STUCK IN QUICKSAND ZION FREE

Rescue workers found her suffering from hypothermia, park officials said in a statement.Īfter rescue workers found Osmun, it took them two hours to get his leg free from the quicksand. McNeill said she felt like she was going to faint when she finally spoke with dispatchers. It took her three hours to reach a location with cellphone service so she could call 911. “I kept telling myself: ‘He would do it for me,’” McNeill said. She left him with warm clothes and decided the fastest way to get help would be to swim down the river, which was waist-deep with frigid waters, rather than taking a trail. With no cellphone service in the remote area, they decided McNeill would have to go for help. She tried to pry his leg out with a stick, but realized that effort would not work. The trouble for Osmun and McNeill began about four hours into the couple’s hike on a popular route called “The Subway” in the southern Utah park.

“When water cannot escape, it creates a liquefied soil that cannot support weight and creates suction,” Baltrus said. Osmun had stepped into a small hole filled with it, Baltrus said. Quicksand can form in saturated loose sand and standing water - the combination found on the river bed trail Osmun and McNeill were hiking, said Aly Baltrus, Zion National Park spokeswoman. man survives heart attack thanks to Facebook “And then toward the end I thought I wasn’t going to make it.” “I thought for sure I would lose my leg,” Osmun said. Ryan Osmun, 34, of Mesa, Arizona, told NBC’s “Today” show that he hallucinated at one point while waiting several hours alone after his girlfriend Jessika McNeill left him last Saturday to get help. The winter storms made it hard for rescuers to see all morning, the release said, but a small break in the weather that afternoon helped rescuers find the man and rangers – as seen in a video the DPS posted on YouTube.A man who was stranded for hours in frigid weather with his leg sunk up to the knee in quicksand at a creek in Utah’s Zion National Park said Tuesday that he feared he would lose his leg and might die because the quicksand’s water was so cold.

Winter storms in the area brought “four additional inches of snow,” according to the park service, so the rangers and the man spent the night at the site.Ī Utah DPS helicopter was dispatched from Salt Lake City the next morning, the release from the agency states. Rangers then rewarmed and treated his leg. It then took several more hours into the night before the man’s leg was freed. The Utah Department of Public Safety (DPS) said the man had been exposed in water for 10 hours. Several hours passed before the rangers could find the man, who was described as “stable but suffering from exposure, hypothermia, and extremity injuries,” according to the park service. National park rangers found the woman, who was showing signs of hypothermia, at the beginning of the trail and treated her. The two tried to free the man’s leg but were unable to so the woman left him “with warm gear and clothing.” She hiked for three hours until she got cell phone service to call 911.Ī Zion search-and-rescue team began hiking to find the man and woman, the release states. “His leg was buried up to his knee and he was unable to free himself,” a release from the National Park Service said. The man’s leg got stuck in quicksand in a location that was about a three-hour hike from the start of the trail they were taking, called the Subway route. The ordeal began Saturday as the 34-year-old man and a woman he was with – also from Arizona – were hiking at Zion National Park in Utah. In the span of two days, an Arizona man got stuck in quicksand for hours and then had to spend the night coping with a winter storm before being rescued.

Stuck in quicksand zion