Nearly out of gas, two friends gambled on an unmarked trail they’d never ridden – and rolled up on a 68-year-old woman who’d been trapped to her face in mud for three days, still alive, whispering “help me.”
Kathryn Woessner, of Alexandria, Minnesota, had been missing for three days. Her minivan had bogged down on a muddy trail in a remote stretch of the northern part of the state, near Backus. When she climbed out to free it, she slipped into a deep puddle – roughly two feet of mud that, she later said, worked just like quicksand.
She couldn’t pull herself out. And there she stayed.
About 100 miles from where she’d last been seen, Adam Sandbeck and Mike Gravalin were out on their UTVs on Saturday, June 6 – something they’d done plenty of times. This trip, almost nothing was normal.
Credits: WDAY
Instead of taking separate machines, Sandbeck rode with his friend in a Polaris side-by-side. Instead of their usual routes, they tried new trails. Running low on gas and still about 30 miles from their RV park, they spotted an unmarked maintenance road and figured it for a shortcut.
In a clearing near an abandoned-looking van, they saw something in a puddle.
“We noticed there was a body in the puddle next to the van,” Sandbeck recalled.
Then it spoke. “She uttered up to us, ‘Help me,’” Gravalin said. “That’s when we transitioned our former thoughts to, ‘This is a rescue mission.’”
Only Woessner’s face, one hand and a kneecap were above the mud. She was badly sunburned and spent after three days outdoors. The men pulled her free and called 911, and rescuers homed in using coordinates from the riders’ Polaris Ride Command device, reaching them within about 15 minutes before she was rushed to a hospital. She is expected to make a full recovery.
Investigators still don’t know why she’d been in the area at all.
For Sandbeck, the math of it doesn’t add up to coincidence. “I have never mapped that trail in my life ever,” he said.
“We changed everything how we do everything, for some reason,” he added. “And it had to be God, it had to be.”
