Trip Post #39: ALWAYS BE PREPARED!

This post is about what happened last night on Easter when we got stuck in a snow bank with no service out in the middle of nowhere..

Last night was crazy. Yesterday started out great, we got some Easter baskets and my two favorite things from there were a Starbucks Refresher and Divergent, the book. We went hiking at Zion, and on our way back through a different route, we got stuck in the snow.

So, of course, we got out, and tried to dig the car out with logs. We tried to put the car’s wheel’s on planks, but that didn’t work. It was about 45 minutes till sundown then, and so Dad knew we had to take action. We got our stuff from the car, and started hiking.

We saw a house in the distance and thought we could get to it, so we went around the edge of a forest, crossed a river, and climbed up a boulder field in the dark. By then we hit a road, and started hiking. We went for a long ways, probably hiking 2 miles until we saw a cell tower in the distance but we still didn’t get service. Finally we got one bar of 4G (Thank God for iPhone’s) on my Dad’s phone, and we kept trying to call the police. Finally, one of the calls went through, but they couldn’t hear us that well. We went a little farther, and tried again. The call went through, and they tracked us somehow through our GPS coordinates (I am thankful and also a little creeped out that the police can pinpoint exactly where you are, even when you don’t have service) and dispatched some people to come get us.

By then it was 9:00 and it was starting to get cold, and I, as usual, was wearing what I normally wear: Short sleeves and shorts. We made it to a fork in the road, and luckily we had our Snowpeak gear and 2 meals, so we boiled some water, made a fire with the emergency fire log thing that Dad has in the back of the car, and tried to get warm. We were praying to God a lot that night. After an hour, the police still hadn’t come, and we needed to make another decision: Go back to the car, go left, or go straight. We decided to keep going straight. After about another few miles in the woods with a really muddy road with snow, we turned around.

Hiking the road back, we came to the fork in the road and decided to get back to our car, sleep there for the night, and get out of here tomorrow. While we were hiking back, we saw a pair of headlights (One of the best things I have ever seen, ever) and they had come to rescue us. We drove back to our car, which was a long ways away, and we realized how far we had hiked. They eventually pulled us out and we drove safely away. We got home at 2 in the morning.

For a second (or 10 minutes) there I thought we were going to freeze, all huddled together next to a fire, but Dad led amazingly, telling us to make up our minds right then that we would get out of there. We probably hiked 6 or more miles. If we would of kept going straight on that road, we would’ve not made it out. Dad listens to our reasoning and accepted when we wanted to go back to the car. He is always prepared. We always say “just in case”, “What’s the worst situation that could happen”, or “If the worst happened, what would we do?”. I guess its safe to say that that was one of those worse times. We always have a fire starter, and our knives (Isaac has his huge Ka-bar). Jadyn was great during the whole time, following Dad’s lead unquestioning. This is probably one of the craziest situations we’ve been in (so far). God is good.