Real Survival Stories - Human Fireball in the Mountains of Patagonia

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

A young New Zealander joins an intrepid crew carving mountain bike trails through the mountains and valleys of Patagonia, Chile. But with just a month left to go on the job before he returns home, a freak accident threatens Jamie Nicoll’s hopes of ever seeing his loved ones again. While drilling into a wall of rock using a jackhammer, a sudden malfunction in the machine results in a violent eruption of flames. Jamie will find himself directly in the line of fire… A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. Written by Joe Viner | Produced by Ed Baranski | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Matt Peaty | Assembly edit by Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is October 8th, 2010. A crisp spring morning beams down over Lago La Paloma, a lake in Patagonia, Chile. In its mirrored surface, the surrounding peaks are as clear as photographs. There's snow-capped reflections almost as vivid as the real thing. Overhead a condor circles, riding the air currents. At the far end of the lake, beyond a stretch of evergreen forest, the valley climbs upwards through a series of slopes and ledges, becoming narrower until it's a tall ravine with steep, rocky mountain walls on either side.

Up here, the serenity is shattered by the din of heavy machinery. Members of a work crew, suspended in harnesses, are drilling into the walls of the ravine, their power tools gouging out splinters of dark granite. Jamie Nicol can feel the reverberations deep in his bones. The 31-year-old New Zealander is using a petrol-powered rockbreaker to carve a path into the side of the mountain. When it's finished, the path will become part of a spectacular mountainback trail. linking the lake below with a grassland above. As he works, Jamie feels a drop of liquid fall onto his leg.

Frowning, he switches off the tool and touches a finger to the dark splotch on his trousers. He sniffs it and recoils. It's petrol. And I thought, oh, that's a bit strange. I grabbed the fuel cap and sort of gagged a tweak. to see if it just was a bit loose or something and carried on. Jamie continues drilling. Barely a minute has passed, however,

before he notices more petrol dripping onto his thigh. He shakes his head. Must be a problem with a fuel cap. He turns off the machine and edges sideways along the cliff to a narrow shelf where he and his colleagues have set up a supply station. He leans a shoulder against the wall, pulls of his ear defenders and bends down to inspect the fuel cap. Maybe the seal's broken.

He unscrews the cap, turning the black plastic disc once, twice, and then. As that undid, it just blew the cap out in the hand, and this massive, pressurized plume of atomized fuel just went up into the air. The boys on the other side of the ravine looked over and they said it was, So that 7 to 10 metre high plume of atomised fuel, just a big white cloud went up. There is a loud pop as fuel bursts out of the giant drill, sending an enormous diffuse pillar into the air.

In an instant, Jamie is swallowed by the shimmering cloud of vaporised petrol. I had my eyes squeezed shut and I was just starting to spit out and just trying to say, get me some water because it was kind of stinging in my eyes. fuel and I didn't even get the words out, give me some water and it was like, boof, just a big sound and all of that atomized fuel just ignited. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make a make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of

ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode we meet Jamie Nicol. In late 2010, the 31-year-old is part of a construction crew building a mountain bike trail through a rugged Alpine Valley in Patagonia, Chile. With about a month to go until the contract ends, Jamie is looking forward to finishing the job, and returning home to New Zealand, where his family and girlfriend are waiting for him. But on the morning of October 8th, while operating heavy machinery, a freak accident threatens his hopes of ever seeing his loved ones again. And as I jumped away from this burning cloud or flames and swung through there

because then I was like falling and swinging, I was like, oh no, I am the fire. Swinging from a harness above a ravine, burning a life, in a ball of flames, Jamie's survival chances appear as remote as the isolated valley he's working in. I remember quite calmly thinking, oh, I don't really see any way out of this. This could be one of those times you die. I'm John Hopkins. From the Noyser Podcast Network, this is real survival stories.

