Melissa Strong remembers everything about the electrical accident. Nearly a decade later, she calls those horrific memories both a curse and a blessing.
The electricity ravaged her body, burning her hands down into charred paws. But that wasn’t the worst of it: She didn’t even feel any pain until medics started cutting off her clothes. The worst part of being shocked — electrocuted, really, given that she believes she died for a few moments — was the fact that the electricity robbed her of any control.
Before the accident, Strong was fiercely independent. She was about to open a new restaurant in Estes Park, a project she started simply because she’d been in many places and thought she could do it better. She was also a sponsored rock climber who preferred bouldering because she didn’t need anyone else to do it.
“I was frozen,” Strong said in an interview. “I was very aware of what was going on, and I had such mental anguish over it. I knew what was happening, and I couldn’t do anything about it.”
Strong was a rebellious child, at least compared to her friends in Catholic school, and her independence solidified into granite after she arrived in Estes Park with her new husband. They broke up in less than a year.
She found her way working in restaurants and, after a bit, enjoyed living without someone else’s opinion. She was partying and having a good time until age 26, when she went out for a run around Lake Estes and couldn’t finish the loop. The revelation was hard for her. She was terrible at team sports but was active her whole life, skiing and swimming and hiking. The mountain air, and the promise it held, was a big reason why she’d suggested to her ex that they live in Estes.
“I was ashamed of myself,” Strong said. “I couldn’t even run a half-mile. I knew I needed to change my life. What would I do to change my life?”
She found her answer when she noticed all her coworkers and her roommate all buried their noses in climbing magazines. She asked to go along and fell in love almost immediately.
“It was something about hanging on a rope and staring at the top,” Strong said. “The sun, the blue sky, something made me feel the need to get to the top. There was some sense of accomplishment that I knew I would have if I got there.”
She was at the top of her rock climbing game years later, when the accident happened, which she details in a new book, “Climbing Through: A Courageous Story of Grit, Healing and Second Chances.”
The curse, of course, of being present during the accident was she never forgot being unable to move as the volts coursed through her body. But that was a blessing too.
“It allowed me to know that I died, and I came back,” Strong said, “and I could come back and try at life again.”
“I just did what Adam told me not to do”
Strong relished her life as a climber. She’d spent almost 20 years working out problems across the U.S. and abroad, guiding at Hueco Tanks State Park, and she met her husband, Adam, a fellow sponsored climber. After a life of feeling inferior to others because of sports — she got Cs in gym class — here was something she could do better than just about anyone.
“Not a lot of women were climbing back then,” Strong said. “Once I put my mind to it, it felt natural.”
Still, she was ready to set aside the climbing in order to open Bird & Jim. She found the idea as exhilarating and scary as climbing could be. She often wondered what she could do with restaurants in, say, Denver or Boulder if she got the chance. She finally did after working 20 years at the Dunraven Inn, a legendary spot in Estes Park known for steaks and Italian cuisine.
The old building she purchased in 2016 was not like those in Denver and Boulder. The old Sundeck restaurant needed some serious renovations. Strong, with toned arms and powerful hands from decades of climbing, was not afraid of the work.
“I was determined to open a restaurant and bring something different to Estes Park,” Strong said.
Strong had tried staining furniture for the restaurant, but nothing looked right. Strong resorted to using electricity to burn artwork into the wood. She had already burned several table legs using a transformer modified with mini jumper cables when she, in her own words, “fucked up,” grabbing the cable clamps with both hands.
“My first thought was, ‘I just did what Adam told me not to do,’” Strong said.
The electricity flowed through her, and she eventually passed out. Then, in a stroke of luck, the breaker tripped, saving her life. When she came to, she yelled for Adam, who loaded her into the truck. When she finally looked down at her hands, she saw melted flesh and scorched bone.
Everyone needs their hands, but Strong saw both her livelihood and the thing she loved to do most of all in them. They were as bleak and black as a steak forgotten on the grill.
“I will never climb again,” Strong told Adam during the frantic minutes to the hospital.
