A hiker is lucky to be alive after sliding down a steep mountain in China following severe storms that battered the area. And the near-death experience was all captured on his 360-degree camera.
Yang Meng, 42, was hiking in the Fanzengjian Mountains in eastern China’s Anhui province on Monday when he suddenly slipped. In the video, which he shared on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, Yang can be seen suddenly losing his balance and quickly sliding down the mountain’s slippery surface. Luckily, a tree broke his fall after a few terrifying seconds.
The video has now been liked by more than 280,000 users on the platform and shared more than 445,000 times.
Anhui province, located about 450 kilometers west of Shanghai, has been experiencing heavy rains after the region was recently hit by two powerful typhoons, Yagi and Bebinca, the latter the strongest storm to hit the area since 1949.
Yang later said CNN that he was not seriously injured in the fall and suffered nothing more than some minor cuts and scrapes, and some bruising to his leg
“I realized I couldn’t get up at all and I was sliding faster and faster, and then it hit me — I must be falling off a cliff,” he said in his interview Friday. “When I hit the tree, it felt like a big rock falling down. I just thought, ‘I’m not dead.'”
“I think I came out mostly unscathed. Just a small scratch on my left hand and a small cut on my thigh,” Yang recalled, adding that the terrifying encounter has given him some perspective. “Life is very short, so we have to cherish every day. I won’t let this incident stop me. It actually pushes me to explore the world even more.”