It's the morning of October 8th, 2010, near the banks of Lago La Paloma in the Aisen region of southern Chile. A group of mountain bikers are peddling through an evergreen forest. Loaded with packs full of construction tools, the cyclists, bob and weave, riding out of their saddles, thigh muscles burning, lungs aflame. These men are all employees of a trail management company from New Zealand hired to build a bike track through the Patagonian wilderness. At the front of the pack, his crew leader Jamie Nicol. A 31-year-old has been working for New Zealand trail solutions for the past year. In that time, he's built trails in Mexico, Canada, and now here,

deep in the back country of southern Chile. They had that contract from Ken Dart, an American billionaire, who discovered mountain biking in his 50s and thought it'd be pretty cool to buy a few properties and get people to build tracks for him. For an avid mountain biker like Jamie, this is an ideal gig. A chance to work outdoors with his hands, building infrastructure for a sport he loves.

even if it is for the private enjoyment of a billionaire. Above the tree line, the terrain steepens. Granite peaks rise above their heads, dark walls streaked with ribbons of ice, slowly melting in the spring sunshine. Pockets of avalanche debris rest in the gullies. The crew presses on, riding their bikes along yards of freshly laid trail. After a while, they reach the bottom of a craggy ravine, a deep, narrow scar running through the massive.

A series of short waterfalls leads up to the ridgeline, beyond which a stretch of grassland extends towards the next valley. The workers step off their bikes and leave them by the side of the trail. Jamie looks up at the vertical granite sides of the gorge. This is their next challenge. to carve a ledge into the rock face so the bike trail can continue up through the ravine to the grassland above. We thought with a bit of work we could probably open that up

to being more accessible where someone could push a mountain bike through to then carry on and access the grassland to go for a bit of a tour that way. So that was really my job was to try and cut a ledge through this ravine. The men begin unpacking their gear. In total, Jamie is in charge of a crew of 15 men. There is a certain irony to a group of mountain bikers working so closely together in a team.

It's a marked change of pace from their highly individualized sport. In fact, this aspect of mountain biking is why it first appealed to Jamie, the state of being alone, cycling with just the sound of his own breathing for company. Growing up in the suburbs of Wellington, he was always drawn to activities that allowed him to get lost in his own little world. Dad had really encouraged us to play soccer, and I just always wanted to be subbed, you know, so that I could go climb the trees and plan the stream around the area.

So I think for me, mountain biking, that's your own mission a little bit. Mountain biking ticked all the boxes for this adventurous, outdoorsy kid. It helped that he had a natural talent for it. It wasn't long before Jamie was competing at a high level, winning international competitions and carving out a name for himself on the junior circuit. One success led to another. Within a few years, he was on course for a career as a professional mountain biker. But as the accolades mounted, so did the pressure to perform.

He found himself losing sight of what had attracted him to the sport in the first place. Because I was good, I had people in New Zealand that were supposed to be. that was supposedly helping to streamline people towards being professional athletes and, you know, telling me that I should wear better clothing and things at prize-giving and different stuff. And, you know, it's like the wrong thing to tell a independent, maybe slightly rebellious teenager. So, I don't know, all of that started tainting the picture for me. Jamie took a step back from mountain biking, leaving him with enough free time to pursue other

burgeoning interests. After high school, he took a vocational course in outdoor education, which trained him in a variety of disciplines, from kayaking and caving to rock climbing and mountaineering. After that, he joined a ski patrol team in the mountains of the North Island, before heading overseas to Europe and Asia, where he traveled and worked odd jobs for a few years, going wherever the mood struck. If freedom is what he was searching for, then surely this was it. But as the years passed, Jamie only found himself with more questions. It's a bit challenging for me in my late 20s, being like, oh, what am I? And, you know, do I need to do some special training so that I get some sort of label? But what would that be? I don't know.

