MEXICO — A Mexico man with a broken lower leg crawled 2½ miles down Thompson Hill in six hours to get help early Friday morning after crashing his snowmobile.
Nicholas Brown, 57, said late Tuesday afternoon that it was quite the ordeal at about 24 degrees.
“It was a bad situation, but it could have been worse with the cold,” he said.
Brown, who is a club officer of the Mexico Trailblazers Snowmobile Club, said he headed up the mountain on ITS 82 to the clubhouse Thursday night to place membership applications and trail maps there.
On the way home, his red 2005 Ski Doo MXZ 800 snowmobile hit some ice on the trail and he lost control at 9 p.m., he said.
Maine Warden Service Cpl. John MacDonald said Tuesday in a news release that the trail was ice covered and included a corner and a grade.
MacDonald said alcohol wasn’t involved in the incident. He said Brown overcorrected while trying to negotiate a turn and broke his leg.
“I lost control going around a corner and the sled went kind of broadside, and it was sliding sideways down the trail and I put my feet down thinking that (the sled) was going to flip over,” Brown said.
He then overcorrected and the sled came back toward a leg.
“I felt my leg get pulled under the sled, and then it snapped and I came off the right side and the sled went off the trail into some alders,” Brown said. It sustained minor damage.
He said he tried to stand up and realized he couldn’t, so he sat where he was for 10 to 15 minutes. He checked himself for puncture wounds in case he had to use his belt as a tourniquet and was relieved to not find any. Brown said he didn’t have a cellphone with him to call for help.
“So, I told myself the best thing for me was to get out of there,” he said.
Laying on his belly, he used his elbows to crawl a mile and a half down to Thompson Hill Road. Once on the road, he was able to get up on his hands and knees and crawl, arriving at a friend’s house at 3:30 a.m. on Friday.
Mexico police and Med-Care Ambulance responded to the call for help from the house, and Med-Care took him to Rumford Hospital.
Brown said Warden Dave Chabot told him he was lucky that he wasn’t bleeding from a puncture wound, because the warden told him he didn’t think Brown could have crawled as far as he did for help.
Club members Gary Wentzell and Jim McDonald, who were heading up the hill on Friday morning to do some trail work, retrieved Brown’s sled. Club member Clyde Wardwell Jr. put the sled on a trailer and returned it to Brown’s house.
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