Howard Creamer jokes that his wife, Linda, will do anything to avoid going fishing.
He can smile now about her potentially fatal 114-foot fall last week from Upper Mesa Falls into the Henry's Fork of the Snake River."She just didn't want to spend her vacation fishing, I guess," he said. Turning serious, he added, "She's a tough gal, and real lucky to be alive."
The couple, from Flower Mound, Texas, was in the Ashton area on vacation, planning to visit Yellowstone National Park. For now, they're visiting Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls.
She suffered four broken ribs, a punctured lung, a fractured pelvis and an assortment of cuts and bruises, and she expects to be hospitalized three to six weeks.
It happened Aug. 5 as she stood on a ledge downstream from Upper Mesa Falls. She was seeking a good spot to take a picture when she lost her footing and plummeted into the river.
Bouncing off a tree on the way down may have saved her life.
"Halfway down the bluff, she hit a tree, which propelled her past the rocks and into the water," her husband said. "She just wanted a scenic view of the falls."
Creamer said she got a "nasty gash across her bottom from the tree."
"I'm lucky I'm well endowed. It may have saved me," she said.
After she hit the water, her husband said, she was probably unconscious for a minute, but then she came to and managed to swim to a rock.
"She is a tremendously strong swimmer, which is another thing that probably saved her life," he said.
Creamer remembers tumbling down into the water but doesn't remember hitting the icy rapids.
"I was aware of being in the water, and I remembered getting to the rock and being conscious of how cold it was," she said.
She survived the fall without losing either contact lens, but lost one earring, her watch and one of two bracelets.
"It was weird. Some of my jewelry stayed on, some of it was lost," she said. "But who cares about the jewelry."
Bob Drake, who works in the Idaho Falls Fire Department, happened to be vacationing at Mesa Falls and was the first to get to Creamer in the water.
"Within 30 minutes I saw the first rope come over the bluff to help me, but I still had to wait about three hours before I was out," she said.
She had to be hoisted out of the water in a metal basket and back onto the cliff. And that, her husband said, took a lot of manpower.