After returning to New Zealand, following his years abroad, Jamie found himself stumbling back into something familiar. The very activity, in fact, that had made him resist the idea. of labels in the first place. While working as a park ranger on the west coast of the South Island, he received a call one day from a childhood friend. She presented him with an opportunity. Her current partner had got these contracts

of building mountain boat tracks all over the world. She rang me up and she was like, what do you think about this, Jamie? And I was like, sounds so good. Got to go and spend some time with my girlfriend. I've been down here on the west coast for too long. And so, yeah, finished that job and went back up to Nelson and sort of got back into that connection with my partner. And then six months later, I was like,

oh, what do you think? I think I might like to go and do this job. And she's like, yeah, can't do it. And so, with his girlfriend's blessing, Jamie set off once again. Building mountain bike trails, it turned out, was the perfect way to bring together his unique set of skills and experience. a job tailor-made for him. The first project was in the desert of northern Mexico,

followed by a three-month stint down in southern Chile. I remember coming into land and just seeing this landscape of tussock and mountains and just sparsely populated. And that kind of tickled me. I like places that are kind of remote, so it looked pretty cool. After Chile, it was up to Canada for two months. When that project ended, Jamie was offered. another contract, a six-week stint back down in Patagonia.

This time, however, he hesitated. He'd now been working overseas for almost a year, and the demands on both his time and his body were starting to get to him. But then it was only a short-term contract. One last job. I do remember, though, being a little bit tired on a deeper level and just wanting to be back in New Zealand and get that. recharge of my homeland, but I was like, ah, it's just six weeks. I'll be right. Go and do this

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The bright yellow rock breaker is large and heavy, about the size of a chainsaw. It's unwieldy, and Jamie has to balance the bulky chassis on his thigh while the drill bit vibrates against the rock. I had the machine then and was cutting into this cliff and noticed a bit of fuel had like dripped on my leg. and I thought oh that's a bit strange I grabbed the fuel cap and sort of gave it a tweak to see if it just was a bit loose or something

and carried on but after a few moments Jamie notices it again a steady drip of gasoline leaking from the fuel cap onto his leg so turned the machine off lowered myself down onto the ledge and then just walked back to the other end

where we had our bags and a fuel still roped up Unstrapped into his harness, Jamie's sidesteps along the ledge to the flat, narrow shelf where they've based their supply station. He removes his ear defenders and inspects the leaky fuel cap. No obvious issues must be something else. So he starts unscrewing the black plastic cap. He gives it a couple of quick twists, two complete turns. Then there's a loud, sharp, sudden hiss.

And as that undid, it just blew the cap out in the hand, and this massive, pressurized plume of atomized fuel just went up into the air. Some malfunction inside the machine must have caused the fuel vapors to expand, creating a dangerous build-up of pressure within the tank. When Jamie unscrews the cap, he is engulfed in a pungent haze of vaporized fuel.

The rank, chemical taste of petrol, coats his tongue. With his stinging eyes squeezed shut, he shouts to his colleagues to get him some water. He needs to wash this stuff of his face. I didn't even get the words out, give me some water, and it was like, boom. Just a big sound, and all of that atomized fuel just ignited. It doesn't take much, just a spark of static electricity, and the plume of atomized fuel becomes a column of flame reaching 30 feet up. feet up, with Jamie at the heart of it, encased in a straight jacket of blistering heat.

I was like, I need to get away from this, and I still tied on to these ropes and harnesses. And so I just jumped away from the machine, because I knew I could just jump off the cliff below me, and I'd be fine because I'm all tied on these ropes. And as I jumped away from this burning cloud or flames and swung through there, because then I was like falling and swinging, I was like, oh no, I am the fire. Drenched in fuel, he's been lit up like an effigy. And now he's swinging above the ravine 30 feet up,

burning alive in midair. I remember quite calmly thinking, oh, I don't really see any way out of this. This could be one of those times you die. It's mid-morning high in the mountains of Patagonia. Overlooking a pristine alpine lake, a blazing fireball swings from a rope across a deep, narrow ravine. At its white-hot center, secured in a harness anchored to the cliffside, is Jamie Nicol. I just couldn't see any way out of it.

