Taken Hostage While Rock Climbing | Nat Geo Live

( Intro music ) About a week into our expedition, a rebel group from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan moved through the valley, and they saw us 1,000 feet up on this big wall. They saw this as this opportunity. And so, we awoke one morning to bullets flying around our portaledges. The message was quite clear. We had to come down, or we would get shot.

So, we spent a couple of hours rappelling to the ground. When we got to the ground, we were greeted with these very scary-looking guys, with big guns, army fatigues, and large beards. We were taken hostage. A few hours after we were actually taken as hostages, the Kyrgyz military moved into the valley, and this incredible battle erupted all around us.

We watched in horror as a Kyrgyz soldier was shot point-blank in the head. We were forced to lie on his body for like four hours as this crazy battle raged around us. Heavy machine gun fire and mortars were shot over our heads. And then, for the next six days, we hid. During the day, we would bury ourselves in holes in the ground, cover ourselves up with brush, and lay completely still. At night, we would sneak from one location to the next.

On the sixth night of captivity, something clicked inside of me. Like, this real survival instinct kicked in. I suddenly felt as though I'd be able to sprint uphill without my heart rate even rising. So, a plan was hatched for the head captor to try and head back to our base camp and get some food. Then we were told to climb up this steep mountainside with our one remaining captor.

So we started climbing. We were climbers, very comfortable on this terrain; our captor was not comfortable. I started to think if we didn't get out of here soon, we might not last very much longer. And so, when we were probably a couple thousand feet up this mountainside in a super exposed section of the climb, I decided that I had to take matters into my own hands.

I scrambled up behind this one remaining captor, grabbed the gun strap for the gun that was strapped over his shoulder, and yanked backward on it as hard as I could. I watched him fall 50 feet, hit a sloping ramp, and then off into the blackness.