Wrong turn leads to a bad week for young hiker and her dog in Montana.
Hiking in the wilderness is refreshing but sometimes it can lead to a world of hurt. Sometimes even your life. But this hiker was able to survive a whole week of being lost without food before authorities and a search team found her.
Madeline Connelly, a 23 year old woman from Illinois, was visiting family in Montana when she decided to go on a hike and camp for the night in Great Bear Wilderness on May 4 with her dog Mogi. A nice little getaway quickly turned into a nightmare when she found her herself lost.
After two days of no return, her family and locals launched a search and rescue effort by land and air in hope of finding her.
She wandered in the wilderness hoping to get back on the trail with no food, and encountering treacherous weather she said.
Connelly was finally found and located on Wednesday, almost 6 days after she had been missing. The crazy thing was she was about 5 miles from her car and was uninjured and the same for her dog Mogi.
Being only tired and hungry, Connelly can consider herself very lucky, especially since the search efforts were finding her tracks along with Grizzly Bear tracks.
Luckily for her she was able to find some fresh water over the span of the week, but no food. She claimed she felt like an idiot, but it is very easy to get directions and whereabouts mixed up once you enter the wilderness like that. The best learning tip people should take from this story is to always have some form of GPS or map on hand when hiking into unknown territory.
As you can imagine, her mother said that finding her was the best Mother's Day gift she had ever received.
Roughing it in the outdoors is fun when it is planned, but I think Madeline would be the first to admit that isn't the case when you don't know if you will ever make it back.
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