You're like, there's no rolling on the ground, there's no running into the water. You're like tied on to a rope hanging off a cliff and you're burning. The fire sounds like wind rushing in his ears, a low, billowing roar. He can feel the intensity of the blaze increasing as the flames feed hungrily

on his petrol-soaked clothing and skin. And yet, oddly, even now, in the seconds before he surely burns to death, a strange sense of detachment settles over him. I was like, oh, it's just pretty plain. Oh, this could be one of those times you die, was the thought. And so there was a very calm moment and then swung through, smacked into the cliff quite hard. And then I think really a sort of panic set in. The calm of a moment ago has gone, replaced by horror, and heat, searing incandescent heat. With his nerve-ending screaming, Jamie tries to rip off his t-shirt, tearing at the fabric, but it won't budge.

As I pulled it, I was like, oh, I've got a full body harness on, that's not coming off. There's no way out of this. I'm burning. And so I was just lifted my head up and was just smacking at my face to try and protect my earwake. and keep the flames off it, and then I was yelling out to my mate, help, help, help. He thrashes wildly, jerking and twisting in his harness. Flames flicker up past his chin, singeing the strap of his helmet. When they reach his eyelashes, the air thickens with the acrid stench of burning hair. The nylon waistband of his shorts starts to melt, fusing with his body.

bubbling red blisters form on his skin is being cooked alive I say man no one's going to help me in the time that I've got so I've got to do something about getting out of this situation direct exposure to open flame can cause life-threatening third-degree burns

in just seconds Jamie has been engulfed for almost half a minute however much he beats the fire with his hands and arms he can't seem to extinguish it. He's got to try something else. Maybe if he can remove his t-shirt,

he can get the blaze under control. But that will mean removing both his helmet and his harness first. I just went down into the flames, put my head into the flames, bent over, bent my head over and started undoing the helmet. With his head tilted down towards the flames, Jamie fiddles furiously with a clasp of his chin strap.

Pulsing waves of heat radiate into his face as he pours his focus into this one small task. Once the chins trap is undone, he can start to remove his harness and his clothes. But before he can finish taking off his helmet, everything stops. The flames abruptly disappear, flickering out with barely a whisper. The echo of their roar fades to silence as if they were never there at all. Dazed, Jamie looks down. This shirt has disintegrated completely. That'll be why the fire vanished.

It had already devoured its main source of fuel, burned itself out. It's a monumental relief. But then Jamie looks at the damage the fire has caused. My arms, I just remember it being grey and like rolled up paper as if someone had wet some paper and rubbed it for too long and it had just sort of all started coming apart

and looked at my hands and they were kind of wet looking in a way I guess because I'd lost a lot of skin. His body hangs in the harness, slumped against the rock. The burns on his torso glisten like fresh paint the outer layer of skin seared away to reveal the seeping red tissue underneath. He can just about hear dim voices bouncing off the walls of the ravine, his colleagues presumably, telling him to sit tight that help is on its way.

But Jamie isn't in the mood to hang about. I was like, man, I do not want to weigh it around. We have that window when the body's... to you with adrenaline and things, and that's the time to act. When you're flying Emirates business class, enjoying a good night's rest in your lie flat seat, you'll see that your vacation isn't really over until your flight is over. Fly Emirates, fly better. This December on the Noiser Podcast Network, it's a busy month with the launch of a

brand new show. Join Sir David Soucher for Charles Dickens' Ghost Stories, a selection of Dickens' most spine-tingling tales. In Jane Austen stories, pride and prejudice concludes, when all said and done, will pride get in the way of true love? Short history of takes us onto the historic canals of Venice and beyond the courtrooms of the Nuremberg trials. On real survival stories, we'll follow an emergency chopper as it goes down in the Labrador Sea and traverse the mountain bike trails of Patagonia. In Sherlock Holmes short stories, Holmes unpicks a mistake. serious string of sculpture-related crimes in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, and Real Dictators returns with the extraordinary story of Jean Bedell-Bocasa.

