TICKER: #IShouldn’tBeAlive: Desert hiker survives in drain tunnel for 4 days without food or water after falling and breaking leg

A Utah hiker lay in agony for four days listening to bikers and other hikers pass by after he fell into a drain tunnel and broke his leg.

Daniel Samuelsen, 33, was trying to cut under a highway through a large drain tunnel near Parleys Canyon in east Salt Lake City on Wednesday when he fell 50 feet and snapped his leg in several places.

“I heard the crack,” he told KTVX Salt Lake City. “And I put my hand down there to grab it to feel what was wrong and I could literally feel the bone protruding out of my leg.”

The crippled hiker shouted for help until his throat was raw, he said, and used a rock to bang against the side of the tunnel to try to alert other hikers whose footfalls he could hear above him.

But the roar of the freeway drowned out his cries for help.

“I thought I was going to die,” he said.

After three nights with no food or water and a dead cell phone, Samuelsen fashioned a makeshift splint of out of a piece of wood, a pillow and his shoelaces and dragged himself 100 yards out of the tunnel.

He made it to the highway and eventually flagged down help.”I was near tears when someone finally stopped. I clasped my hands together and was like ‘thank you, thank you,’” Samuelsen told the station.

The hiker was taken to St. Mark’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, where doctors said they may have to amputate his leg because the wound became infected.

He was also treated for severe dehydration.

Samuelsen admitted he was stupid to try use the drain tunnel as a shortcut.

“I’ll never do that again,” he told the Salt Lake City Tribune.

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