Skier Angel Collinson Describes Tumbling More Than 1,000 Feet Down Alaskan Mountain
Collinson was skiing in Alaska's Neacola Range when she flipped onto her back.
— -- Big-mountain skier Angel Collinson says she had "a bit of fear" before starting down an Alaskan mountain that would ultimately end in her tumbling more than 1,000 feet down.
"I definitely always have a bit of fear before I do stuff," Collinson said today on "Good Morning America." "I feel like professional skiing and a lot of sports is knowing the difference between the fear in your gut when you shouldn’t do something or just the little bit of nervous fear that we always have."
Collinson was filming for the movie "Paradise Waits" in the Neacola Range in Alaska last spring when she says she hit an icy patch that caused her to fall.
"I was skiing down pretty fast, but totally reasonable speed for what I normally do, and I hit some icy, chunky snow and it kind of bounced my ski around," Collinson said. "This happens to us a lot but in this case it kind of bumped my ski up above me to my left and my body kept going down to my right and then that’s when I started falling."
Collinson says once she realized the speed of her descent, she immediately went into self-protection mode.
"At first I was trying to slow myself down with my arms, but then once I started picking up speed I realized that I was going to be falling for a while and the snow was icy and there was big icy snowballs," she said. "As I was tumbling, I covered my face and protected my head with my arms and I kind of just held on until I stopped."
Collinson amazingly suffered only minor injuries.
"Two jammed fingers and some bruises, but totally unscathed other than that," Collinson said of her injuries.
Collinson's fall was captured on camera by Teton Gravity Research (TGR), which last week released the footage on YouTube as part of its 2016 Safety Week.
"They brought a bunch of professional skiers together where we talked about some of the lines that we’ve skied where maybe we made good calls or calls that we would have made differently," Collinson said of TGR, a Wyoming-based adventure and action sports media brand. "They’re using it just so people can learn from it."