation center on Monday, May 22.

Sixteen days after his fall, he recalled that sequence as vividly as anything else that happened on the early afternoon of May 6.

Valentine can’t say with precision how much time elapsed.

But gravity exerts itself quickly in Hells Canyon, where cliffs are far more common than flat ground.

“It could not have been more than 10 seconds,” Valentine said.

Even in that brief span he worried that he might tumble all the way into Hells Canyon Reservoir.

Valentine knew that if he got soaked and chilled on a 55-degree day, hypothermia might pose an even greater danger than his injuries.

After rolling about 65 vertical feet, Valentine collided with a boulder 20 feet or so above the shore.

In the sudden silence and stillness, he took stock of his condition.

He hadn’t lost consciousness.

“I knew there was something wrong with my neck and my foot and my leg,” Valentine said. “My wrist hurt.”

But the pain was, at least initially, secondary.

Valentine’s initial feeling was, he says with a chuckle, “unquotable.”

He was angry at himself.

Mad that, after hiking so many hundreds of miles across challenging terrain, he had fallen from a trail he had hiked, without mishap, perhaps a dozen times.

“There was a deep annoyance that I had let this happen to me,” he said. “Because it was stupid.”

But it was also a fluke, what happened when he yanked on that weed.

The sort of thing Valentine had done before and could probably do a thousand times without mishap.

The weed — he’s not sure of the species but he called it a bluebonnet — was right beside the trail.

He leaned forward, grasped the stalk and pulled.

It didn’t come free from the soil as easily as he had expected.

He lost his balance.

“I’m not quite sure what tipped me,” he said.

Then he was tumbling.

The red jacketAfter he struck the boulder, Valentine, who spent decades as a lawyer and judge analyzing problems dispassionately, quickly set aside his anger.

He considered his situation.

Although the trail on the Oregon side of the canyon was within the Hells Canyon Wilderness, the spot isn’t particularly remote.

Valentine knew the reservoir was popular with anglers and boaters.

Moreover, Idaho Power Company’s paved highway leading to Hells Canyon Dam runs along the Idaho side, less than half a mile across the water.

It was about 15 minutes past noon, so even in the deepest canyon in North America, the light would last for several more hours.

Valentine was confident he would be rescued.

“I knew I was not going to be there overnight,” he said.

But he wasn’t content to just wait.

First, though, he needed to take off his Osprey daypack.

With his injuries limiting his movement, this normally straightforward task, a matter of a few seconds, took Valentine about five minutes.

Although he always heeds the advice given to hikers to bring the “10 essentials” on even the shortest jaunt — food, water, extra clothing, matches or other firestarting tools among them — Valentine wanted one item in particular.

His red jacket.

The bright garment would stand out against the canyon’s brown rock.

But Valentine wanted to make himself even more visible.

He decided he needed to crawl up the slope to the trail.

He would be safer there, he figured, able to sit on the only flat patch of ground nearby.

And he would be more conspicuous.

Valentine had just started the climb, perhaps 20 minutes since he had fallen, when he heard the voice.

The rescueThe voice was coming from across the reservoir, on the Idaho side.

The caller was a woman from Boise.

Valentine responded immediately, yelling the word certain to express the situation as succinctly as possible.

“Help.”

Despite his condition, Valentine’s voice carried.

“Who knows if the angels can enhance your voice,” he said.

Although he was confident the woman would go for help, Valentine couldn’t know that she would, just after seeing him, come across a group of Boy Scouts from Troop 77 in Eagle, Idaho, who were paddling canoes on the reservoir.

Regardless, Valentine was convinced he needed to get back to the trail.

“I felt I had to keep going,” he said.

He feared that if he paused too long on that 70-degree slope, which lacked even the ubiquitous hackberry tree to aid in his ascent, that he would slip again.

And that, he was sure, he “couldn’t afford.”

The climb was short but arduous.

“More of a crawl,” Valentine said.

He found a clump of deep-rooted grass that served as a stable handhold.

And then a gap in the rocks where he wedged the toe of his right boot.

That gained him about 3 feet.

Then Valentine looked up the slope.

“I was surprised how far above the trail was,” he said. “I didn’t think I had rolled that far.”

As he neared the trail the grass gave way to dense clumps of lomatium, a type of wild parsley.

An attractive plant with its tiny yellow blooms, and one Valentine, as a longtime photographer, knew well.

But his affinity for lomatium dissolved immediately.

The plant, with its shallow roots and brittle stalks, as a climbing aid is about as helpful as a frayed rope.

“Absolutely worthless,” Valentine said.

He managed to find a route to the trail.

And one that avoided a patch of poison ivy.

“I guess I didn’t touch it,” Valentine said with a chuckle. “I never did get an itchy rash.”

The Scouts arriveValentine estimates he had reached the relative safety of the trail just five minutes or so earlier when he heard below the clatter of boots on shale.

The Scouts were coming.

Nate Bondelid, Troop 77’s assistant scoutmaster, had used his satellite phone to call for help.

Valentine said the Scouts, who were accompanied by Steve Rasulo, a former Boise firefighter who has emergency medical training, used life jackets to stabilize his neck and leg.

