The Healing Power of Utah’s Outdoors

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“Even when I can’t get to the mountains, I can look at them. Just looking at them is therapeutic.” —Muffy Davis

“While she may not have been cured, she has certainly been healed.” —From a sermon delivered at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Sun Valley, Idaho, by the Very Right Rev. Dr. Brian Baker

Racing on a downhill skiing course at 50 mph, 16-year-old Olympic hopeful Marianna Davis missed a turn. She flipped over a fence, smacked into an Aspen tree back-first, bounced off it, and hit a second one with her head. Her helmet and back shattered.

The hospital radiologist, Robert Davis, would call it the worst back injury he’d seen in someone who was still alive. The X-ray showed vertebrae so crushed that they had to be vacuumed out of her spine. For the radiologist, the name on the corner of the X-ray was more crushing: Marianna (Muffy) Davis was his daughter.

Now, 18 years later, Muffy Davis leans forward in her wheelchair on the fourth floor of the Salt Lake City Public Library.

“This may sound strange,” she says, “but I consider my disability a blessing.”

What happened in between is as much about the healing power of nature as it is about the strength of the human spirit. For Davis, nature was her source of strength in dark times. On bad days after the accident, she would get in her hand-controlled car and drive to Galena Summit, north of Sun Valley, Idaho.

“I would look out over the Stanley Basin and watch the sunset,” recalls Davis. “That’s where I would find my peace again. That’s where I would grieve, and that’s where I would heal and get the strength to go back at it again.”