Once in a while, we hear stories about people who find extraordinary strength in a time of crisis.

Aaron Cole, a college student from Grass Lake, is fortunate those stories can be true. Otherwise he'd probably be dead.

Cole, 24, and his girlfriend, Shelly Johnson, 22, also a college student from Grass Lake, were headed to Maine on a vacation when disaster struck Aug. 18.

"We were in New Hampshire when we saw a beautiful waterfall and decided to climb to the top," said Cole, a graduate student studying speech pathology at Eastern Michigan University.On the hike, Cole started fooling around by walking in the water. It was not incredibly steep, but the water had lots of slippery algae and rocks.

To Johnson, it looked dangerous. She pleaded with her boyfriend to get back on dry ground.

"He's one of those daredevil kids, so it (the warning) did not do any good," Johnson said.

Suddenly Cole slipped. For a split second, it seemed OK.

"Then I lost control and could not stop," he said.

He careened about 120 feet, bashing his head on rocks. He stopped, bloody and unconscious, face-down in a pool of water. That was actually a lucky break because he just missed sliding off a tall drop-off.

His second lucky break was the fact his girlfriend of four years is a senior nursing student at the University of Michigan.

Cole was not breathing when she reached him, so she gave him a few "rescue breaths." It worked. Cole coughed and spit water.

Johnson took off her swimming suit to bandage gashes on his head, then carried him down a hill that took them 45 minutes to climb. Most of the way, she said, she cradled him, talked to him and tried to keep him conscious.

"With head injuries, I knew it was important to keep him from going into a coma," she said.

Johnson is athletic  a state champion hurdler at Grass Lake  but it defies explanation that she, at 115 pounds, carried a 160-pound man so far.

"She tried picking me up again the other day and could hold me for only a few seconds," Cole said.

"If all the money in the world was placed on it now," she said, "I don't think I could do it again. It was adrenaline and God."

Cole's third piece of luck came at the bottom of the hill. The first people to find them were an intensive-care nurse and an emergency-room nurse.

The closest hospital was not equipped to handle serious head wounds, so Cole was airlifted to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. He was treated in intensive care for two days, but had no permanent brain damage.

"Shelly is a true hero and deserves all the credit in the world for saving my life," Cole said.

Johnson is not comfortable being called a hero, but she knows one thing.

"He owes me ice cream for life," she said.