Downed rider’s home receives upgrade

Auburnjournal.com - Full Article

8/15/12
Cool woman adjusting to wheelchair
By Amber Marra, Journal Staff Writer

Friends and family of an injured horseback rider from Cool have come together to bring her ranch up to snuff before she comes home this weekend.

Crystal Costa's ranch has been alive with activity the last few days as neighbors, friends and family work to make her home handicap accessible.

Costa, 50, of Cool, was thrown from her horse while she was training in July for the Tevis Cup near the Francisco's checkpoint. Her horse was startled when a passing mountain biker's wheel slid out in loose gravel.

The fall broke two vertebrae in Costa's back, her eye socket and her nose. The mountain bike rider, Jon Hyatt, of Granite Bay, was in fifth place in the Tahoe-Sierra 100 at the time, but he stayed with Costa until help arrived and has visited her in the hospital since then.

Costa has been in recovery at a San Francisco rehabilitation center since her fall, but has not regained her ability to walk, according to her friend and neighbor, Dan Schafer. He said she will be home from the center by Saturday.

"Her attitude is as aggressive as ever to get back on a horse," Schafer said.

Schafer said that despite having a positive attitude and working hard at the rehabilitation center, his friend he trained with for the Tevis Cup for so long will be bound to a wheelchair...

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