A family who disappeared while on holiday in a remote mountain area were safely back at home on Wednesday after spending nearly three weeks marooned in their snow-bound motor home at an altitude of 1 158m.
Three generations of the Stivers family — including children Sabastyan, nine, and Gabrayell, eight — spent their days huddled under blankets in their 11-metre van, which had become stuck in more than a metre of snow after sliding off a road in south-western Oregon.
They survived by rationing dried food, bought in anticipation of a millennium bug meltdown in 2000, and drinking snow. Fortunately, they had enough propane to heat the van.
While the area was too remote to have cellphone reception, they monitored their plight on a small black-and-white television set and the children kept their spirits up by reading jokes from an old copy of Reader’s Digest.
”They enjoyed it,” Peter Stivers, the children’s father, told local Oregon station KGW-TV. ”They didn’t know we was in trouble.”
On Monday, when news stations reported that rescue teams had called off the search for the lost family, Stivers and his wife, Marlo Hill-Stivers, decided to strike out on foot, leaving their two children and Stivers’s mother and stepfather behind.
The couple took tins of tuna, honey, handwarmers and a blanket with them and were found in remote woods after 24 hours. Helicopter rescue teams were sent to search for the van, and the children and grandparents were brought out by snow vehicle.
The family holiday that went horribly wrong began on March 4 when they set off on what was supposed to be an overnight trip to the California coast. The journey through the mountains normally takes a couple of hours, but the family took what they thought would be a short cut. ”We thought we would take the scenic route,” Elbert Higginbotham, Stivers’s stepfather, told reporters.
”Every time we took a corner, it seemed like we took a wrong corner.” – Guardian Unlimited Â