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About 30 feet below him is a sparkling glacial pool. Before the adrenaline subsides and the pain becomes unbearable, Jamie resolves to move. He grabs hold of the rope with his raw, weeping fingers and starts shifting his weight from side to side. eventually generating enough momentum to swing himself across to the ledge. He lands unsteadily on the rocky shelf. Quickly he unclips the carabinas, untethering himself from the cliff face.

Then he peers down at the water below, separated from him by a series of small drops, three or four meters high. Without pausing to second guess himself, Jamie jumps, hurling himself down the centre of the ravine all the way down to the water. I just jumped underneath that in this pool and was just hit by the freezing, freezing water and then chilled by this ice

and there was part of me like, this is good. But then the cold hit me and so it's this quite interesting thing of being burnt but then the next kind of pain was being chilled. so extremely. Extreme heat and extreme cold. To a human body under stress, the two sensations aren't so different.

To panicked pain receptors, both burn, as if a million sharp needles are being driven into the skin. Jamie gasps, writhing beneath the onslaught. He scrambles to his feet, unable to bear being submerged. Instead, he takes off his helmet and uses it like a bucket.

scooping water from the pool and dumping it all over his blistered face, neck, arms and torso. The cold shock is still agonizing, but it's more tolerable like this, less intense. He keeps going, dowsing his burns over and over. Meanwhile, two of his colleagues make their way down to him. They tell him that somebody's already radioed for an air ambulance. That's the good news.

Then comes the bad. They can't just wait here for help to arrive. They need to get to the lodge all the way over on the other side of the lake where the helipad is located. Jamie tries to pay attention. But as the adrenaline wears off, the pain intensifies. We pulled off my gunboats. I'm shirtless.

My skin's all like peeling off. The tops of my shorts are all melted. The idea that Jamie can go anywhere right now is crazy, but there is no other choice. His colleagues explain the outrageous plan. They need to run. To travel the two kilometers on foot through the woods back to the lake, where a boat will take them across to the lodge. It may only be just over a mile, but Jamie is half naked and half burned to death. Right now, it's an almost inconceivable distance.

Still, the guys wrestle his feet into a pair of shoes he can run in. Then, flanked by his two co-workers, he sets off down the trail. We're just running, running through forest, and it's kind of real consistent jog through there, just with this real pain of burning around the neck and shoulders. The forest floor is carpeted with fallen pine needles. Sunlight streams down through the branches, dappling the ground beneath Jamie's stumbling feet. Through the canopy, the tops of the mountains are occasionally visible. Huge granite pyramids enclosing the valley.

Now the world darkens at the edges as Jamie's vision contracts to a pinhole. Always carried that capacity to focus and push through adversity and pain and things like that. So that was just what had to happen. Everything else falls away, the mountains, the sky, the forest. All that's left is the trail, snaking through the trees and the lake, a pale blue band glimmering just beyond the curve of the forest floor. Step by step, they wind through the towering trunks until the forest thins out and they reach the water's edge. The rest of the work crew has already congregated on the shingle beach,

their mountain bikes lying beside them, tires coated in fresh mud. They greet Jamie with words of encouragement, assuring him that everything will be okay, though their fearful faces till a different story. For his part, Jamie fights to remain upbeat. And I even remember joking to some of them like, oh yeah, got pretty sunburned, hey? like this while I'm sort of standing there on the lake side

I think that's part of my sense of humour too it's like when things are bad you can still see some funny things in those situations too humour can only carry him so far though after a few minutes he hears the roar of an approaching motorboat this guy Javier one of the Chilean people workers in that he came screaming in and the jet boat really hard on the beach like he knew it was serious and I jumped in

and the look on his face and his inhalation of his breath was kind of the first time I'd really had a reflection of my situation because I think you know I could look down a little bit but you're not really seeing what's happened as such you know and so that kind of hit me as being like oh I mustn't look that good There'll be time to assess the extent of his burns later. For now, Jamie just needs to stay focused on the mission. Get to the lodge, wait for the helicopter, get to hospital. There, hopefully, he'll be given something to dull the pain.

