A Bundaberg teenager whose parents insisted he take an emergency personal identification beacon on his hike, thought he would die after falling around 80 metres from a pinnacle next to Mount Walsh in Biggenden.
Now just two months after the incident, Jake McCollum has reunited with the LifeFlight rescue crew who saved him.
Jake dropped into the Bundaberg LifeFlight hangar today (Friday January 16) and enjoyed an emotional reunion with the people who saved his life.
“The wind was knocked out of me, and I remember thinking it was probably all over for me. I didn’t really think it was survivable,” Jake told the aeromedical team.
He tried to catch his breath after the fall, but everything hurt.
The 18-year-old was ‘pretty banged up’ and would later discover he had a fractured spine and a couple of broken ribs, internal bleeding and a decent head laceration.
He has played back the November 2025 fall in his head a million times.
After the fall, Jake found his mobile phone still inside his hip pocket. He tried to make a call, but the screen was smashed.
Just before the fall, the real estate agent had used it to take a photo of the view and then realised the difficult predicament he’d climbed into.
The mossy rocks he needed to walk back over to get down the mountain were crumbling and still wet from overnight rain. There was nothing solid to step onto, so he knew he was in trouble.
“Then literally seconds later, I fell,” Jake said. “There was nowhere to go but down. I kind of knew it was going to happen before it happened.
“It was just a pretty straight, steep drop off, like an 80 degree drop off.
“There wasn’t a lot to break my fall, I fell through one tree at the very bottom but there was a lot of falling before that.
“Initially I did a bit of rolling, like a little bit of a rumble, and then a drop off, but for most of it I was falling, and I landed with a thud on my back.”
In that moment, the reality of being alone was suffocating. Jake crawled over rocks he’d just tumbled over to reach his backpack.
He grabbed the personal identification beacon he packed in his backpack before he left on his first ever solo bushwalk, pushed the red button and hoped like hell it worked.
Not long after, someone in Canberra called Jake’s father Tim, but he was mowing the lawn and missed the call. The next number they dialled was Jake’s mother Rachel.
Half an hour after he tumbled down rugged granite boulders, Jake heard his hand-me-down AirPods ringing.
He’d never before been so grateful for a gift.
The AirPods had come out during the fall. He crawled towards the sound and found the first AirPod and popped it in his ear. He found the other one.
But by that time, he had missed 10 calls.
The phone rang again, Jake tapped one AirPod once and then he heard the most beautiful sound – his mother’s voice.
He was in too much pain to cry but did manage a few words.
“I tried again, and luckily that was the call that connected,” Rachel said. “And I heard really, really faintly: ‘Mum, I’m hurt really bad’. And I think my heart sank, my knees went, it’s probably the worst news you can ever hear.
“I don’t know how many times he said during that phone call: ‘I think I’m going to die’.”
“I don’t know how the AirPods worked,” Jake said. “But they just automatically connected to a smashed-up phone – it was a miracle really.”
Rachel and husband Tim used the 90-minute driving time from their Bundaberg home to Mount Walsh to pass on messages to Queensland Police Service scene coordinator Greg Manskie who was coordinating their son’s rescue from his office on K’gari.
Rachel stayed on the phone with her son for more than five hours and ensured everything she said was reassuring Jake and keeping him calm.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “People are coming. They are coming to save you.”
Inside the LifeFlight Bundaberg base hangar, pilot Shaun Gillespie was taking the tasking call.
Senior aircrew officer Shayne White and rescue crew officer Alexander Bartolo were working together to prepare the helicopter for Jake’s rescue winch mission.
Flight paramedic Michael Porter was checking the medical bag with critical care doctor Kit Harvey who was realising he was about to fly out to his first-ever winch mission.
The AW139 chopper took off for the 25-minute flight to Mount Walsh after being tasked by Retrieval Services Queensland.
Twenty minutes later police officer Greg Manskie was texting Jake’s parents: Chopper is still a few minutes out, we can see it on our app. He will hear it very soon.
Rachel and Tim could hear their son’s discomfort. He was groaning and breathing heavily.
But then there were long stretches when Jake didn’t speak. The next time he spoke he asked for water. It was a sweltering 36 degrees.
Jake didn’t realise he hadn’t walked up the main Mount Walsh trail, so he couldn’t tell his parents he was lying at the bottom of an adjacent pinnacle.
As he seriously started to doubt whether he’d ever be found, Jake was watching four toads jumping around him and wondering if there was a snake nearby.
Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS) and Queensland Police Service (QPS) officers had scrambled up the main walking track with worried bushwalkers. They were looking for Jake up the wrong summit.
