Hiker Was Lost for 9 Days in the Himalayas. How He Got Rescued (Exclusive)

Over three months after he went missing for nine days in the Himalayas, Samuel Vengrinovich is still processing what happened to him and how he miraculously survived under extreme conditions.

“I tell people it’s like I had a funeral and I was able to see all the love from my friends and my family,” Vengrinovich, 44, tells PEOPLE, “but then with a little twist at the end that I survived.”

On the morning of June 6, Vengrinovich and his friend from the Netherlands embarked on a hike in the Himalayas near Dharmsala after spending the night at their base camp. Joined by two other hikers, the group went toward a glacier valley and further up the mountain. At the time, he didn’t have his phone on him. 

“The battery was dead, and there was no charge at the camp because there was no electricity,” Vengrinovich explains. ”I thought, ‘I’m going on a simple 1-2-hour hike. Why do we need to carry my phone?’ I left it in the tent.”

Halfway through their hike, Vengrinovich’s friend decided to return to base camp while Vengrinovich and the rest of the group proceeded onward. They were roughly 60%–70% of the way up toward the Indrahar Pass when a thick layer of clouds and fog rolled in around noon, creating a complete whiteout.

“It felt like looking out of an airplane window — we were above the clouds and could no longer see anything below us,” Vengrinovich recalls. 

As the men were in the middle of the glacier valley, they climbed up large boulders. Vengrinovich hiked ahead of his companions by 30-40 meters and then heard them shouting that they would all meet back at a small temple-like structure nearby.

Assuming it would be easy to find later, Vengrinovich kept going.

But when he got to the top of the ridge, he called out to his fellow hikers and didn’t get a response. “I also couldn’t find the temple,” he said. “So I decided to head back down to base camp.”

But every time Vengrinovich tried to descend, he ran into cliffs. “I’m getting stuck,” he remembers thinking to himself. “I’m like, ‘Maybe if I hop to that rock, I can see the way down.’ So I started hopping.”

He eventually started getting a bit riskier with his hops, which was when he fell about 100 feet and suffered multiple injuries, including a broken arm, a fractured ankle and a broken bone in his foot.

“I tried to stand and I screamed in pain,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is bad.’ So I stayed put. I tried screaming for help. Then I realized, ‘I am going to sleep here tonight on the edge of this cliff.’ ”

As it turned out, this was only the beginning of a long ordeal.

“I began working my way down through terrain that transitioned from glaciers to rivers to valleys,” he says. “I was essentially following a deep gorge carved out by a river, hoping it would eventually lead me down to the Dharamsala region, where I believed I would find villages or civilization.”

“Due to my injuries, I ended up sliding down the glacier uncontrollably for about 100 meters on my back, barely stopping before slamming into a large rock,” he says. “From there, I reached the river and started descending again.”

Vengrinovich had no food or water, so instead he ate bugs and gooseberries and pulled out plants with large stems so he could suck out the moisture. “I was pissing in a bottle and drinking my pee,” he says.

To his fortune, a rainstorm arrived one day. He laid out his jacket to collect the rainwater and drank from it. “I was able to fill up a liter of water in my bottle,” he says, “That was when I was like, ‘God is with me.’ With that bottle of water, I decided, ‘Okay, this is my second chance.’ ”

Vengrinovich proceeded to circle the mountain diagonally, returning to the first river he had followed, knowing that he could at least access water there. For the next three days, he observed animal trails along the mountainside above the river and slept wherever was flat.

On Day 8, Vengrinovich noticed a helicopter circling along the peak of the mountain about 4,000 meters up. He initially thought it was only carrying tourists. “When I heard the helicopter, I ran to an open field to [wave at it], but it was so far off,” he said. “I only found out later that the helicopter was for me.”

On Day 9, Vengrinovich spotted a village across a gorge.

“I see three guys at the Indian temple,” Vengrinovich says. “I sit down and I start screaming, ‘Help me, help me, please help me!’ Thank God one of them knew English. We started screaming back and forth. They finally told me, ‘Stay there, stay there!’ “

The villager who spoke English returned with two other people and they climbed across to reach Vengrinovich. “It was the first time I truly realized I’m not alone,” he says. “I didn’t see one human for nine days.”

Vengrinovich was taken to the temple where he was fed and then escorted by car to an Indian government hospital. There, he was met by members of a search team, one of whom handed Vengrinovich a phone to contact his family.

He was hospitalized for 17 days and underwent multiple surgeries for a fractured right arm, a PCL injury on his right knee and a broken right shoulder. Meanwhile, Vengrinovich’s family set up a GoFundMe to cover the expenses for the search operations and medical costs.

After initially recuperating in India, Vengrinovich tells PEOPLE he’s back in America and continuing to make progress. As of now, his legs are performing better than his arm and shoulder and he is able to walk without a cane.

Currently, he is living with his parents in Palm Coast, Fla., and does physical therapy five times a week.

“Healing really is all about time — you can’t rush it,” Vengrinovich says.

Before he went on his fateful hike, Vengrinovich, a musician, recorded and produced an electronic music track in India called “I’m Free,” which, to him, reflects the personal transformation he underwent over the past year. The song’s meaning has now taken on greater significance after his experience in the Himalayas. 

“What it means by ‘I’m free’ is I’m free from all the negativity and all the suffering that I’ve been experiencing in my life,” he says. “When you’re negative, you’re suffering inside. This whole last year has been a year of soul-searching. It climaxed with this whole crazy experience of nine days in the mountains, and I survived. Now I know I can do anything; nothing can hold me back. I hope I carry this energy and this wisdom.”

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Vengrinovich credits his faith and optimism for allowing him to overcome his dire situation. He never thought for a moment that he was going to die. “I felt like God was with me every second of the way,” he says. “There’s a lesson in all this…which is to never beat yourself up. Even now, while I’m recovering, it’s hard for me to be as positive. I feel the pain in my body. But when I was in the mountains, there was no choice. I can only stay positive.”