A life-threatening electrocution nearly took this Estes Park woman’s hands. It didn’t take her will to climb again. ...Middle East

The smell of burning flesh was so potent, Adam Strong had to roll down the windows.

Hands that once navigated rock faces that some boulderers could only dream of challenging were now black and smoldering.

Melissa Strong looked at them and yelled at her husband that she didn’t have hands anymore. Doing his best to keep her calm as he raced toward the hospital, Adam assured her that she still did.

Then Melissa’s thoughts went to her passion. “I will never climb again,” she wailed.

Adam didn’t have a response.

And neither did the EMT at the hospital, as Melissa was having her clothes cut off and her body hooked up to IVs.

“I knew the EMT there, and I looked at him and asked the same question: ‘Will I ever climb again?'” Melissa recalled. “And as soon as I said those words, I knew how unfair of a question that was. I followed it up with, ‘You don’t have to answer that.'”

It took weeks in the hospital, months of rehabilitation and a will to keep pushing forward, but Melissa eventually found the answer to that question. She wrote a book about her journey titled “Climbing Through: A Story of Grit, Healing & Second Chance,” which is set to be published by Falcon Guides in 2026.

One of her main takeaways: “We all have some scar tissue we are dealing with.”

‘The most significant moment of my life’

If not for a tripped breaker, Melissa Strong would have died that day in her Estes Park driveway back in 2017.

Strong was burning artistic runnels into wood furniture to be used at the restaurant she planned to open. Employing a technique called fractal burning, Strong rigged a 2,000-volt microwave transformer with mini jumper cables as leads to burn the wood.

But in a moment of distraction, Strong forgot she left the transformer running and grabbed the live leads with both hands. What followed was a life-changing, 20-second-long electrocution that torched her hands.

“I tried to scream, but couldn’t; tried to shake my hands free from the leads, but couldn’t; tried to fall over, but couldn’t,” Strong recalled. “That’s when I said to myself, ‘Oh (expletive), I’m dying.’

“With that thought, everything went black, and I was in a beautiful forest with so many ferns, sunlight coming through. I turned my head and saw a tunnel in the forest. There were these figures floating between me and the tunnel. … When I finally was able to open my eyes, I was face-down, and was looking at the gravel on my driveway. Then, I could finally scream for the first time.”

Strong had been climbing for about two decades at that point, starting with traditional climbing and sport climbing before finding her love for bouldering. She routinely solved difficult bouldering problems, was a volunteer bouldering steward in Rocky Mountain National Park and ran a guide company with Adam for climbers at Hueco Tanks State Park & Historic Site in El Paso, Texas.

At the burn center in Greeley, the morning after the accident, doctors told Strong that she was going to lose six of her 10 fingers and would only be left with her index fingers and pinkies. That would’ve been a catastrophic outcome for her climbing — not to mention her ability to run a restaurant.

Undaunted, she was transferred to UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, where she met Dr. Ashley Ignatiuk.

A plastic surgeon who specializes in hand reconstruction, Ignatiuk performed an important preliminary test to determine whether he would be able to save Strong’s thumbs. He pricked the tips, and a small amount of blood came out. Strong called it “the most significant moment of my life.”

“If the tissue is completely burnt, then there’s nothing that we can do,” Ignatiuk explained. “But the tips of her thumbs still had a tiny bit of blood supply, which means there were reconstructive options. But not a lot of them, because the whole palm side of her thumbs was completely torched, burnt all the way down to the bone.

“With an electrical current, the more resistive the tissue is, the more it heats up. The bone is the most resistant, so it heats up the most and you cook yourself from the inside out. Which is what happened to her hands. But her demeanor and the fact that she was such a fighter made me want to find a solution.”

With the small bit of hope, Strong and Ignatiuk pressed forward. Ignatiuk admits that at the time, he thought there was a 20% chance of saving Strong’s thumbs and zero chance that she would ever climb again.

“Right then, after that tiny pool of blood came from my thumbs, I swore that I would be the best patient in the world if anyone would just try to help me,” Strong said. “And, of course, I thought about climbing the whole time.”

Eight surgeries, skin grafts

While Ignatiuk made a plan, Strong started to get her life back.

About two weeks after the electrocution, she started riding a stationary bike at the hospital. She called on contractors, got business done with the bank and consulted lawyers to make sure her restaurant’s opening stayed on schedule.

Because of Strong’s determination, Bird & Jim opened exactly six months after her accident, on Oct. 2, 2017.

