Derek Cram doesn’t really remember falling through the air on his dirt bike. After all, the last time he rode that route there had been a solid hill where now there was only air. “I couldn’t quite believe I had just gone off a cliff,” says Cram.

July 25 was a beautiful day, perfect for Cram, 13, to go riding with his friends at a popular place on Lopez. Cram’s father Doug, himself an experienced biker, was supervising.

It took only four or five minutes for the day to take a turn for the worst. “We were just starting to warm up and I made my way to this hill I had done before, it rises up then there was a somewhat steep path down.” Except of course what Cram found when he crested the hill was not a steep path, but a 22- foot sheer drop. When he hit the ground, both his arms broke.

Cram is no irresponsible rider. Both his parents attest to the fact that he is not only cautious, but safety conscious. “He’s been riding for 10 years, and in 10 years of riding he has never had more than a scrape,” says Doug. Indeed what saved Cram from worst injury was the full safety gear he was wearing.

What the family say they have gained from the incident, and what they hope to pass on to others, is that sometimes safety in the form of helmets and body armor isn’t quite enough.

“Scout before you go out,” says Cram’s mother Lisa. She says that accidents can be avoided with a quick check of the terrain. “Never be complacent,” says Doug.

Cram was airlifted off island to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he spent the night. Fortunately his mother had been at a conference in Seattle and was able to get to the hospital in order to be with him through the experiences in the ER.

The severity of Cram’s accident and injuries, he is now in casts up to his arm pits, has not effected his plans to get back on the bike. It has, however, influenced the way he will go about it, “I think [I will look] around a lot more before I actually go start riding, I think that’s really important. Just take a few minutes to look around.”