News Channel 3 Exclusive: Surviving the Night
A prominent Coachella Valley business owner is grateful to be alive after he recently crashed his dirt bike in Morongo Valley and could not be found for more than a day.
"I just praise God for making the best out of a terrible situation," Nate Otto told Peter Daut.
Speaking from bed at his physical therapy facility, Otto said he was practicing Motocross on his dirt bike in late December when he suddenly lost control and "ended up doing a front flip into a thicket."
The 56-year-old founder and president of solar company Hot Purple Energy suffered a contusion that affected his spinal cord, limiting his ability to move. For 30 hours, with no food or water, he remained fully alert, pinned beneath his bike under the bushes.
"What did you do during those 30 hours?" Daut asked him.
Otto replied: "I stayed calm, maintained my airways because it was a little hard to breathe in the way that I landed, and just thanked God for my many blessings and prayed for my friends and family."
Dozens of search and rescue team members, deputies, and volunteers scoured the area for more than a day trying to find Otto, but to no avail.
"A helicopter couldn't see me. You can only see me from one direction. When you got up close to me," he said.
Daut then asked, "I know it gets cold in the desert at night. What was that like?"
Otto replied: "That was the one warm night of the past two or three months. I got a lot of gear on, and my motorcycle was on top of me, so that kept me a little bit warm."
After the sun went down the second night, an exhausted and dehydrated Otto began to think he was going to die in the remote desert. So he said one more prayer, and closed his eyes. Just 20 minutes later, he was found by a young volunteer.
"I yelled, 'Stop!' and he goes, 'I gotcha! I gotcha!' and that was one of the best sounds I've heard in my lifetime," Otto said. "I knew I was going to see my daughter again, and see everyone who's been so supportive of me this whole time."
Daut asked him: "How has this experience changed you?"
Otto answered: "Definitely I'll be a different person from this moment forward. I couldn't be more thankful to those people who stayed out there one full night, and were there the next morning. The hundreds of people who've reached out to me with cards and texts, and different messages. Its really humbled me. It's given me a different outlook. I didn't know I touched so many people to be real honest."
Otto has now fully regained movement of his limbs, and he is expected to make a full recovery. He looks forward to going home soon, and thanking the young man who found him in person.
