Dr. Ben Lewis, a 45-year-old paragliding pilot from the Yukon, Canada, was on a flight in the Indian State of Himachal Pradesh when he got caught in a thunderstorm and sucked up to an elevation of 24,333 feet.
Dr. Lewis’s ill fated incident happened on October 17th after a five hour cross country flight when he came upon a large cumulonimbus cloud. The storm cloud’s updraft took him from 10,000 feet to 30,000 feet in just 10 minutes with a maximum climb rate of 37mph.
On the edge of consciousness, Dr. Lewis was resigned to his fate and thought of his wife and two children before passing out. Miraculously he woke up hanging from a tree branch just feet off the ground. Dr. Lewis removed his harness and sat through an intense hailstorm.
Badly injured and nearly blind in one eye from a cornea damage and a vitreous hemorrhage, Dr. Lewis embarked on a self rescue mission down a jungle river valley. After 2 hours of trekking he finally got cellular reception and was able to contact his friends who organized a rescue from a local family who found him in the dark and took him to their house. His friends arrived shortly there after and they hiked down to a waiting taxi and returned to civilization.
