COPPER MOUNTAIN — Dave Repsher and Matt Martinez occasionally crossed paths in the years they worked as volunteers at Copper Mountain — Repsher with the ski patrol and Martinez with the mountain safety patrol. But they were just vaguely familiar faces on the ski hill.

Now, Repsher and his wife, Amanda, consider Martinez family, because on Aug. 15, he gave Repsher one of his kidneys.

Repsher, a flight nurse, was on a Flight for Life helicopter that crashed in Frisco on July 3, 2015, and caught fire. Pilot Patrick Mahany was killed. Flight nurse Matthew Bowe was critically injured. Repsher was burned over 90 percent of his body, which quickly led to kidney failure.

His last dialysis treatment was the day before the transplant surgeries at the University of Colorado Hospital.

“It’s just so hard to put into words what this means,” Repsher said Thursday in the ski patrol room at Copper’s base area. “They say donation is the gift of life, and it really is. It’s given us a second chance to hopefully do some of the things that we could do before, get back out there and enjoy life. ‘Thank you’ just doesn’t suffice.”

Repsher and Martinez are still getting to know each other. They have more in common than a kidney and a love of the mountains, Amanda said. They both have giving hearts.

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