A paraglider injured last week after falling 1,000 feet from the sky was expected to be discharged from the hospital Monday.

A.J. Frye, 24, said in a telephone interview that he expected to leave St. John’s Medical Center after spending five days there recovering from injuries he suffered in the accident Aug. 5 in Teton Village.

“I’m expected to make a full recovery,” he said.

Frye said the accident occurred around 5 p.m. He took the tram at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort up to the top of Rendezvous Mountain to paraglide. He was doing an “aggressive, acrobatic maneuver” when his lines twisted and caused the glider to stall. Frye said he fought with it a bit and got it to reopen but it stalled again. He threw a backup parachute but that also became tangled in the main canopy, he said.

A second backup parachute was deployed too close to the ground to have time to work, Frye said.

“I was cognizant,” he said. “I wasn’t panicking. I was just trying to fix the situation.”

Fry said he remembers seeing the ground rush up at him and thinks he fell about 1,000 feet. He doesn’t know how fast he was falling.

“I crawled into a little ball and basically bounced, miraculously,” he said. “I should have been totally roadkill, but somehow, in some miraculous way, I had relatively minor injuries.”

Frye is now recovering from four broken ribs, two collapsed lungs, a punctured lung and some torn ligaments in his spine.

He won’t need surgery but will wear a back brace for three months, he said. He plans to return to his hometown, Pittsburgh, to be near his family during his recovery.

Frye has lived in Jackson on and off for seven years. He is employed by Jackson Hole Paragliding but was not working during his accident.

He’s been paragliding since he was 15.

“I was just kind of pushing my own personal limits with some of the maneuvers,” he said. “I had lots of altitude. I just tried to remain calm the whole time and try to fly the glider.”

He said he expects to continue flying.