Olympian Ate Tree Bark After 8 Days Trapped on a Frozen Mountain

Eric LeMarque left for the slopes expecting a few hours of fun and a hot tub. Instead, the former Olympic hockey player ended up alone on a frozen mountain, eating tree bark, screaming at circling coyotes and watching his own feet slowly turn black.

In February 2004, the 35-year-old ex-pro athlete headed out to snowboard at Mammoth Mountain in California. He didn’t bring much: a light jacket, a dead cell phone and an MP3 player. No survival gear. No backup plan.

“I figured three hours of riding and then I’d hit the Jacuzzi,” he told PEOPLE.

On his last run of the day, he decided to take a secluded trail. That split-second choice almost killed him. As darkness and a storm slammed into the mountain, LeMarque realized he was completely lost. Every direction he turned dragged him deeper into the icy wilderness.

With no food and no way out, he started living off pine nuts and strips of bark he peeled from trees. At night, he clawed out a makeshift shelter in the snow with his snowboard and tried to stay alive as temperatures plunged.

Then it got worse.

At one point, LeMarque slipped into an icy river. Soaked and freezing, he dragged himself out only to see his feet turning black, bleeding and dying in front of him. The pain was unbearable — and there was still no rescue in sight.

As his body was breaking down, three coyotes appeared and surrounded him in the snow. Alone, freezing and half-delirious, LeMarque screamed at them until they finally ran off. It was pure raw terror — and somehow, he kept moving.

By the time day eight rolled around, his body was failing. His temperature had plummeted to 86 degrees. He was hypothermic, severely dehydrated and suffering from brutal frostbite.

A helicopter rescue crew finally spotted him using infrared imaging to detect his remaining body heat. When they reached him, he was barely hanging on.

Doctors later delivered the news no athlete ever wants to hear: his legs would have to be amputated six inches below each knee. His feet — the same feet that had carried him to the 1994 Winter Olympics with the French national hockey team — were gone.

In an essay for Backpacker, LeMarque wrote about how those feet had been his entire life: they took him to the NHL, the Olympics, and into the freedom of snowboarding. Suddenly, he was an amputee learning to walk again with prosthetics, starting over at the very bottom.

He admitted the first step wasn’t physical — it was emotional. Humility. Accepting that he needed help for everything. Letting other people catch him when he fell. “I needed help at every turn,” he wrote, and realized that asking for support was the first real step toward growing up.

Instead of disappearing, he turned the horror story into a comeback.

LeMarque wrote a book about his ordeal, Crystal Clear, in 2009. In 2017, Hollywood turned his nightmare into the film 6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain, with Josh Hartnett playing LeMarque.

Today, the man who once screamed at coyotes in the snow and watched his feet die on a mountain is a motivational speaker and a relentless advocate for resilience. He even got back on a snowboard. In late 2024, he launched a GoFundMe to chase a new dream: competing in the Paralympic Games.

He went up the mountain expecting a few runs and a Jacuzzi. He came back without his feet — but with a survival story that sounds almost too extreme to be real.