CORBETT, Ore. — "Help!"
That's the word Taylor Root said he heard as he was walking down the Larch Mountain Trail near Multnomah Falls. He had just passed by a woman and her mom a moment before, and everything seemed normal.
"That's when I start running. I'm like, 'Oh, something just happened,'" Root said, recalling the rescue.
Root had a GoPro strapped to his chest that was already recording content for his YouTube channel when the cry for help rang out.
He said he ran up the hill about 100 to 200 feet and found a woman bent down on the trail holding on to one of her mom's legs. That woman's mom had fallen backwards, with her feet up towards the trail and her head down the hill. Root bent down and grabbed the other leg.
"So trying to pull her back up, there was no way. I gave her a couple of pulls and was like this was not gonna happen," he said.
Root and the daughter tried coming up with different ways to pull the woman's mom back up.
"I can't pull up," the mom was heard saying in Root's video.
"No, mom it's going to be OK. We're going get you," the daughter responded.
The two came up with a plan.
"Can you maybe grab her other foot and I can grab her hand?" the daughter asked Root in the video. "Mom, it's going to be OK."
"The other fearful part of it was," Root told KGW, "not falling over ourselves."
That's when the mom gave a response that shocked Root.
"Let me go!" the mom told the two.
"You're not going anywhere," Root responded.
"We got you, OK?" the daughter reassured her mom.
They came up with a different plan to grab her arms.
"Try to hold on both feet," Root told the woman.
"I can't, I only have one arm," the daughter told Root.
They eventually got a hold of the mom's hand and she was able to rotate her body so her arms were facing the trail and her legs were hanging down.
"So I just kind of lean forward and grab her arm and I start pulling," Root recalled.
With one big pull, the two pulled the mom up on the trail to safety. From the time Root heard the first cry for help to her feet safely on the trail was one minute and 40 seconds.
"It was a really intense situation that I'm glad to be done with," Root said.
In the video, you can hear Root ask the mom after she's back on the trail if she's OK.
"I'm fine," she said.
Root told KGW that he was in the right place at the right time.
"If I was 100 feet farther down the trail, I wouldn't have heard her because that waterfall is so loud," Root said.
He didn't ask how the woman fell off the trail, but said when the woman and her daughter appeared to be fine, he headed back down the trail and went home.
