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Buried in Snow
Although the wind was still howling, the couple could hear airplanes flying somewhere over the cloud cover-one every 50 minutes or so. Tom, remembering a scouting survival tip, cut the vanity mirror off the truck's visor. When he heard an engine, he leaned out the window and flashed a signal. After sunset, he used the headlights, flickering them in sets of three.The rescue efforts were so widely scattered, though, that few searchers came near the Garners. Most of the passing aircraft were commercial jets. Even when a search plane circled half a mile away, it was easy to miss a gray truck buried in snow.
That night, while her husband slept, Tamitha tried a handful of dog food. Tom would never eat it, she thought, and it wasn't that bad. She'd leave the rest of the granola bars for him.
As the days passed, and the cycle of storm and clearing continued, the Garners realized that their best hope of survival was to abandon the truck and walk back the way they'd come. But they knew they couldn't hike 20 miles wearing only sneakers. "We might make it," Tom told his wife, "but we'd lose our feet to frostbite and spend the rest of our lives in wheelchairs." He'd seen a Discovery Channel documentary in which a couple in similar straits had made snowshoes out of their car seats.
They spent Saturday getting ready and planned to leave the next day.
To make one pair of snowshoes, Tom cut two squares of foam out of the backseats. He and Tamitha crammed necessities into their suitcase and a garbage bag. Along with dry clothing, blankets, and the remaining food, they packed a tool kit, three umbrellas, and their camera equipment-they couldn't bear to leave it behind.
On Sunday, it snowed. Tamitha groaned at the delay, but the couple spent the day communicating in a way they hadn't since their courtship. They talked about favorite movies and music. They made plans to renovate their house. Tamitha wanted a purple bedroom; Tom wasn't so sure.
Their cell phone alarms rang at six the next morning. Tom cut up the front seats for the second pair of snowshoes and fastened both sets to their feet with bungee cords. Snowdrifts blocked the truck doors, so he heaved the suitcase and garbage bag out the window. Medusa jumped out, and the Garners squeezed out after her.
The snow in the roadway ranged from knee- to hip-deep, but Tom's improvised footwear kept him from sinking more than a few inches, even with the weight of the suitcase he carried. Tamitha, dragging the garbage bag, wasn't so lucky. The snowshoes fit poorly on her smaller feet; they kept coming loose, and after an hour or so, she tore them off in exasperation. Tom strapped them to his back for later use.
"I'll make you a trail," he said. He walked sideways, tamping down the snow by putting his left foot where his right had been, then using the suitcase to flatten the space between.
The technique worked, but it slowed their progress even more. By late afternoon, their energy was spent. They'd made it only a couple of miles.
They set up camp in a pine grove, laying their blankets beneath the canopy of branches. After gathering a pile of twigs, they sprayed it with flammable deodorant and ignited it with a cigarette lighter. They propped their sneakers near the flames to dry. Then, sheltered by their umbrellas and using the snowshoes as cushions, they sat by the fire until they stopped shivering.
When Tamitha took off her gloves, Tom saw that the fingers of her right hand looked blue-a sign of frostbite. Again he told her how sorry he was. "Don't be," she said. "If we come out of this alive, what's a few fingers? I'll just learn to brush my teeth differently."
They spent most of the night at the fire. Before dawn, the sky cleared and a shooting star streaked overhead. "See that?" Tom said. "I think we're going to make it."
By the second Tuesday after Tom and Tamitha's disappearance, authorities had given them up for dead. Investigators, suspecting foul play, were checking pawnshops along the Nevada border for the couple's possessions. Searchers were looking for corpses.
Meanwhile, the Garners-hungry and exhausted-kept walking. The day was sunny, in the 40s, and the slushy snow made every step a chore. After a few miles, Tom wanted nothing more than to lie down. Tamitha saw him wavering. "Come on," she shouted. "Krystal's waiting! Can't you hear her? She's yelling, 'Daddy, I need you!'"
To lighten their loads, they transferred a few essentials to the garbage bag. Before long, however, they were both too tired to continue. As they made camp, they heard coyotes howling. They hoped their fire would keep predators away.
On the road Wednesday morning, the snow began to thin, which meant Tom could abandon his clumsy snowshoes. Tamitha, though, began to hallucinate. She heard laughter, smelled sizzling steak and baking cookies.
And she found herself growing angry. She quarreled with Tom about which way to turn at a fork in the path; they clashed again when she spotted a No Trespassing sign on a fence post and wanted to see if there was a house beyond it. He won both arguments, and she stormed off ahead of him.
Tamitha was alone when she heard the sound of an engine. "That damn wind," she muttered. Then she rounded the bend and saw a beautiful sight: a road grader, laboring uphill with its snowplow lowered. She ran toward it, waving the emergency blanket and yelling, "Thank you!"
As Tom and Medusa straggled up, the driver asked, "Are you the couple everyone's been looking for?"
"Yes!" Tamitha shouted, wrapping him in a bone-crushing hug.
Even when everyone else around her was losing hope, Krystal had stayed optimistic. "I knew how bullheaded my mom and dad were," she recalls. "I figured they'd come back home. I just didn't know when."
She drove 300 miles with her uncle Jack to a hospital in Cedar City, where the extended family gathered at her parents' bedside. That evening, Tom and Tamitha ate a hearty dinner, their first in 12 days. They were diagnosed with dehydration as well as frostbitten hands and feet. To the doctors' amazement, they were otherwise unharmed and unlikely to suffer any permanent damage.
The couple were discharged from the hospital the next morning. They didn't go straight home, however. First they attended the funeral of a stranger: Leroy Davenport, 37, a local volunteer who'd spent the previous Saturday searching for them. He'd gone to bed feeling ill and died in his sleep of an undiagnosed heart condition. The Garners embraced Davenport's widow and offered tearful thanks.
Within two weeks, Tom and Tamitha were back at their jobs. But their sojourn in the snow had changed them. In the future, they would travel more carefully and cherish each other-and their daughter-more deeply. In fact, they planned to revisit the site of their ordeal after the spring thaw, to see the wild horses once again and renew their wedding vows.
"Our bond is stronger than ever," Tamitha says. "We've been to hell and back and lived to tell."
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