A hunting guide fractured both ankles and broke his leg when he crashed his off-road vehicle deep in the Uinta Mountains of northern Utah. He told The Salt Lake Tribune that he might not have survived if not for his dog, Buddy, who stayed with him throughout his 11-hour crawl to help.
Jake Schmitt, 34, flipped his Polaris Ranger on July 20, 2025. Schmitt, a lifelong hunter who had worked part-time as a guide in Utah for nearly ten years, had turned the side-by-side utility terrain vehicle (UTV) onto a rugged uphill trail that he knew well from seasons past, only to find that it had become unsafe over the previous winter. He tried to reverse, but his rear tires lost traction.
“I knew it was going to flip, and I tried to jump out,” he told the Tribune. “And upon trying to jump out, it started to roll, and it took my body with it.” He said the vehicle rolled over him twice, then ejected him partway down the slope, before picking up speed and rolling another dozen or so times down the steep hill, into a dry creekbed.
Schmitt’s six-year-old German shorthaired pointer, Buddy, had been in a crate in the back of the Polaris, and at first he was worried the dog had died. But miraculously, Buddy padded up beside him, wagging his tail, completely unscathed.
Schmitt was a different story. Both of his ankles were shattered, his ribs were broken, and “when he looked at his left leg and couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing,” writes the Tribune. “His foot was folded back and his lower leg was skewed at a strange angle.” He was four miles from his parked truck at the trailhead, and his UTV was trashed—its roof gone and tires ripped off. His satellite phone, radio, and cellphone had all been inside of the vehicle.
Unable to stand, much less walk, Schmitt decided to log-roll himself down the hill towards his crashed vehicle, hoping to find one of his devices to send out an SOS. No luck. All he could scrounge up was a roll of duct tape. Using a piece of metal that had broken off his vehicle as a fulcrum, Schmitt jerked his broken leg into place and splinted it with the duct tape and a stick. “I was way more scared to lose my leg than to rebreak that back,” Schmitt told the Tribune. “I was terrified.”
At this point, Schmitt began the long crawl, with Buddy at his side all the while. He crossed six streams, hauling himself up and down the muddy, rocky mountainsides using only his arms, the jagged bones of his broken ankles grinding against each other as he pulled them along behind him. He said that Buddy stayed just ahead of him the whole time. When Schmitt felt burnt out, Buddy kept him going. “I would pet him, and then he’d go 20 feet more,” Schmitt recalled. “And now I know he was just helping me, step by step.”
When he reached his truck the next morning, Schmitt had been crawling for more than 11 hours. He and Buddy then drove 40 minutes to get help at a nearby diner. Schmitt and Buddy were eventually separated, as the former spent a week in the hospital for surgery. But on his last day in the hospital, the nurses gave the all clear for Schmitt’s mom to bring in Buddy. The dog was so excited he nearly jumped into bed with the injured man on sight. “He cried. I cried,” Schmitt told the Tribune. “It was pretty wild.”
Although physically, Schmitt was able to get out of the mountains on his own, he said he may not have had the willpower to keep going if it wasn’t for Buddy showing him the way. “He’s the little man that got me out of there, for sure,” he told the paper. “If he wasn’t there, I probably wouldn’t have made it mentally, spiritually.”
Friends and family have established a GoFundMe to support Schmitt’s medical recovery.