Right now, the wind whipping off the surface of the lake feels like acid against his skin. At that point, I just couldn't stand still. I was like just kind of dancing around because just dealing with the pain of the burns. They'd brought me a wet sheet to put over me, but I was really cold. You know, even though I'd run through the mountains, I hadn't really warmed up. Finally, the boat pulls up to the wooden dock. With the assistance of others, Jamie hobbles up the long gravel drive that leads to the lodge. An impressive timber building perched on a bluff above the lake.

Jamie is led to an outdoor deck area where a small crowd has gathered. Dozens of faces turned toward him, eyes widening in alarm. Apparently there were no rescue helicopters available, but as luck would have it, a guest staying here at the lodge happened to know someone stationed at the nearby military base. They were able to call in a few favors. The chopper is on its way. Jamie is at once stung by burns and bitten by cold as he trembles and shivers and his teeth chattered together then amid all the commotion a stranger steps forward and speaks softly to him offering words of comfort and then this woman I don't know what she did but she was just there in my vision and my space and yeah she was like a little bit of an angel in that moment of like calmness

that feminine quality I guess the care heat related injuries are among the most complex and devastating the human body can sustain there is the risk of infection septic shock respiratory failure organ shut down the list goes on Jamie doesn't know this yet but he has suffered third degree burns to 35% of his body. Anything over 30% carries a high risk of death, even with rapid and expert treatment. Severe burn victims are given a narrow window of time in which to receive life-saving intervention. Outside that window, survival chances plummet. For Jamie, the clock is rapidly ticking down.

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Jamie squints up at the sky as the chopper comes into land, the rotor wash blasting aside debris from the surface of the helipad. A doctor in a white coat jumps out and runs over. He asks a couple of questions, but Jamie struggles to hear over the roar of the craft. There's no more time to waste. The doctor hurries Jamie on board and the helicopter whisks him to the nearest hospital in the town of Koeheike, about 20 miles north. We landed right outside the hospital and I stepped

out and lay straight onto a wheeled stretcher and I remember being wheeled around the chopper and then going into some doors and then that's all I remember it hadn't been given any drugs or anything at this point

but obviously something some memory loss that's been wiped from there because I would have been conscious and present asked those doors up until they put me into an induced coma, but I don't remember anything after going through those doors. From this point on, Jamie's recollections end.

While he's in his medically induced coma, the doctors and nurses work around the clock to keep him alive. For a while it's touch and go. His body is in a state of turmoil as his system tries to fight off the cascade of infection and shock, threatening to shut it down. But eventually, he stabilises. And two weeks later. I woke up and just like the movies, the beeping machines and the heart rates and all that going in your room

and you're plugged in with tubes all over you and some tube coming out of my chest and all these bandages on me. Jamie blinks around at the overlit ward in the ICU. you. The faces of the blurry figures around his bed slowly sharpen into focus. And then my girlfriend and I think my mother were, yeah, both of them were standing around me when I became lucid. And I don't remember what anyone said, actually. It's not something that sits with me at the moment. I think I was not awake for very long. Although he's stable, for now, his condition remains extremely serious. Swaddled in thick bandages, he spends days drifting in and out of consciousness,

dozed up on morphine, while medical staff busy themselves around him. These bandages were crazy, like you're just like a Michelin man. Your body's just leaking, leaking white blood cells, plasma. So in the days after that, you just go through these times of getting very sleepy and weak. I think that's a part that's quite impactful about the whole event is kind of realizing your fragility. There's something that came home really heavily in the hospital, realizing that you're only alive because someone kept coming into your room and fiddling with your machine or pumping more blood into you.

you're only alive because other people are caring for you and looking after you and that's quite a strange experience. Jamie is soon transferred to a larger hospital in the capital Santiago. Here, specialist burned doctors begin the process of preserving his damaged skin. They perform extensive grafts, taking healthy skin from elsewhere on his body

and transplanting it to the burned areas. The procedures, complex, drawn out, and agonising. Afterwards, Jamie spends two months recovering in the Burns unit. That was a long and difficult time. You know, a lot of very sleepless nights and feeling incredibly hot. I was fevered for that time. The whole time I was running a temperature. My family had come and sit in the room with down jackets on and things,

and I was just naked, feeling so hot. So my body was working so hard to survive and to fight the infections that I was dealing with. Slowly, but surely, Jamie makes positive strides towards recovery. The skin grafts take successfully. The antibiotics help stave off infection, his vital sign steady, and his organs begin to function without support.

