Teen Falls 260 Feet Fall Down a Mountain But Survives Thanks to Headphones

Eighteen-year-old Jake McCollum should have died on the side of Mount Walsh. Every expert who saw the scene said the same thing: “No one survives a fall like that.”

But McCollum did.

The teen was climbing alone on Nov. 30 when he suddenly lost his footing near the summit and plunged an astonishing 260 feet down the jagged Australian mountain. He pinballed off rock walls. He smashed through a tree. He finally slammed into the ground with a force that fractured his spine, shattered ribs, triggered internal bleeding, and left his head badly injured.

“I thought I was done,” he said. “I didn’t think anything human could survive that fall.”

Mount Walsh is notorious among local hikers. Its cliffs are sheer. Its slopes are slick. Rescuers often call the area a “nightmare zone” because bodies vanish beneath the thick canopy. Some victims are never found the same day.

McCollum almost became one of them.

Thrown yards from his backpack, he somehow managed to crawl toward it. Inside was a personal locator beacon — a last-resort survival device that sends out an international distress signal.

Jake pressed the button.

Canberra picked up the signal. His parents picked up the phone. What they heard next will haunt them forever.

Through the static, through a broken phone, through a battered body lying in the dirt, a small voice came through a pair of Bluetooth headphones that had also survived the fall.

“Mom… I’m hurt really bad.”

Rachel McCollum said the words cut straight through her.

“My heart just went,” she told 7 News. “He kept saying, ‘I think I’m going to die.’ Hearing that from your child… it destroys you.”

With his phone shattered, those headphones were the only lifeline between Jake and the outside world. Rachel stayed glued to the connection for more than five hours as police and rescue crews scrambled to pinpoint his location.

The PLB signal kept bouncing off cliffs, confusing the search. The teen’s black clothes blended perfectly into the mountain shadows.

“He was basically invisible,” LifeFlight aircrew officer Shayne White said. “Face-down. Buried under thick brush. If he hadn’t had that beacon and those headphones, we might not have found him in time.”

Even when a rescue helicopter finally buzzed overhead, Jake panicked.

“It flew right past me,” he recalled. “I was yelling, ‘It missed me! It missed me!’ I thought I was going to die alone out there.”

Crews eventually spotted a pair of legs sticking out from dense foliage — the only sign of life after hours of searching. Rescuers said stabilizing him took nearly an hour due to the severity of his injuries.

Then came the miracle moment: he lifted his hand.

Jake was alive.

He was airlifted to the hospital, where doctors spent days treating his extensive injuries. His family spent those days trying to process how close they came to losing him.

Without the headphones, Rachel said, “it could have taken days to locate him.”

Now she calls his survival nothing short of a blessing.

“We get to hug our kid at night,” she said. “Most families in stories like this don’t.”

Jake knows the truth too.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “But I am. That fall didn’t win.”