I DIDN'T SEE THE BOY FALL — I heard him: a quick sliding sound followed by silence and then the thump of flesh and bone against ground. The two girls he was climbing with were shrieking his name as they tried to get down to him. More Russians soon arrived, weaving through the woods, talking on their cell phones in hushed tones.

A hundred feet away, the boy had tumbled more than 200 feet off the Stolby Two descent we'd finished just thirty minutes earlier. I was the third person on the scene. His left arm was impossibly bent behind and over his right shoulder; his left knee was wrenched backward, dislocated. His shirt was slightly pulled up, exposing blackened splotches from organ hemorrhaging. A small bookbag was off to his side. He looked twelve years old at the most. He gasped in spasmodic bursts as Oleg and another Russian tried in vain to clear his airway of blood, teeth and bone.
He wasn't going to live.

Brittany approached. "No. Go back," I mouthed to her. She couldn't see this.

Ten minutes later, as a light mist blew through the air and leaves drifted down from the trees, the boy's wheezing stopped. He was dead.

Mikhail turned and, in his broken English, told me, "I am sorry. In Stolby... this is normal".

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