A 17-year-old girl from Enoch is fighting for her life in a Salt Lake City hospital after a side-by-side she was riding alone near Duck Creek went off the road and slammed into a tree. Kensley Holmes was not found for hours until her boyfriend noticed her phone’s location had stopped moving and went looking for her on the mountain.
The crash happened Thursday, August 20, in the Duck Creek area of Kane County, according to a photo gallery published by St. George News, which included images of the wrecked off-road vehicle tangled among pine trees. As reported by KUTV on Facebook, Holmes was riding solo when she went off the road and struck a tree, and it was her boyfriend who eventually found her unconscious after realizing her digital location had stopped moving.
Holmes’s mother, Ashley Holmes, provided the photos used in the gallery, which show her daughter smiling in a cowboy hat before the crash and later resting in a hospital bed. As of Sunday, August 23, Holmes remained in a critical care unit at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, per the gallery.
A Cascade of Injuries and Emergency Surgery
The severity of Holmes’s injuries has been described in family updates shared through local social media incident reports. According to those posts, she suffered a severe traumatic brain injury, skull fractures, a broken neck, and a collapsed lung. She underwent emergency surgery in St. George, where doctors removed nearly half of her skull to relieve swelling, before she was transferred to Salt Lake City for further treatment, the posts state…