A father and his young son got lost while hiking in Utah. An abandoned backpack helped keep them alive

(CNN) — The woman’s call came around 7:20 p.m. last Sunday.

Her husband and his 12-year-old son had gone hiking on the Red Mountain trail in southern Utah. She began to worry after the pair failed to show up hours later at a spot where she was supposed to pick them up, according to Sgt. Jacob Paul, who supervises the volunteer search and rescue team for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

Two search teams were dispatched to scour the treacherous terrain, Paul said. A private medical transport helicopter also assisted for a time but could not locate the missing hikers. With a description of the father’s boots, search teams were able to find footprints, along with a smaller set of tracks, along Red Mountain trail. For more than three hours they followed the tracks, calling out the names of the 33-year-old hiker and his son. Eventually, Paul said, searchers started hearing voices but echoes and darkness prevented them from pinpointing the hikers’ location.

Lost and stranded on a narrow ledge on a frigid night, the father came upon a backpack that – like manna from heaven – was filled with emergency blankets, water, snacks, a small tent and other supplies. The backpack had been left behind by a teen hiker who had to be rescued more than a month earlier after getting lost near the same location, according to Paul and the teenager who assembled the supplies.

“I can’t say 100% that it saved their lives because they may have survived, but they were on that ledge for at least 13 hours before we were able to get them off, and had they not had that bag, they definitely would have had some pretty severe cold-related symptoms,” Paul said.

“That bag essentially kept them from being harmed in any way.”

‘It didn’t turn out the way we wanted’

The red rock mountains of southern Utah are popular among adventure seekers, offering spectacular sand dunes, slot canyons and sandstone cliffs that can be forbidding to even experienced hikers because of hazards from rough terrain and foul weather.

The father who went hiking with his son last weekend agreed to talk about the trek but asked that they not be identified. He has become concerned about his son reliving the experience. “He’s like, dad, I just don’t want to hear anymore about it,” the father said. “It was a tough situation.”

The father said they decided to take the hike the previous night. “It’s a typical trail that we have taken so many times,” he said. On a navigator app on his phone, he showed his wife their expected route.

“I told her, ‘Look, we’re going to start right here. We’re going to end up out there. And we’ll meet each other in the park around this time,’” he said. “You know, it didn’t turn out the way we wanted.”

The boy and his father set out on their hike shortly before 10 a.m. on Sunday. “Everything was going well. We got to the overlook that we were trying to check out,” he said. The plan was to meet his wife at a parking lot on the trail by 2 p.m. at the latest. On the way back, he said, he decided to use the navigator app on his phone.

“The application ended up sending us somewhere else on the other side of the mountains where we ended up getting stranded,” he said. “We were actually walking back, talking about what we were going to do the moment we got home. All that time I was depending on my GPS, and come to find out my GPS took me somewhere on the most rocky places.”

On previous hikes, the father said, he always went “old school,” relying on a compass, footsteps and trails to guide him.

“But the one and only time that I decided to use GPS, we took a turn for the worse,” he said. The navigator app not only led them astray, he said, but also drained the battery on his phone.

“While we were trying to look for shelter,” the father said, “we came across this backpack.”

Inside, there was a space blanket designed to retain heat, an MRE and snacks, and other items that would help them get through the night.

“It was a miracle,” he said.

What he expected to be a three to four-hour hike turned into an ordeal of more than 20 hours. He said his focus was keeping his son safe and warm until the next morning.

“It was a scary situation but right in that moment, you cannot panic,” he said. “My son was handling it really well. For a 12-year-old, you know, to go through that situation and remain calm until the rescue came. He was pretty brave about it. He does tell me that he has overcome his fears but that next time, even if it’s just a small hike, let’s bring our tent and the rest of the stuff we need.”

‘Oh my gosh, that’s my son’s backpack’

As the search and rescue team, totaling about 20 people, scoured the mountainous trail late Sunday, the sheriff’s office learned the closest DPS helicopter was down with a maintenance issue, according to Paul. Instead, another helicopter was summoned from Salt Lake City. It took about two hours for that helicopter to reach the search site.

On Sunday night, Gretchen Dittmann was sitting in the hot tub with her husband when a helicopter flew over their home near Red Mountain.

“We knew they were searching for someone,” she said. “They’ve had other searches on this mountain because it just tricks people. They think they’re going down a path and then they kind of get stuck on these ledges.”

