lost while following his GPS on his bike, he spends the night clinging to a cliff above the void

“He clung to life and he believed in it until the end”, tells France Bleu Isère on Tuesday, October 25, Brigadier Philippe Magnon of the CRS Alpes. A 17-year-old boy who got lost on a mountain bike while following his GPS on Google Maps spent the night from Monday to Tuesday hooked “to tussocks of grass” on a cliff of the Chartreuse massif. “He was very lucky. If he had slipped, it would have been fatal”estimates the brigadier of the CRS Alpes.

Remained perched for ten hours on a rocky outcrop made wet by the rain and which overhangs 100 to 150 meters of vacuum, the young man had left Monday at the end of the afternoon from Fontaine, in the suburbs of Grenoble (Isère), for join friends at Plateau-des-Petites-Roches, in the Chartreuse massif.

For this trip of about 40 km and three hours by bike, his smartphone application took him through overly technical paths with significant elevation gain. The cyclist therefore ended up abandoning his bike and venturing through a closed via ferrata. As night fell, he found himself stuck on a cliff.

“He found himself in an inaccessible place”explains to France Bleu the brigadier of the CRS Alpes who was able to be warned by the 112 joined by the young man who still had battery on his phone. “The comrades walked all night trying to find him but couldn’t find him”, he explains. It was only in the morning and with the help of the Civil Security Dragon 38 helicopter that he was able to be located and airlifted.

When rescuers picked up the young man, “he was happy to drink hot tea because he was quite cold”. Brigadier Philippe Magnon thinks he will “it may take several days before realizing that he came close to disaster” and insists: “On Google Maps, there is no notion of relief.”