Seth Rowe, 30, is scraped and bruised, but alive and lucky he survived being trapped in a narrow crevice on the Niagara Escarpment. Rowe was exploring the crevice at the Nottawasaga Bluffs south of Collingwood on Saturday when he slipped and fell 40-feet into the narrow crack in the rock and couldn't get out. “All my strength left me and I slowly slid back down. I thought I’m in trouble. I'm not getting out of here. It's was pretty bad, nobody knew where I was,” says Rowe. Rowe spent the next eight hours huddled in the dark trying to stay warm. He knew the odds of being found were slim, his cell phone was dead, the conservation area was remote and the sun was going down when two hikers on the Bruce Trail happened by. “I started yelling ‘hello, help, help’ and miraculously someone said ‘hello’. He said, ‘is somebody down there?’ I said, ‘I am stuck can you get me a rope or something? He said, ‘how did you get down there?’ I said, I fell most of the way.’” The hikers contacted Rowe's family and called 911, which triggered the rescue operation. It was a long slow process, but fire crews from Clearview and the City of Barrie worked through the night. Another rescue team from Toronto arrived early yesterday morning to help. Rescuers managed to get Rowe some food, water and blankets to prevent his hypothermia from getting worse. They kept him talking through many long dark hours. More than 19 hours after falling into the crevice, Rowe reached through a crack firefighters widened with hammer drills. “I reached through and he grabbed my hand and I started crying; we made contact. Another human being touching me; it was pretty intense,” he says. “He pulled me up to where he was standing and he grabbed my foot. They started pushing me up manually and the guys were pulling on the rope, we were still pretty far down there.” “I was shaking like a leaf. I was saying, ‘please no more hold backs, please get me out of this hole’. They said, ‘it was wide enough from here… buddy you are getting out’ and I got up to the next guy who had talked to me all night. He said, ‘I told you we would not leave you here and we would get you out.’” At 9:39 a.m. on Sunday morning, Rowe was pulled from the crevice. “They pulled me out onto the ground and I saw the sky. I said, ‘I'm alive! That's crazy, I'm alive!’” Officials with the conservation authority say they don't have a policy that specifically forbids exploring the crevices. There was a fatality in the same area about 15 years ago when a person fell from the bluff. Rowe says he is looking forward to meeting his rescuers and the two hikers who found him against all odds.
