A Happy Camp woman likely saved a man’s life Saturday morning, officials said, when she saw skid marks on a little-used road and decided to stop and get out of her car to examine them.

Once out of her car, Laurie Bowers looked over the cliff on Grayback Road, a circuitous 40-mile route between Happy Camp and Cave Junction spanning the California border, and saw a red Jeep perched perilously 50 feet below.

“It’s a good thing she was traveling by,” Ned Booth, public information officer at the Illinois Valley Fire District, said in an interview.

The Jeep was perched on roughly a 40-degree slope on the side of the hill. Booth said the car was resting against a single tree otherwise it likely would have plunged 1,000 feet to a ravine below. Crews had to work to extricate the driver from the car amid a perilous situation, Booth said.

He declined to identify the driver, saying they were awaiting to notify family, but he said the man was in his 30s or early 40s. The driver told officials he crashed at around 2 a.m. Rescuers were dispatched to the scene at 10:10 a.m. Saturday.

Search and rescue crews often take some time to materialize in the rural stretch of the Siskiyou Mountains, but Booth said a team of paramedics and rescue personnel were conducting a routine exercise in Cave Junction so they were able to respond quickly.

“Everything just worked out real nice,” he said.

The driver of the Jeep was hypothermic, had a badly fractured leg and internal bleeding. He was airlifted to Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford.

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen

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