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I don’t remember the helicopter ride and I am real disappointed about that, because that was probably cool." But I do remember giving a little thumbs-up as they loaded me on you know, like a football player being carried off the field — and then I guess I passed out again.”

Cameron’s dad, Jon Alspaw, president of the Lake Highlands Exchange Club, wasn’t on this trip. “Thank God he wasn’t,” Cameron but no broken bones. He now wears a helmet during activities like skiing and can’t go on roller coasters, he says. He suffers no noticeable residual neurological dysfunction, he says, but he has acquired a mutant ability.

“I can say any word backward … I do not know why, but I know I didn’t have it before the fall. It’s just that any word I hear — it started just lying around watching ‘SportsCenter’ while I was out of school recovering — I think about it and can say it backward.”

Cameron can’t imagine how that skill will serve him, and he doesn’t think much about what could’ve been, he says. He always has had a zest for life, and that hasn’t changed. After high school graduation he went to college at Texas A&M. These days he works closely with the local chapter of Young Life, a religious youth group whose members he calls “the teens.” says, “because he would have been worse off than me. Meaning, yeah, he would have been upset.”

The mountain slashed Cameron’s head open and cracked his skull three times, left him with a swollen black eye, many bumps, scratches and bruises and puking blood —

Just recently, Cameron went rappelling with the teens. Cameron was shaky and a little gun-shy his first time back on the ropes, but the teens, familiar with his story, supported him with unbridled enthusiasm, he says.

“I looked down, and they were all cheering for me.”