Local musician comes back strong from skydiving accident

As Douglas Spotted Eagle got ready to take his 1,388th sky dive last October, he tried to stand and realized he’d made a classic rookie mistake — his seatbelt was still fastened.

The butterflies that had suddenly invaded the Stockton musician’s stomach were uncommon for the experienced flier, but not unexpected. His 1,387th jump had nearly killed him.

On June 8, 2009, Spotted Eagle was making a routine jump on some new equipment when, only about 25 feet above the airfield outside Tooele, one of his toggles slipped from his hand and a sharp, unexpected turn sent him slamming to the ground.

His pelvis split, knee ligaments torn and internal organs punctured, Spotted Eagle didn’t know if he would live to see the next day, much less get back into the skies.

“On June 8, they told my family I wouldn’t make it through the night,” he said. “On June 12, they said I wouldn’t walk again until next year. I was back in the air on Oct. 27.”

It’s been nearly a year since his accident, and while he says he’ll continue to have significant pain for at least the next few years, that hasn’t stopped him from taking to the skies. Since his accident, Spotted Eagle has completed just shy of 400 jumps.

Stockton’s most famous resident came to skydiving relatively recently. While working as an audio engineer on a television show in Hawaii, the lure of the airport across the street from the set became too great and Spotted Eagle went over and joined the tourists lining up to soar high above the island. It was love at first flight.

“I did five jumps that first day,” he said. “I realized I could have started going to ground school three jumps earlier and took classes and learned to jump on my own.”

Soon, flying had developed into a borderline obsession to the point where Spotted Eagle admits it began to encroach on both his passion and livelihood: his music.

“It got to the point where I loved jumping so much that I started to abandon my music,” he said.

But, as it turns out, his two passions were already entwined, and have only become more so.

“Music allows me to express what’s in my spirit and skydiving allows me to fill my spirit,” Spotted Eagle said.

The Grammy and Emmy Award-winning artist has a list of enviable credits on the soundtracks of silver screen blockbusters and critically acclaimed albums. His big prizes include a Grammy for his production of the “Gathering of Nations Powwow,” which took the prestigious award in the inaugural year of the Best Native American Music category in 2001.

“A lot of my music invokes flying and has sense of freedom or soaring about it,” he said. “I think flying really feeds that thought process or emotional space. Normally I’m a very articulate person, but flying is hard for me to express and music allows me to express those emotions.”

For a man with such a laundry list of accomplishments, his motivation can be traced almost directly to the most mundane of things: A ninth-grade homework assignment in his childhood hometown of Valley Junction, Iowa.

Adventurer and motivational speaker John Goddard spoke to Spotted Eagle’s high school about his famed “Life List” and the students were then required to compile their own. The assignment drew a set of goals out of Spotted Eagle that he has kept close to his heart all his life.

“That list became a catalyst for a lot of things in my life,” he said. “Achieving those moments have become the high points of my life.”

He’s accomplished everything but three things: walking on the moon, playing for an NFL team, and going down the Amazon River in a canoe. He’s compromising on a fourth item — climbing Mount Everest — by instead, being the first wingsuiter to skydive over Mount Everest.

Though only a few admittedly unlikely-to-be-completed items remain, Spotted Eagle’s June accident almost ensured he never had the chance to complete anything ever again.

“Imagine driving down the freeway alongside a barrier, gripping the wheel at 10 and 2 just like they teach you,” he said. “You reach to grab a Coke and now all of a sudden the hand at 10 o’clock spins you into the barricade. I took my hand off the steering wheel.”

Miraculously conscious after impact, Spotted Eagle joked with the emergency crews who arrived at the scene and even the pilot of the helicopter that transported him to Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City as the adrenaline coursing through his body kept him from realizing the extent of his injuries.

Once at the hospital, the prognosis was grim. His pelvis was split in half, coccyx and sacrum broken, sciatic nerve compressed, bladder perforated and colon damaged. With the internal bleeding and broken pelvis, Spotted Eagle said his odds of survival were low.

It was only after an initial surgery and a week of recovery that an MRI scan discovered his torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), medial collateral ligament and meniscus.

Once repaired, Spotted Eagle embarked on a brutal regimen of physical therapy to regain his strength and mobility and — hopefully — return to skydiving before a November attempt to break a wingsuit formation-flying world record in Southern California.

Spotted Eagle credits Tooele’s Meier and Marsh Professional Therapies for getting him back in the air after putting him on an accelerated path to recovery that matched his single-minded desire to get in the air.

“They said if I had mental and physical ability to do it, they would be behind me,” he said.

And by the time October rolled around, Spotted Eagle had progressed far enough that with a “bionic-looking” knee brace, his therapists cleared him to jump. Despite protests from his doctor, the man who had barely five months previous almost died while falling from the sky, was headed back into the clouds.

He didn’t get to fly as part of the world record attempt because of a late registration, but participated as part of a support team for the failed bid. But he was jumping again, and with the same zeal he had for the sport before his accident. On Jan. 1, he celebrated his 1,500th jump near his winter home at Lake Elsinore, Calif., and he shows no signs of slowing, despite his harrowing experience.

“The bolt in my pelvis hurts, and I have to wear the knee brace,” he said. “If anything, it’s an indicator of my passion for this. I often say to people who ask why I skydive, my response is ultimately that I’m not afraid of dying because I’ve lived such a great life.”

Today, Spotted Eagle has resumed teaching new jumpers the skills required to take flight, and helps them learn from his nearly fatal mistake. They may also learn a thing or two about resilience, something Spotted Eagle has in spades.

“If you want something bad enough you’ll find a way or you’ll find an excuse,” he said. “Either way, you find what you’re looking for.”