For all, the cancer, Countless hours that Jamie has spent in hospital, it was the steps taken in the minutes after the accident that made all the difference. His quick thinking to get down off the cliff and into the water, his ability to run through the pain and reach the boat, every second counting towards his survival. Later on, talking to experts and things in this field,

it's that I actually didn't have much time to get to hospital and that the actions that we all took How I got out of there quickly were pretty important. Apparently I would have only had hours. After two grueling months spent recovering in hospital, Jamie at last flies home to New Zealand. There, he begins coming to terms with the longer lasting effects of his injuries. You really feel quite alone and you realise how difficult things are to do

because you're starting to try and do more things like go to the toilet or open a door handle, but, you know, I couldn't hold a knife to slice a piece of bread or cut a cucumber or anything. I couldn't open a bottle. Everything felt sharp, and my hands were just sorrow-sensitive. Despite these ongoing physical challenges,

Jamie works tirelessly to rebuild his strength and fitness. Within weeks of arriving back in New Zealand, he returns to the sport he excelled at as a teenager. Soon, he's entering himself into competitive mountain bike races and pushing himself harder than ever. He returns to the professional circuit and within three years he achieves podium finishes in two international events. He also completes the Enduro World Series, the pinnacle of off-road endurance racing. All this, in spite of the fact that scar tissue on his fingers, makes it impossible to fully close his hands.

He attributes his success in part to a state of mind he entered during those terrifying moments suspended ablaze in that ravine. You've been hyper-stimulated into this survival, and there's part of that almost becomes then a natural state. It's also quite helpful for racing mountain bikes. It's incredible, the energy that's in that space. At that point, the skin was so angry and red where it was swollen in your face.

And when you put the helmet on, put goggles on, you've got full-length clothing, you've got gloves. People don't stare at you anymore. You felt like everyone else when you were all in that mountain bike gear. No one could see that he looked different. About five years after his accident, the emotional strains begin to show. Jamie feels tired, irritable.

Little thing set him off. And so he does something that doesn't come naturally. He slows down. He goes to see a counselor who helps him work through his various challenges. Turns out he is likely suffering from adrenal fatigue, a symptom of chronic stress and a possible side effect of PTSD. having a confirmed diagnosis is the first step of the next stage of his recovery journey, one that leads, hopefully, to a deeper kind of healing.

My quest of finding myself in myself, rather than in that outside world, that I'm not going to be made happy by what's around me in the physical world, that it's this journey inside. I think that was there before the accident, but the importance of that has just been reinforced so much more. And as the years have gone on, I think that's just slowly opened up into more and more understanding

and knowledge of anything from nature to our interconnectedness with the world and with people and all of that it's so hard to even daydream about would I want to not have had the accident, you know and that's just what has happened

and so to know if you would not want it to happen but it's also taking you somewhere and you've had pretty amazing journey since then Next time, while the production team take a short, festive break, we'll delve into the

real survival stories archive. We meet Marine-turned yachtsman Pete Goss, as he takes on the most draining and dangerous sailing event on Earth, a 24,000-mile single-handed race around the globe. Most don't make it to the finish Some don't survive Two months in Hundreds of miles from land He is beset by the worst storm he's ever faced And then a distress call comes in

A fellow racer is sinking And needs urgent help Suddenly Pete's battle to stay alive Also becomes an epic Christmas time rescue mission That's next time on real survival stories Listen right now by joining Noiser Plus Thanks.