CONEJOS, CO — Six snowmobilers missing in the mountains for 2½ days while a howling blizzard swirled around them were rescued today — hungry and cold but unhurt — after taking shelter in a cozy cabin and calling 911 on a cell phone when the storm eased up.
The group, consisting of two couples and two teenagers, broke into the cabin, where they huddled around a gas grill and dined on popcorn and chicken bouillon they found inside.
"We counted 18 blankets. We were cozy," 31-year-old Shannon Groen said after rescue crews on snowmobiles brought the group to safety. "God was looking out for us. When we knew we were safe we began to worry about the rescuers and we prayed for them."
Groen and the others were trapped by one in a series of storms that killed at least three people across the West, unloaded as much as 11 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada range, flooded hundreds of homes in Nevada and knocked out power to a quarter-million Californians.
At least three people — two skiers and a hiker — were missing in the snow-covered mountains of California and Colorado.
Click here to read the article from the Rocky Mountain News.
Two snowbound families spent more than two days in a cabin near an isolated train station in southern Colorado before searchers found them this morning.
"We just stayed in the cabin because it was safe," Jason Groen, 36, said when crews on snowmobiles brought him and five others to the top of Cumbres Pass at about 11 a.m, according to the Associated Press.
Groen, the owner of several businesses in Farmington, N.M, his wife and teenage daughter were snowmobiling with with another family near the pass about 30 miles north of Chama.
The group got lost and ran out of gas Friday night.
"The snow was so bad, they had gotten disoriented with the whiteout," Jason Groen's father, Larry, said in a telephone interview this morning.
They took refuge in a cabin near the isolated Osier Station, a small wooden building that serves as summertime stop on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, a tourist line.
Click here to read the article from The Denver Post.
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