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Woman Severely Injured When She Belly Flopped Into Water After Cliff Jump

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An 83-foot leap into a Colorado swimming hole ended in a violent belly flop that left a young woman badly hurt.

Over the Fourth of July weekend in 2017, a 20-year-old woman jumped from an 83-foot cliff into Guffey Gorge, the swimming hole near Florissant, Colorado, better known to locals as Paradise Cove. The jump went wrong in midair, and she hit the frigid water flat on her stomach in front of a crowd of onlookers. Bystander Rachel Dukich of Denver caught the entire sequence on video and later posted it online, where it quickly drew attention for just how badly the landing went.

• The jumper hesitated at the edge before leaping from the 83-foot cliff face at Guffey Gorge, west of Colorado Springs in Teller County.
• She lost her form in the air and slammed into the water in a belly flop, drawing audible gasps from the crowd Rachel Dukich was filming.
• The 20-year-old sustained severe, traumatic injuries and had to be airlifted to a hospital after search and rescue crews responded to the remote site.

The Jump at Guffey Gorge

Guffey Gorge sits on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and has long been one of the go-to cliff-jumping spots for people escaping the summer heat around Colorado Springs. The site draws crowds every warm-weather holiday, with jumpers climbing rock ledges of varying heights above the water. Signs posted around the gorge warn visitors in plain language that diving and jumping are strongly discouraged because of the risk of “injury or death,” but that hasn’t stopped generations of thrill-seekers from lining up at the top anyway.

In Dukich’s video, the woman is seen pausing at the lip of the 83-foot ledge, clearly working up the nerve before she finally steps off. That hesitation matters — cliff jumping demands a clean, controlled entry, and any hitch in the approach can throw off body position on the way down. It’s the same margin-for-error problem that shows up again and again in outdoor scrambles and jumps that go wrong when someone’s technique breaks down at the worst possible moment.

A Violent Impact

From that height, the fall gives a jumper roughly two seconds before impact — barely enough time to correct if something goes sideways. In the footage, the woman’s body rotates out of a clean vertical line midair, and she strikes the surface of the water flat, absorbing the full force of the impact across her stomach and chest rather than cutting through the water feet or hands first.

Onlookers can be heard gasping the instant she hits the water.

The physics of a belly flop from that height are unforgiving. Water doesn’t compress, so a flat landing at speed transfers an enormous jolt to the body all at once — which is exactly why the woman needed emergency help getting out of the gorge rather than swimming to shore on her own.

The Rescue Response

Because Guffey Gorge sits in rugged, hard-to-reach terrain outside Florissant, getting the injured woman out required more than a quick trip to a nearby ER. Search and rescue personnel were dispatched to the scene, pulled her from the water, and had her airlifted to a regional hospital given the severity of her injuries. Local authorities have noted that Guffey Gorge sees cliff-jumping accidents regularly during summer holiday weekends, when crowds swell and jumpers of all skill levels attempt the higher ledges.

The BLM’s warning signage exists precisely because of incidents like this one — cliff jumping at height carries real consequences when form breaks down, no matter how many people have made the same leap safely before.

Dukich’s video kept circulating well after that holiday weekend, and Guffey Gorge kept drawing jumpers the following summer regardless — the ledges are still there, the signs are still posted, and the water is still just as unforgiving from 83 feet up.