Testimony
Grant Bolt: At the End of His Rope
By Cynthia Savage
The 700 Club
CBN.com
– “All those thoughts come to your mind. ‘It’s going to be terrible. I’m probably going to die.’ Normally, when you think of stuff like that, you wake up. It’s a bad dream, and you’re fine.”
Grant Bolt wasn’t dreaming. His day started off with adventure. It ended near death at the bottom of a mine shaft.
“My parents have some land up in the northern Black Hills,” Grant tells The 700 Club. “We had used this mine shaft to throw in old trees and stuff, and it had always been around. So curiosity kinda got the best of us.”
Grant and his buddies rigged tow straps to the front bumper of a truck. They used the truck to lower them into the 130-foot deep shaft. On Grant’s way out, the rope suddenly got slack.
His brother Lyndon was driving the truck. He says, “When the rope came off, I saw it fly above the windshield, and that’s when I realized that the rope had snapped.”
The rope flew past his friend, Josh, standing at the top.
Grant says, “I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘If you don’t do something right now, I’m going to fall, and I’m going to die.’ I remember him looking back at me, just kinda shrugging his shoulders and saying goodbye -- like ‘there’s nothing I can do.’’’
Grant began to free fall down the remaining 120 feet of the shaft -- the height of a nine-story building. Someone ran to get Grant’s dad, Greg.
“My first reaction was panic,” Greg says. “I thought, ‘You cannot fall down in there and not get hurt really, really bad, because it was so deep and so jagged with rocks.’”
Grant took a few hard hits on the way down. He says, “I came to a sudden stop, and I remember opening my eyes, looking around and for a split second I thought I was dead. I didn’t have any pain. Maybe I am impaled, because I didn’t know. That’s when I felt around to check myself out and see.”
He realized his knee was severely injured.
“I remember yelling up at the top of my lungs that I was alive,” he recalls. “I couldn’t hear back. It was so far. I yelled at them a couple more times, and finally I heard a response.”
Greg says, “I have all these terrible thoughts. ‘You know he’s going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He’s alive but how long is he going to live?’”
The guys re-harnessed Grant’s rope and pulled him up. It was a slow process as Grant braced his knee with his good leg.
"It was just a traumatic, traumatic experience pulling him out of there,” Grant’s father says. “He kept saying, ‘Dad, I can’t fall again.’”
Grant continues, “Right as I got to the top, they all grabbed me and pulled me out. I laid on the side of the bank, regrouped and was just so thankful to be out of that mine. [I was happy to] be alive.”
They rushed Grant to the hospital an hour away.
“They started to work on him,” Greg says, “and then the doctor asked him what happened to him. He told him. He says, ‘You are kidding me. We’ve got to stop right now. We’ll stop this bleeding and then we’ve got to x-ray your whole body. If you fell that far, you could be hurt everywhere else.’ So from there, they x-rayed him. The doctor is going, ‘This is unbelievable. You’re in one piece having fallen that far.’”
Marilyn, Grant’s mom, thanked God when she heard her son was safe.
“I felt like I was going to faint,” she says. “I just could not believe that I had a son there [who] only had a broken leg. [He] was able to get out of a pick-up, and he had just fallen 130 feet. I’d see the hospital, look at the 8th floor and think, ‘He fell that far. I’m going to visit him in the hospital, and I should be planning his funeral today. God, why have You blessed me? Why?’ I didn’t understand.”
“What a tremendous miracle this was to have our son live through this impossible fall,” Greg says, “and not have anything more than that happen to him. We just praise God that He spared his life.”
Lyndon says, “That was just God’s grace. He fell a hundred plus feet. He’s not dead, and he’s talking to us. It was the pure grace of God.”
Amazingly, Grant had only a shattered knee and bruises after the fall. With surgery and time, his knee movement was restored 100 percent.
He says, “What could have happened? I’m sure the possibilities are endless. I’m sure I could be in a wheelchair right now. I could obviously be dead. Things that you would take for granted, I am thankful to God. Being able to do things with my wife that I might not have been able to do.”
He continues, “I have a sense that God is with us. He kept me alive. I’ve been given a second chance at life that I shouldn’t have been given. It opens your eyes.”
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