Pastor's dying words still an inspiration

"It was totally surprising that he did that," she said. "I still have the card."

It reads: "Thank you for letting me live this adventure. Know wherever I am and whatever I'm doing, I am thinking of you."

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Turner and his dog started their adventure on July 30, hiking to Eklund Lake in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. In his journal, he described a scene "so quiet, so perfect."

"Is it all just as you want it, God? Or, like skeptics say ... is it just random events and we are nothing before the beneficence and destructiveness of nature? You send the winds and rain and yet even amid the deep savagery and destruction of life, I sense your hand. In threatening my comfort, even my life, you challenge me to cope. In beauty and peace, you refresh me."

On Aug. 2, the fourth day of his journey, the Rev. Turner was traversing a field of boulders along a mountain lake, more than 11,000 feet high and 16 miles from the nearest trailhead. When a boulder he stepped on teetered, he jumped to the next one.

But he slid off, and the 800-pound rock he had just leapt from rumbled toward him, catching him between boulders.

"Somehow, miraculously, the rock had barely touched Mike," Smith wrote in an article, not yet published, that retraces his friend's journey. "But when he tried to extricate himself, his legs wouldn't move. They weren't broken, barely even injured, but his feet were suspended in air. He couldn't push them down or pull them up. Sideways motion was equally impossible beyond an inch or so. The two boulders had come together in the perfect configuration to form a pair of granite shackles."

Through the hiker's journal and physical evidence at the scene, it is clear he fought mightily to free himself and to stay alive. He used his tripod and anything he could lay his hands on to try to force himself free. His sleeping bag and clothing provided some insulation against the cold granite.

He melted, then drank, the snow he could reach, and used his tent's rain fly to collect dew and rainfall. He tied a water bottle to a rope and tried repeatedly to toss it to the nearby lake. But the bottle, too, got caught between rocks.

"I am concerned about first, losing my legs, second running out of snow to melt for water, and fuel," he wrote. "Third, hypothermia. My biggest concern is water. I have only 2 quarts left. The irony is that the lake is only 30 feet away. ... I am also saving my urine. I wonder how it will taste with Crystal Light?"