“She never faltered on that decision to open the restaurant,” said John Witmer, who co-founded the restaurant with her. “I remember her being very steadfast about continuing on, no matter her injuries and through all the surgeries. She has mental strength beyond almost anyone I know, and a determination that she just won’t quit.”

Ignatiuk conducted eight surgeries plus an array of skin grafts to rebuild Strong’s hands.

One of the procedures, called the bilateral cross-arm flaps, was a novel surgery in which Ignatiuk sewed both of Strong’s thumbs into her opposite forearms. She was stitched that way for three weeks. The surgery enabled blood supply to the thumbs from her forearm tissue, which was eventually incised and left on the thumbs to provide coverage for bones and tendons.

Ignatiuk also took tissue from the back of her index fingers for her thumbs, did multiple fusions to get her bones stable again, and grafted thigh skin into her fingers and groin skin onto her palms.

In the end, Strong was left with what she calculates as seven and three-quarters fingers — a much better outcome than what doctors initially predicted. She lost half of her right middle finger and parts of several others, including a shortened left thumb. Neither thumb has tendons and thus cannot bend.

While her thumbs were sewn to her forearms, Strong used the pinkies she had free and her right index finger to continue her restaurant plans and run her guide company. Her friends and fellow climbers were amazed, but not necessarily surprised.

Bronson MacDonald said she knew Strong would figure it out: “That was clear from very early on in her hospital stay.” Another climbing friend, Jackie Hueftle, saw the same resilience.

“She’s a really fierce personality,” Hueftle said. “Melissa, since she first started in the sport, has gone out and tried stuff that was way too hard for her, and just beat (routes) into submission. It’s a different mentality, and we all saw that at the hospital, too.

“… She’s always been determined, and the accident didn’t change that. I felt like, ‘Dang, you should’ve died, and somehow didn’t, and you suffered this life-changing accident for a climber. Yet here you are, just pushing along.'”

Return to the rock

After a six-week hospital stay, Strong’s most challenging days were ahead.

Her fingers were mostly saved, but she had to relearn how to climb, get her strength back and force her way past the mental and physical adversity that accompanied her recovery.

The first step: forgiving herself.

“I was standing next to a pit that could swallow me up,” Strong said. “I was almost ready to jump into the pit and willfully let it swallow me. Because I had no one to blame but myself for this accident. I had to deal with that immediately. So I had to build a safety net over this pit to keep myself from living in despair and from living in anger at myself.”

The second step: touching a climbing hold that Adam installed on the side of their staircase.

Then, she progressed to grabbing a hold with her feet on the ground. Then she took her feet off the ground and pulled herself up on a hold.

The final step was the hardest: actually climbing again. That meant restoring confidence in her hands and upping her pain tolerance and endurance to reach from one hold to another.

“In the couple of years after the accident, it was a tedious, slow and painful comeback — painful emotionally and physically,” Strong said. “The pain was almost unbearable when I first started to truly climb again.”

Strong’s reconstructed hands are no longer calloused. The groin skin grafted to her palm is sensitive and can be easily cut open. But she finally returned to the rock in the spring of 2018, nearly a year after her accident, at the Box Car Boulder in Rocky Mountain National Park’s Wild Basin.

“The main thing was when she did that first climb, it was super easy, but it showed that she could still do it,” Adam Strong said. “It was a V2 traverse, which was one of her old warm-ups. After that, everything else was just building on that.

“She doesn’t climb quite as hard (of routes) as she used to, but she’s still trying her hardest. The numbers are different, but the effort is the same.”

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In the years since, the 51-year-old has conquered problems as challenging as V8, which is roughly the mid-point of the bouldering ranking system (V0 to V17). Outside of the sport, Bird & Jim emerged as an Estes Park mainstay, with the business even expanding to a second, adjacent building called the Bird’s Nest, which is a bakery/coffee shop/pizzeria that also functions as a catering and event space.

Yet even though her hands have healed, Strong’s recovery remains an ongoing process.

“Without digits, it’s a constant everyday issue — dropping things, Ziploc bags, buttons, necklaces,” Strong said. “Even climbing, it can still be so frustrating, because there’s so many times (I look at a route) and know if I had my old hands, I could do it.

“But it’s a full-circle feeling, because I get frustrated at all these things, but then I can come around to the fact that I can still try at all these things in life, and I’m still alive. It’s a constant reminder that no matter what the daily frustrations are, the gratefulness outshines them.”

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