By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer

A New Hampshire hiker was home Saturday night – injured but grateful – after 70 people helped rescue him from Tumbledown Mountain.

He’d slipped on a small rock and injured his knee.

“I was expecting someone maybe to come up and maybe someone to lean on,” said Mark Davis, who lives in Portsmouth and often hikes Maine mountains.

Davis, 48, an athlete and avid hiker, started up the mountain with his girlfriend and two dogs around lunchtime. They made it to the summit and were on the way down when Davis slipped on the flat part of the trail.

“I could just feel everything rip inside my knee,” he said. “I could have done it in my driveway. It was just an accident.”

Davis, who carried a pack filled with hiking essentials and emergency gear, wrapped his knee in a bandage and fashioned a brace from tree branches. When he still couldn’t put weight on it, he said, his girlfriend flagged down another hiker, Richard Bailey of Whitefield.

“Without him, I would have spent the night on the mountain,” Davis said.

Leaning on Bailey, he struggled for hours down the mountain. Eventually, cell phone reception came in and Bailey called for help.

Rescue workers strapped Davis in a litter and passed him down the rest of the mountain. By that time it was dark.

A warden said in Saturday’s Sun Journal the trail was barely visible and that Davis was ill-prepared for the hike.

Davis bristles at the accusation. He said the weather was perfectly clear, and he had everything he needed. He described ill-prepared hikers as “stupid.”

“I may be accident-prone, but I’m not an idiot,” he said. “This was just simply an accident, nothing more, nothing less.”

Home now, Davis expects he’ll need surgery on his knee. But he is thankful to be off the mountain.

“The rescue workers worked very hard. I don’t know how you repay six or seven towns and 70 people,” he said.