NISSIM IN NIAGARA: After Falling 70 Feet From Niagara Falls Gorge Trail Frum Woman Lives to Share Tale

By M. C. Millman

A frum woman who was hiking with her family on a Niagara Falls Gorge Trail tripped and could not stop herself from sliding over the edge and hurtling head first towards the chasm 70 feet below. 

After miraculously slowing her descent and turning herself around by instinctively grabbing a tree root, the hiker described the sensation of "floating down" accompanied by the screams of her daughter above her before she hit bottom. Inconceivably enough, she suffered only minor injuries and next to none to her dignity as b'chasdei Hashem her shaitle landed beside her so she could have it on for the battery of tests that followed when she was rescued. 

Baruch Hashem, she only suffered a few small scratches, one place requiring stitches, and some injuries to her spine. Her baby's heartbeat was heard loud and clear in the hospital as well.

"This is crazy," she told herself directly after her fall as she waited to be rescued. "I have all my teeth, my fingers, toes, they're all there. I have two or three chipped nails, and I'm bleeding from my face. It doesn't make sense! I fell so far, and I'm still alive!"

While relaying her story, the survivor marveled over the huge number of chesadim her tale involved. The fact that she wasn't holding her seven-year-old's hand when she fell as they walked side by side as she might have pulled her down with her was one. That her five-year-old wasn't walking with her as then, that child might have rushed to the edge and fallen over after her was another. The fact that if someone had to fall, it was her and not one of her children; the chesed that when the local Lubavitcher rabbi came to pay her a visit and told her usually when he visits people who have fallen over the edge, it's to pick up the broken pieces of their bodies that are left - all were listed as pieces of her miracle. Even the nurses who met her as she arrived in the emergency room could not believe that she was the same woman who they had been told had fallen over the edge into the gorge. 

"Why is she not intubated?" they demanded of the EMT's despite her being conscious and alert.

After consultation with her Rav, the woman chose to share the harrowing tale so as to publicize the incredible nais and thank Hashem for saving her when, even now, she can't fathom any part of her own story, not of how she tripped and not of how she lived to tell the tale of her unimaginable survival.