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.
Primary Children's Hospital, operated by Intermountain Health, is Utah's only American College of Surgeons-verified Level I Pediatric Trauma Center, serving a six-state region across the Intermountain West. Her family also confirmed that Holmes was not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet at the time of the crash, a detail that helps explain the extent of her injuries.
Utah Law Requires Helmets for Riders Under 18
Under Utah Code Section 41-22-10.8, off-highway vehicle operators and passengers under 18 are legally required to wear a properly fitted, DOT-approved safety helmet on public land, with fines of up to $50 per offense for noncompliance. The Utah Division of Outdoor Recreation also mandates that riders under 18 complete a youth safety education course and carry a valid certificate before operating on public lands, roads, or trails.
Duck Creek Village sits at roughly 8,400 feet elevation on the Markagunt Plateau and serves as a major access point for more than 300 miles of off-highway vehicle trails winding through the Dixie National Forest's conifer forests and lava fields. It is not the first time the area's terrain has proven deadly: a 2020 crash near Duck Creek Village killed a 27-year-old passenger after a UTV rolled over on State Route 14, according to KSL.com.
Community Rallies Behind #RallyforKensley
Holmes's ordeal comes amid a troubling statewide trend. Preliminary data from the Utah Department of Public Safety showed teen traffic fatalities in Utah nearly doubled in 2025, climbing from 18 deaths in 2024 to 31 the following year.
In the meantime, community members across southern Utah have rallied around Holmes and her family under the hashtag #RallyforKensley, launching fundraising efforts and a raffle to help cover mounting expenses, including two separate air-ambulance flight bills. It remains unclear whether the Kane County Sheriff's Office or the Utah Highway Patrol has released official findings on the cause of the crash, and Holmes's long-term medical outlook has not been disclosed as her family continues to share updates and lean on community support.
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