Eric LeMarque was no stranger to extreme conditions. A seasoned athlete and former professional ice hockey player, he even competed at the 1994 Winter Olympics with France’s national team.
So when he set out to snowboard on Feb. 6, 2004, without the usual gear he typically carried, it didn’t feel especially risky.
“I figured three hours of riding and then I’d hit the Jacuzzi,” LeMarque, then 35, said in a 2005 interview.
On what became his final run at Mammoth Mountain Ski Area in Mammoth Lakes, California, LeMarque chose a more secluded trail. As daylight faded and a storm moved in, he quickly realized he was disoriented — and unprepared. He had only a light jacket, a dead cell phone, and an MP3 player.
What followed was a brutal eight-day fight to stay alive in the wilderness. LeMarque survived by eating pine nuts and chewing bark, and he slept in a shelter he carved out of the snow using his snowboard.
He attempted to use radio signals he picked up on his MP3 player as a guide, but every direction seemed to push him deeper into the trees. At one point, he slipped into an icy river — a plunge that left him soaked, freezing, and even more exposed to the elements.
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When he checked his feet, he saw they were turning black and bleeding. “I knew I had to get out of there,” he later recalled.
As pain intensified and his hope wore thin, he also had a terrifying encounter with wildlife. He described being surrounded by three coyotes and screaming until they backed off and ran away.
Rescue finally came on the eighth day, when a helicopter crew located him using infrared imaging to detect his body heat.
By the time he reached medical care, he was suffering from severe frostbite, hypothermia, and dehydration. Doctors determined both legs would need to be amputated about six inches below the knees.
LeMarque was later fitted with prosthetic feet and spent months in rehabilitation, relearning how to move through the world he once dominated as an elite athlete.
In an essay he later wrote for Backpacker, LeMarque described the moment he was found and the staggering condition he was in: “He had rappelled from a helicopter to save me. My body temperature, he’d just told me, was 86 degrees. That I even had a pulse was remarkable considering I’d been wandering in the snow for the last seven nights. One foot was naked, and the other was frozen in its boot.”
Elsewhere in that same essay, he reflected on the shock of going from world-class athlete to amputee. “My feet had been my livelihood. They’d taken me to the NHL and the Olympics as a hockey player. As a snowboarder, it was my feet that had conveyed those sensations of gliding and floating. What had I done to end up here without them?”
The turning point, he wrote, began with “humility.”
“I’d been an elite athlete for so long, it was hard to start at the very beginning. I had to learn to walk with the prosthetics. I needed help at every turn,” LeMarque wrote. “But I realized that asking for that support was the first step toward finally growing up.”
He later chronicled the ordeal in a 2009 book, Crystal Clear. The story was adapted into the 2017 film 6 Below: Miracle on the Mountain, with Josh Hartnett portraying LeMarque.
In recent years, LeMarque has worked as a motivational speaker and advocate for resilience, and he has also returned to snowboarding. In late 2024, he launched a GoFundMe campaign to support his goal of pursuing a journey toward the Paralympic Games.