Her only hope
Strong would need that reminder of a second chance at life often during the first few weeks in the hospital. Her head and heart were fine, at least physically, and that was lucky. But her hands were, it seemed to her, beyond hope. Burn doctors at the UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora weren’t hopeful. They told her people rarely survived with a shock strong enough and long enough to cause such gruesome burns. Strong’s independent streak rebelled once again at the doctors’ words.
“It took a while to realize your life is changing,” Strong said. “It was gut-wrenching and horrifying. I couldn’t change the narrative. I was completely hopeless and helpless. I would think about climbing, and then I laughed at myself for thinking about climbing.”
At times, she fought through a sense of worthlessness, especially after she learned she would lose at least part of her fingers, as if she was nothing without them. She was still a restaurant owner, but as an elite climber, she’d invested a lot of self-worth into those fingers. Climbing defined her way of life.
“I pictured an exceedingly melancholic woman moving morosely through life, fumbling with four fingers,” she wrote in her book.
A look at Melissa Strong’s hands two years after bouldering in Albarracin, Spain. The electrical accident took parts of her fingers. (Handout)A plastic surgeon would be her only chance, which made her laugh inside: When she thought of plastic surgery, she only thought of boob jobs. Dr. Ashley Ignatiuk was, instead, a hand reconstruction specialist who was known for his innovations: One of the things he suggested was removing her big toe and using it as a thumb.
It turned out he wouldn’t need that trick: There was enough blood flow to possibly save her thumbs and whatever was left of her fingers, even though she only saw charred stumps of bone. In the meantime, she learned how to navigate a new world, one without her hands. She couldn’t wipe after using the bathroom, blow her nose or order food without help. She couldn’t even put in her contacts, requiring Adam to find a pair of old glasses so she could see again.
Many painful, gruesome but innovative surgeries followed, including one where Ignatiuk sewed her injured thumbs directly to forearms to allow for blood vessel growth and tissue redevelopment. She went home five weeks later.
Small victories, and then milestones
Strong remembers appreciating all the small victories that would follow and a deep frustration that they weren’t happening sooner.
She opened Bird & Jim, named for star-crossed lovers Isabella Bird and Mountain Jim Nugent, on Oct. 4, 2017, six months after the accident. That same month, she had her first breakthrough on her climbing wall in her garage. She was able to link several moves together, despite raw pain that left her nauseous.
“This showed me there was something else in my climbing trunk besides sadness,” Strong wrote in her book. “There really was hope.”
It was time to move beyond the wall in her garage and be outside again. She craved it. It was the thing she missed the most besides her fingers.
“It’s not me in a plastic gym,” Strong said. “I started climbing because I loved being outside. The breeze and the river. It’s better than just a plastic hold.”
Melissa Strong climbs two years after her electrical accident in Albarracin, Spain, known as one of the best places in the world for bouldering, Strong’s favorite activity. (Provided by Adam Strong)A week from the one-year anniversary of the accident, she decided she was ready to return to one of her favorite boulders, the Boxcar in the Wild Basin area of Rocky Mountain National Park. She cried as she packed her gear and crash mat, something that would break her fall. She’d probably made the trip 100 times, but this felt new again.
“I missed the ritual of it,” Strong said.
She drove out to the spot with Adam.
She viewed it as the final test of her new life. It was a relatively small test — the boulder, rated V2, was relatively easy for the world-class climbing skills she once possessed, like a professional marathoner running a 5K — but it would mean everything. It would, in many ways, determine whether the thing she loved most would be a part of her life again.
She would, later, endure many other challenges, including COVID-19, and many other triumphs, such as opening a second restaurant in Estes Park, the Bird’s Nest. She divides her time between there and Hueco and volunteers with Adam as a bouldering climbing steward for Rocky Mountain National Park.
Now 52, she is back to climbing many of her favorite routes, with some limitations, including those that have nothing to do with the accident.
“I’m feeling the limits of my age,” Strong said. “There are still days I’m really frustrated.”
But she looks back on that day on Boxcar as the reassurance that she could still live the life she wanted. It hurt, but she did climb it, just as she did before her fingers were burned to nubs.
“It was all so heavy and emotional,” Strong said. “It meant that I was outside climbing again.”
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