Dittmann even called her 15-year-old son, Levi, who got lost while hiking alone on January 3. He was rescued the following morning. She asked Levi to pray for whoever was lost.

The next morning, on a Facebook page of a southern Utah emergency group, Dittmann said she read that a father and son had been rescued and that “they had found this miraculous backpack.”

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my son’s backpack,’” she said.

On that Friday afternoon early last month, Dittmann said, Levi set out alone on a hike. He later FaceTimed his mother from the top of the mountain.

“OK, well, make sure you’re down before dark,” his mother remembered telling him. “I didn’t think he was going by himself, but I haven’t been up there so I didn’t know how precarious it is.”

But Levi got lost after taking a different route back. At one point, his 28-year-old brother hiked up the mountain to search for him. Dittmann said Levi had set up a small camp with his equipment but packed up after learning his brother was coming. Levi hurled his backpack to a ledge below because he didn’t think he could safely climb down with the large bag.

The battery on the teen’s phone was waning, according to his mother. Around midnight, Levi made another call home. He was upset. Dittmann told Levi to stay where he was and either his father or a search team would find him using the GPS coordinates provided by the teen’s brother.

“We were worried… He hadn’t really been up there before but it wasn’t a cold night. So, you know, we weren’t too worried that he was going to die or anything. I definitely didn’t sleep that night until they got him back down from the mountain.”

Levi said he packed one or two days worth of snacks – including energy and protein bars -along with a sleeping bag and emergency blankets, among other items. He said he wanted to train himself to hike with the weight of the large backpack.

When he learned his brother was coming, Levi said, he decided to move further down the mountain. He threw his backpack to a ledge below before realizing the climb down would be too precarious. He said he would not be rescued until hours later.

“I’m glad that it wasn’t for nothing, that I could help someone,” he said of the backpack.

Dittmann, referring to the discovery of the bag by the lost hikers, said, “I’m a Christian. It’s a total God story. It’s a miracle. The whole time, it’s been like, ‘Why’d you throw your bag down? Why did you do that?’ And now it just feels like God’s handprint on it. Throw your backpack down. It’s for later use.”

After a search team led Levi down from the mountain, Dittmann had her son take a photo with them. “We have to take this picture. This is a memory that you’re not going to forget,” she told Levi.

Most hikers in similar situations don’t survive

“It’s a pretty amazing story. There’s hundreds of square miles in that Red Mountain wilderness that they could have gotten lost in. And they just happened to get stuck on the exact ledge that the backpack was sitting on,” Paul said of the father and son.

Just after 6:20 a.m. Monday, a thermal imaging camera on the DPS helicopter recorded the father and son covered with an emergency blanket on a narrow ledge.

“Let’s get down and take a closer look at that,” a rescuer on the helicopter is heard saying in a video. “If we can just come down low. Don’t get in close or we’re going to blow them off.”

The boy and his father waved at the helicopter as the blanket fluttered in the wind. The helicopter left to get another crew member and prepare to hoist the hikers up from the ledge. Later, a rescuer was lowered on a long line – retrieving the boy first, followed by his father.

“The moment I saw the size of that line, the rope line, I was like, please don’t snap,” the father recalled with a laugh.

After the rescue, Paul returned the backpack to Levi.

Travis Heggie, a professor at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University and former public risk management specialist for the National Park Service, lamented that most Americans going into wilderness areas such as southern Utah are inexperienced.

“When you are planning for such a trek it is best to over plan and speak to rangers or others that know the area. This young man did try to do that. However, he broke another cardinal rule and went out by himself,” Heggie said of Levi, adding that hikers should go out in groups of no less than three people. “Even if you are experienced, it’s so easy to get turned around in wilderness areas like southern Utah.”

The father and son were fortunate, Heggie said. Many hikers in similar situations don’t survive, he said.

“They were just lucky that they found this old backpack from another hiker who had tried to be prepared and that helped them survive,” said Heggie, who’s researching hiking fatalities on the Angels Landing Trail in Utah’s Zion National Park. “They are lucky to be alive… You really need to know where you’re going and what you’re getting yourself into and prepared for it.”

Paul said Washington County search and rescue, with about 100 volunteers, has one of the highest call rates in Utah – between 130 and 180 calls a year. There were at least two heat-related deaths in the area last year, and dozens of severe injuries from falls, he said.

“Every few days we’re going out on one of these calls,” Paul said.

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