The rescuers carried Valentine a short distance down the trail to a spot where the slope isn’t quite so steep. They carefully brought him to the reservoir, where an Idaho Power jetboat was waiting.

“It was a very dicey lift and carry, but they were able to get me down to the water,” Valentine said.

He recalls hearing the Scouts and the adults gasping with exertion as they maneuvered their load across the torturous terrain.

“I felt in very good hands,” Valentine said. “They were a very competent team.”

Valentine said he wasn’t in severe pain.

“I was very calm,” he said. “I knew the Lord knew where I was.”

The jetboat crew had brought a backboard, and the rescuers securely strapped Valentine to the rigid plastic sheet designed to prevent further injury to his neck.

The boat hauled Valentine to the Copper Creek campground, where he had started his hike, which has enough space for the LifeFlight helicopter to land.

About an hour after he had fallen, Valentine was in the air, en route to Saint Alphonsus Medical Center in Boise.

“Less than an hour — what a miracle is that?” Valentine said.

The flight was short, too.

Although it didn’t seem so to Valentine.

“For me it lasted forever,” he said. “It was really noisy, and very claustrophobic.”

The recoveryAt the hospital’s trauma center — which Valentine described as “incredible” — doctors examined his injuries.

He sustained fractures to his neck, back and ankle. His wrist was sore but not broken. He had various cuts and bruises.

Surgeons operated on Valentine’s neck on May 7, the day after he fell, and on his leg and knee the next day.

He was transferred to the Saint Alphonsus Rehabilitation Hospital on May 11.

“I’m making really good progress,” Valentine said on May 22.

He was tentatively scheduled to be released on May 26.

He’ll return to La Grande, where he and Meg, his wife of 56 years, live.

On the evening of May 15, some of the Scouts from Troop 77 visited Valentine in the hospital.

The boys told Valentine that his red jacket had served its intended purpose, making it easy for them to spot him on the trail.

Valentine told the Scouts that in 2017, while he was hiking with a group of Boy Scouts from Eastern Oregon, they helped some rafters who needed help.

During his ordeal in Hells Canyon, Valentine said he asked God to send angels to his aid.

“He sent me the Boy Scouts,” Valentine told the members of Troop 77.

The futureValentine already is looking forward to his next hike.

“I have all this energy,” he said.

Valentine will return to Hells Canyon, and to the trail north of Copper Creek campground, including the spot, about a mile north of McGraw Creek, where he fell.

“It’s just a gorgeous hike,” he said.

Especially in the spring, Valentine said as he ticked off the species of wildflowers he saw on May 6 — phlox, larkspur, balsamroot, mountain mahogany trees blooming yellow.

But although his fall didn’t curb his enthusiasm for the trails, Valentine said the incident did prompt him to reconsider his approach.

“I’ve pretty well decided that I’m going to back off in terms of what I do,” he said. “This is a sign I should not ignore.”

Most notably, Valentine said he will no longer hike alone in difficult terrain such as Hells Canyon.

That said, he’s grateful that he was by himself on May 6.

He often hikes with his wife or another companion.

Had that been the case on May 6, the other hiker could easily have fallen while trying to help him, Valentine said.

The experience was something of an epiphany.

As a longtime hiker whose interest in the outdoors started as a boy growing up in the Los Angeles area and reading “Outdoor Life” magazine, Valentine said he has read many accounts of hikers who fell.

He said he’s always wondered how he would deal with such an experience.

“Do I have the wherewithal to pull myself out of it?” he’d wondered.

Having answered that question to his satisfaction, Valentine said he plans to share that message with people he meets, particularly on the trails, “in however many years I have left.”

He also intends to visit with Scout Troop 77 and talk about the same topic.

“It’s about resiliency, and having the mental and spiritual strength to make it,” Valentine said. “That’s where I see my mission.”

His ordeal in Hells Canyon has also strengthened his faith.

Valentine marvels that, as serious as his injuries were, he avoided fracturing his skull, internal injuries and other life-threatening damage that might almost have been expected under the circumstances.

Although he credits divine intervention, Valentine also cites something more prosaic — that daypack he was wearing.

It had a partially filled water bladder as well as the jacket and other soft items that he believes helped cushion his chest and stomach as the pack twisted from his back to his front during the fall.

Yet even as Valentine describes his recovery as a “miracle” and ponders a future in which his experience could possible inspire others who share his love for wild places, he emphasizes that this chapter in his life story is one he would prefer had not been written.

“This fall was not on my bucket list.”

“This fall was not on my bucket list.”

— Eric Valentine

Valentine graduated from Stanford University and the Stanford Law School in 1967. He and his wife, Meg, whom he met while they were students at Stanford, served for two years in the Peace Corps. The couple moved to La Grande in 1970. Eric Valentine served was circuit court judge for Union and Wallowa counties from 1983 to 2003, and as a senior judge, filling in as needed across the state, for the next 10 years. He became interested in photography in the 1990s after joining a photography club in Wallowa County. Many of his photos are on his website, praisephotography.com.