The Ohio man who fell 60 feet off a cliff when he was sleepwalking during a camping trip said as soon as he landed he thought he was going to die, ABC News reported on Wednesday.
A rhododendron bush saved his life during the fall.
"I was sure I was dead, or at least severely messed up," Ryan Campbell told ABC News. "You don't think you're going to fall that far and walk away from it."
Campbell, 27, was camping with friends in Grays Arch Trail in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky last week when he fell asleep in a hammock.
Campbell got out of the hammock an hour later on Thursday morning and began sleepwalking. He walked right over a nearby cliff in front of his friends, plunging 60 feet below.
It took rescue crews almost three hours to get to the scene, but when they rappelled down the mountain to Campbell, they found him miraculously alive and without life-threatening injuries.
"I was pretty shocked that I couldn't really find any discernible injuries," Wolfe County Search and Rescue officer David Fifer told ABC News.
Rescuers took about one hour to place Campbell in a basket and bring him back up the mountain, giving the camper a chance to see how far he had tumbled.
"It was surreal coming up the way I came down, because I got to see every foot of this cliff that I'd just flown over," Campbell said.
Rescuers said Campbell's soft and life-saving landing was due to the fact that, in an area full of rocks and boulders, Campbell fell on a rhododendron bush.
"Otherwise, more likely than not, it would have been a fatal fall," Wolfe County Search and Rescue officer John May told ABC News.
Campbell was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital where he was treated for a cut to the back of his head and a chipped vertebrae. He was eventually released.
Though he is expected to make a full recovery, Campbell says he will not have to worry about rescuers coming out to save him ever again.
"I'm not going to put myself in a position to have that happen again," Campbell said.
