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

A father and his 12-year-old son got lost and stranded on a steep cliffside while hiking in Snow Canyon in Utah. An abandoned backpack helped keep them alive

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.”