On Saturday night, University student Lauren Sowers will be parked in front of the TV watching “What Should You Do?” on the Lifetime channel. She’s only seen the show a couple of times in the past, but Saturday night she’ll be on the edge of her seat, and she’ll definitely be recording the show.
The story she’s eagerly awaiting is her own — the story of a badly injured hiker and the way Sowers helped her during a five-day Outdoor Program trip more than two years ago.
It was on April 1 that Sowers first heard from Lifetime. She received an e-mail from a woman with the network requesting an interview.
At first she thought someone was playing an April Fools’ Day trick on her.
“I thought it was a joke,” she said. “I thought it was somebody from the trip trying to be funny two years later, but I called the woman back and it was real.”
The segment will be called “Hiking to Safety” and will involve reenactments of the ordeal, complete with actors hired to portray Sowers and the woman she helped rescue, Lani Rovzar. The show will start at 11 p.m.
Sowers thinks the event and the show are comical.
“Although it was really serious at the time, when everybody from the trip gets together, we all joke about it,” she said. “I thought it was hilarious, I mean I still think it’s really funny. Of course I’ve told all of my friends and my family about it, but I think I’m more interested in watching to get a good laugh.”
Rovzar, who was sent a preview copy of the program, thought the segment was kind of “cheesy.”
“It’s not intentionally funny,” she said. “It’s funny for Lauren and I because they did a re-enactment and there’s an actress that’s being me. If you were there, it’s like, ‘no, it wasn’t like that.’”
For instance, in one scene the actor playing Rovzar is trapped between two rocks pleading for help, but when the actor yells “Lani” she mispronounces it, Rovzar said.
The show segment is based on an accident that happened more than two years ago during spring break of 2001. Sowers, Rovzar and eight others were on a University Outdoor Program backpacking trip through Paria Canyon, a 40-mile slot canyon that runs from southern Utah into northern Arizona, Rovzar said. They were planning on taking five days to navigate the entire canyon, averaging eight miles per day.
During the first two days of the trip the group fell behind schedule, Sowers said. On the third day they tried to make up for it by going at a faster pace.
Sowers recalled hiking with Rovzar, who she had first met on the trip, on the third day. The two women were singing “cheesy 80s songs” as they trekked on.
After lunch the group started to separate, Rovzar said. She wanted to go at a slower pace so she fell back and hiked alone. Behind her, Sowers and Sarah Feinstein hiked.
The women approached a section of the canyon that was dangerously narrow. The river roared with pressure and could not be crossed, Sowers said. They had no choice but to walk along a ledge of rocks above the water.
“Sarah and I were walking on the big rocks and we heard Lani ahead of us screaming,” Sowers said. “As we got closer we could hear her screaming ‘help,’ and we saw her backpack. Sarah and I threw our backpacks off and left them on the rocks and we went running to see what was going on with Lani. We went up to Lani and we saw her — she was kind of stuck between two rocks.”
Rovzar had stepped over a crevasse between two rocks when she slipped, careened forward and smashed her face on a rock, she recalled. Then, she fell between the rocks and her 40-pound backpack pinned her down. Rovzar had broken her arm in five places and her nose in two, she said. She wasn’t sure how long she would have to wait before help arrived, so she tried to cut her backpack off with a pocket knife. She also tried blowing a whistle to get somebody’s attention, but the noise was drowned out by the river. She waited for about 30 minutes before Sowers and Feinstein found her.
“I think I kind of stopped in my tracks at first,” Sowers recalled. “It was obvious that she was really hurt, there was some blood on the rock in front of her. She was like, ‘Don’t touch my arm. I have to get out of this rock right here. Don’t touch my arm!’” Sowers said. “Sarah and I took the backpack off of her and lifted her out slowly.”
The two women then propped her against another rock.
“We sat there for a while,” Sowers said. “Both Sarah and I were really nervous.”
Feinstein left the two women to go get another hiker who knew first aid.
“Pretty much all I did was sit there with her and calm her down,” Sowers said. “I gave her some water and tried to relax her as much as possible. I think I realized it was going to be difficult because she was so panic stricken and it’s pretty serious to hike two days with a broken arm.”
Sowers stayed with Rovzar for about 30 minutes before Feinstein returned with John Mann, who devised a makeshift splint for Rovzar using a hiking pole and bits and pieces of clothes. She wore it for the next two days while the group hiked out of the canyon.
When they got out of the canyon they drove her to the nearest town, where she saw a doctor. Then, they drove her to Las Vegas, where she said goodbye to Sowers and the group and caught a flight back to Portland.
Sowers and Rovzar lost touch for a little over two years until Lifetime contacted both women.
“Then we talked on the phone and pretty much laughed about how funny it was that we were on the show,” Sowers recalled.
In the aftermath of the accident, the group looks at it lightly. But that didn’t necessarily mesh well with Lifetime, Sowers said.
“I was sort of joking about it for the interview and the director, he didn’t like that at all,” she said. “He told me that I was smiling too much and that (the accident) was potentially fatal. It felt like he moved my words around and wanted me to be as dramatic and cheesy as possible. I think that if I would have started crying he would have loved it.”
Brad Schallert, a friend of Lauren’s who was also on the trip, thought that because the show wasn’t very timely they would have to stretch to make it entertaining.
“It’s a feature piece and jazzed up a bit,” he said. “I think the way they’ll portray it will not be what it was like. Because it’s Lifetime television for women, they’ll have to have a different slant than my experience was.”
As much as Sowers thought it funny that Lifetime chose to put the story on television, she conceded it’s worth telling.
“I think it’s an interesting story because I think a lot of people have something to learn from it,” she said. “Because that situation happened to me I feel a lot more prepared. I think that other people have something to learn from hearing the story.”