Tamara Sandulak fought back tears as snow piled up on the windshield of the broken-down pickup.
“I had a funny thought when I was in the truck. ‘If I cry, I’m losing my moisture. I’ve got to preserve my water,’” she recalled Monday, barely 48 hours after she and her partner Cody Martin were rescued by an RCMP helicopter from the deep snow surrounding Moriarty Lake.
The couple and their dog Rex left Nanaimo Wednesday morning for what was supposed to be a one-day fishing trip. When they didn’t return that night, dozens of search and rescue volunteers from all over Vancouver Island started looking for them.
Sandulak, 29, a baker at Cobs Bread, and Martin, 31, a maintenance worker at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital, go to the mountain lakes almost every weekend to explore, fish or pick mushrooms.
“We took off that day up the mountain towards Echo, which is a nice private lake, and we found some snow up there, which was kind of exciting for this time of year,” said Sandulak. Then they decided to check out Moriarty Lake because there’s a cabin there and it didn’t look that far, she said.
“We found a few inches of fresh snow and we saw tracks of deer, rabbit, grouse. We just kept exploring because it’s so pretty up there and the weather was nice. “
But the road down to the lake was slippery and the truck hit a water bar.
“Cody realized we shouldn’t have gone down it because there was no turn-around up ahead. He tried reversing out of it and the bottom of the truck was hitting the top end of the water bar and we couldn’t get out.”
The truck slid off the road. A huge tree was in their path and their front left tire was in a hole, spinning, she said.
The couple decided to hunker down, stay the night and light a fire in case people were looking for them.
Then the snow started coming down. They got into the truck to try and sleep, taping garbage bags to the windows to keep out the moisture.
“We started the truck every hour or so to keep warm, but the snow kept coming. Even the next day, it was a complete white-out,” said Sandulak. “At that point, we got scared.”
The couple normally bring lots of extra warm clothes, food and water, but this time, because they’d been delayed that morning, they were not very prepared.
“We just had the sweaters we were wearing and Cody had one big jacket. We had a few packs of jerky and granola bars and trail mix. We had a foot-long, Tim Horton’s turkey club sandwich, but the dog got that on Friday night and Saturday.”
After drinking the water they’d brought, they filled a Gatorade bottle with snow and turned on the truck to melt it. “We were drinking little sips, here and there. she said.
On Thursday afternoon, the news on the truck radio said people were looking for them. They also heard helicopters searching for them.
On Friday morning, it was snowing and they decided to hunker down. “We watch survival shows and we knew if we started walking we’d get cold. We could hurt ourselves and that’s a really big problem,” said Sandulak.
The weather was supposed to be clear Saturday so they decided to walk out. They duct-taped their shoes and stuck their feet in garbage bags, then back in their shoes.
When the sun came up around 7:30 a.m., they were on their way. They walked for about 45 minutes in knee-deep snow then found tracks from a friend who had come looking for them on Thursday.
“Those tracks were a silver lining because they saved us from walking in the deep snow. We got more energy and a little more excited. … Then all of a sudden Cody’s phone goes ‘Ding.’ He said: ‘Did you hear that?’ I’m like ‘Are you being serious?’ ” said Sandulak.
“We rushed to get it out of the backpack and he had a whole bunch of text messages.”
Martin called his mother who was so excited she dropped the phone. Then he talked to an RCMP officer and sent him their location from the backroads map app on his phone. “They said: ‘Stay put. We’re sending the chopper.’ ”
Sandulak wants to thank everybody who helped search for them. People have already offered to help them retrieve their truck.
She’s hoping this won’t put an end to their adventures. The experience will just make them more prepared when they’re in the backcountry, she said. And she hopes their experience will make other people more prepared.
