By Monday, Kyle Geyer looked pretty chipper. Especially for a woman who had spent four hours the previous week pinned beneath her riding lawnmower.

She’s also exceedingly grateful to the teenagers who saved her life, Danny Fehr and Channing Thompson who were visiting from Billings.

Geyer, 72, was mowing the lawn next to her home on Meadowlark Lane near Big Arm on June 27 -- a task she’s executed countless times, especially since her husband of 52 years, Bob, died 18 months ago. She was making her last pass across a hillside above Flathead Lake when the front tire slipped on a loose rock and sent the mower into a ravine.

“I had no time to do anything,” she recalled on June 30 from her room at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Polson. “It went down this little gully and it would have taken me all the way down to the lake except there was a big rock there that stopped the mower, and once it stopped, the mower just fell over on its side and took me with it.”

That occurred, by her estimation, shortly after noon. Her body was pinned beneath the mower, with only her left arm free, and her face pressed against the rock. She used her free hand to claw away the grass that impinged her view of the lake, and struggled to turn her mouth so that her screams could be heard.

“It was so heavy there was no way I could get out from underneath it,” she said. “I started screaming at the top of my lungs.”

About an acre separates Geyer from her neighbor, Debbie Thrailkill, who couldn’t hear or see her friend. Thrailkill later told Geyer she had seen her mowing around 11:30 a.m., and when she dropped by her house around 12:15 p.m. to bring blueberry muffins to her friend, no one appeared to be home.

“So I'd obviously gone down by then,” says Geyer. And because she was trapped in the gully, she was invisible except from the lake below.

A few hours later, she saw a boat speed by in the middle of the bay. 

“There was no way they were going to hear me. I still tried. I screamed and waved and nothing was happening,” Geyer said.

She had left her phone and smartwatch in the house, so she had no way to call for help. And as the afternoon wore on, she noticed that her breath was growing increasingly shallow. 

“I was just so afraid and beginning to think ‘this is the end,’” she said.

At around 4 p.m., she saw two teenage boys putting along close to shore on a jet ski, looking for fish. 

“I picked my arm up as far as I could and I was waving and I'm like, ‘help me, help me,’” Geyer said.

One of them glanced up and saw her waving “and he goes, ‘oh my gosh, there’s a woman trapped under a lawnmower up there,’” Geyer recalled.

They hustled up the steep embankment, “as only someone that age could do,” and as one dialed 911, the other leaned down and stroked her hand. Together, they tried to lift the mower, but it was too heavy to budge.

One boy headed up to the road to look for help and intercepted a man who was riding his bike back to Big Arm State Park, which abuts Geyer’s property. He happened to be a former EMT and was able to do an initial assessment. Even with his help, the three couldn’t lift the mower.

Around 4:30 p.m., three members of the Polson Rural Fire District showed up, followed a short time later by an ambulance crew. Together, the rescuers muscled the mower off and moved her uphill on a gurney to the waiting ambulance. The firefighters retreated to fight the Early Dawn Fire, which had just blown up in Big Arm, and she was ferried to the hospital in Polson.

By Monday, she still had some visible bruises and contusions and very sore (but unbroken) ribs. Her C-2 cervical vertebrae was fractured, and the trauma had also affected her kidney and liver function, although her doctor was optimistic both organs would recover fully.

As awful as the experience was, “I feel like I'm the luckiest woman on Earth,” she says. “It made me realize how precious life still is.”

“I truly believe they saved my life,” she said of the two boys who came to her rescue. “Because I wouldn't be talking to you right now if they hadn't come.”

In addition to the boys – “my heroes” – Geyer appreciates the first responders and her many friends and neighbors who have rallied. Even the retired EMT who was riding by on his bike offered to take care of her pets while she was hospitalized.

“It's not just our neighborhood. It’s Montana,” she said. “This is a wonderful group of people here."