Monkey see, monkey threw: Three hikers in South Africa sustained broken legs following an attack by “agitated” baboons, who rolled a large boulder down at them.
nypost.com
Three hikers in South Africa sustained broken legs following an attack by “agitated” baboons, who rolled a large boulder down at them. A Facebook post detailing the alleged interspecies assault is currently blowing up on Facebook.
“Three hikers all suffered broken legs – after a boulder smashed down a mountain,” reads the shocking post, which was
posted by the Western Cape-based Wilderness Search and Rescue.
According to the post, the freak incident occurred last month after a group of seven hikers embarked on an abseiling expedition in the remote Banhoek mountains in the Western Cape.
The excursion was going well until the second day when the adventurers stopped for lunch and noticed a troop of Cape baboons on a cliff above them. The simians — which are some of the
world’s biggest monkeys, weighing up to 80 pounds and measuring four feet long — appeared “agitated and curious” about the humans below, per the post.
However, the alpinists didn’t think much of it and continued their descent down the cliff. That’s when things started to get rocky: two of the hikers decided to rappel on down a waterfall, when a massive 132-pound boulder, apparently dislodged by the baboons, struck the ledge the remaining five were standing on.
The massive stone “exploded on impact,” sending shards of “razor-sharp rock” flying into the hikers like shrapnel, breaking three of their legs and leaving another with a flesh wound. Meanwhile, a fifth hiker was nearly knocked over a ledge by a stone but was halted mid-fall by his safety harness.
Unfortunately, the primate-triggered rock slide was far from over: The mad monkeys allegedly continued to rain stones down on the hikers like something out of a medieval siege, forcing them to seek shelter in the cliff face.
Despite their remote location, the hikers managed to make an SOS call. An Air Mercy Service helicopter and a team from the Wilderness Search And Rescue (WSAR) were mobilized.