The personal locator beacon was misbehaving too and bouncing off boulders, and confusing the coordinates, so the rescue chopper also headed to the wrong summit.
“Apparently it just alerted to where I was but there’s all these different peaks at Mount Walsh,” Jake said.
“It said I was at a different one, but I was actually not there, so they roughly knew where I was, but it was just pinging somewhere that I wasn’t.”
Shayne White was leaning outside the chopper, scanning the bush for Jake in what flight paramedic Michael Porter described as a classic needle in a haystack search.
“The geography was spectacular but challenging,” Michael said. “With large rock faces transitioning into thick foliage below, it significantly added to the difficulty of locating Jake.”
White is used to searching for people in rugged terrain, and late last year returned from an aeromedical role in Tasmania where search and rescues in the South West Wilderness were regular occurrences.
“He was wearing all black, was face down in the mountain’s shadow and well hidden under a thick canopy of foliage,” Shayne said.
“It’s difficult to find someone who has fallen down under heavily wooded terrain.”
Pilot Shaun Gillespie was talking directly to police officer Greg Manksie, who was passing on Jake’s description of where he could see the chopper via communication with his parents.
By this time, both AirPods had died, but Jake had his ear pressed up against the smashed phone and somehow through shards of glass could still faintly hear his parents.
Tim: He can hear the chopper now. We can hear the chopper through his AirPods.
QPS: Hopefully they will be able to see him.
His mother recalls the first time the LifeFlight helicopter was above her son, he screamed: ‘they are above me! They are above me!’
“When the helicopter did arrive, I remember thinking ‘oh, this is great’,” Jake said. “But then it went right past me.
“And I was talking through the phone and saying: ‘it’s gone past me, it’s gone past me’! It was back and forth for quite a while.”
“And then eventually they spotted me.”
When aircrew officer Shayne White finally saw Jake’s legs it was five hours since he’d fallen.
“Then he said, ‘you are right above me now’ and we brought the helicopter down a bit, and we could see his legs,” Shayne said.
“He was very hard to spot. We had to come down low to hover, before we could actually see him.”
Doctor Harvey, flight paramedic Michael Porter and rescue crew officer Alexander Bartolo winched down 150 metres from where Jake lay.
They carried all the medical bags and fought through dense foliage to reach him.
“We were hoping for the best, but had prepared for the worst,” Michael said. “We certainly felt every bit of that 36-degree heat.”
The moment the rescue crew reached him was a huge relief to not only Jake but also his parents, who were still on the call to Jake and listening in through the car speakers. They heard Doctor Harvey greet Jake with a ‘Hey mate’.
“That was probably the biggest moment for me,” Rachel said. “It was just like ‘oh, my goodness, they’ve got him! He’s not alone’!”
Dr Harvey and Michael treated Jake for head and neck injuries and were concerned he also had abdominal injuries.
“We were surprised he was alive, given the story we’d been told,” Dr Harvey said.
“So, we were very relieved to find him awake, conscious and talking.”
It took them over an hour to stabilise Jake, administer pain relief and carefully package him up into a special spinal stretcher.
The LifeFlight team then carried Jake back down through thick, rocky scrub, over a steep decline on unstable ground relying heavily on strong teamwork and clear communication to ensure everyone got back to the winch site safely.
By the time he was winched into the LifeFlight helicopter, his parents were watching from the Mount Walsh car park.
“I just watched him going up on the winch and the moment that he got inside, I kind of almost felt like I was going to be sick because it was just relief,” Rachel said.
“It was absolute relief that he was safe, and it was an overwhelming emotion. It was just incredible. I knew he was in the safest hands.”
That genuine care and concern the aeromedical team showed his son is a gift Jake’s dad Tim will be forever grateful for.
“My biggest fear was that Jake would have serious spinal injuries,” Tim said.
“So, we really appreciate the care the LifeFlight team gave him. Without that crew, I have no idea how we would have found Jake or got him out.”
Shayne White says two little, white, plastic earpieces played an important role as well.
“He’s a very lucky boy with a good outcome,” Shayne said.
“If his AirPods and phone weren’t working, we might not have found him.”
For Jake’s family, his fall has been life changing.
“We’re not taking each other for granted, we’re slowing down and being present and not sweating the small stuff,” Rachel said.
“Something massive has happened to our family and we are one of the lucky ones, you know, we get to hug our child and say goodnight to him. We are very aware that so many others can’t, so it’s just been a very overwhelming feeling of joy.
“I’m just extremely grateful to those men and they have our extreme gratitude for what they do.
“We are very lucky.”
