Carolyn Dorn is considered a free spirit by her family, an outdoors lover who would think nothing of grabbing a child’s tent and a wilderness survival guide and hitting the trail.
The 52-year-old woman was drawn to southwestern New Mexico, where the rugged landscape is peppered with cliff dwellings used by people of the Mogollon culture more than 700 years ago.
So when Dorn called her family late last year to let them know she was heading into the wilderness, they figured she would soon return with tales of her adventures.
They were wrong.
Five days into her trip, which began Dec. 6 near Silver City, N.M., Dorn got lost and was unable to cross the rain- and snow-swollen Gila River.
For the next few weeks, she pitched her tent and huddled beneath a rock formation, bracing against snow storms, heavy rain and plummeting temperatures.
That Dorn was located at all is surprising. That she was found alive – and is now listed in good condition at Gila Regional Medical Center – is considered almost unbelievable by the people who rescued her early Sunday morning.
“It is a miracle she came out alive,” said Frankie Benoist, incident commander for Grant County Search and Rescue, told the Associated Press.
A trail gone cold
Search teams began looking for Dorn on Christmas Eve. Over the next two days, they covered an 11-mile radius around a ravine off Turkey Creek Road, near Gila, N.M., where Dorn’s locked vehicle was found Dec. 11.
By then, her trail had grown old and the weather had dropped to the single digits at night. Dorn’s brother-in-law, Stan Cornine, came from her family’s home in South Carolina and continued the search.
But the family reportedly gave up hope earlier in January, and Cornine stopped looking. Benoist said at the time, “We are afraid she may have succumbed to hypothermia.”
Dorn nearly did.
She ran out of food after the second week, according to her rescuers, and said she began scrounging for plants to eat. Her supply of clean water ended around week three, forcing her to turn to the river and snow for fluids, they said.
As the days passed, the 5-foot-tall Dorn told rescuers, she had lost so much weight she barely had the energy to stand.
Dorn scavenged as much wood as she could find from the crescent-shaped area that was relatively protected from the weather, but eventually there was nothing more to burn.
“So she started tearing pages out of the wilderness guide to use as fuel,” said Albert Kottke, 24, a graduate engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin.
Kottke and his brother, 20-year-old Peter, were hiking out of the Gila wilderness Friday when they discovered Dorn. She was east of the Gila River, about 6 miles from the nearest road.
‘I’m real hungry’
When Albert heard Dorn’s faint plea for help, he said he thought it was a raven cawing. Peter pointed across the river: a slight, bedraggled woman, covered in ash and dressed in tennis shoes, long underwear, a knit cap and a leather jacket.
“When we got to her, the first thing she said was, ‘I haven’t eaten in three weeks. I’m real hungry,’” Albert said. “She said that before, she weighed about 120, 130. When we found her, she barely weighed 100 pounds. She was gaunt.”
The brothers fed her granola and noodle soup.
“She told us that it got bad when it started to snow. She got scared,” Albert said. She tried to cross the river, “but then it got too high and she thought she’d wait for the water level to drop. After she waited a while, she got scared of getting even more wet than she was. She got weak from the lack of food, which made her even more worried. The fear just built on itself.”
The brothers gutted their supplies, leaving behind more than 2 pounds of food: cheese, granola, dried fruit and nuts, and brown sugar.
After collecting firewood, the pair promised Dorn that they would send help.
The Kottkes hiked nearly 20 miles over the next day and a half, reaching Silver City on Saturday where they alerted authorities.
The New Mexico Army National Guard sent out a helicopter team, including a medic, from Santa Fe station late Saturday evening. But snow and sleet forced the crew to wait at Las Cruces, N.M., until 4 a.m. Sunday.
They found her about 23 miles north of Silver City, Baker said, standing by a fire waving a white cloth, said one of the pilots, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Race Baker.
“She was so weak, Staff Sergeant (Greg) Holmes had to carry her across the creek,” Baker said. “She was very dehydrated and suffering from hypothermia. She was in pretty bad shape. We’re not sure how much longer she could have lasted.”
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