People are calling one Pennsylvania family's holiday experience a "Christmas miracle" after a mother went through tremendous lengths to save them. After Karen Klein's family reportedly got stuck in their car near the Grand Canyon's North Rim for two nights over the holiday weekend, the courageous woman endured 30 miles of hiking through the bitter cold in order to seek rescue services.
"My mama bear instincts kicked in and I just told myself I had to keep going to save my family," Klein told People of her mission to save her family. The Klein family, consisting of Karen, her husband Eric, and young son Isaac, embarked on their holiday adventure on Dec. 22, after they left Las Vegas in pursuit of the Grand Canyon, People reports. The family was reportedly unaware of the fact that State Road 67 leading to the Canyon was closed for the winter, which caused them to make a wrong turn. And just like that, it was a snowball effect of unfortunate events. First their car became stuck in a ditch, then snow began to fall. "We were faced with some decisions," Karen, who is a biology professor at Northampton Community College, told People. "Since our cell phones didn’t receive service and I’m a runner and have taken wilderness survival classes, we decided that I would hike out and look for help."
Due to her husband's recent back surgery, Karen was forced to make the journey alone. After saying farewell to her family, she began her 30-mile hike through the snow in search of help. "I was determined not to fall asleep and kept walking, even when I became delirious," Klein recalled. "This might sound trivial, but I kept thinking of Ellen DeGeneres’ character, Dory, in Finding Nemo saying, ‘Just keep swimming.’ It dragged on forever, it really did. But love and strength saw me through."
What she thought would only be a couple of hours turned into days, and when she didn't return that afternoon, Eric also made a hard decision to leave his son in the car and hike to higher ground in an attempt to get a cell phone signal. "I told [Isaac] to run the car to keep the heat on, drink the juice and water that we had left and not to open the doors for anyone unless they had a police or ranger badge,'" he remembered. "It was very upsetting to leave him. But I knew it would take much longer to reach high ground if he went with me."
Meanwhile, Karen was still in pursuit of a savior. "It was snowing so badly that night that I had to use my cell phone light to see where I was going, and finally the battery went dead," she said. After running out of her small supply of Cheerios and water, Karen began eating twigs, snow, and drinking her own urine just to survive. "It tastes as bad as you imagine," she said of drinking her urine. "But it was warm, and so I resorted to that a couple of times. I also ate snow along the way and bits of aspen and evergreen branches. They’re not tasty, either. But in a survival situation, that’s what you do." During her expedition, Karen was able to break into a ranger's cabin for shelter, but still came up short on any way to call for help.
But little to Karen's knowledge, help was already on its way. Her husband, who had hiked nearly 15 miles uphill, was able to get phone service and alert the authorities to what had happened around 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 24. And after rescuers followed Karen's trail back to the cabin, they quickly escorted her to Dixie Regional Medical Center in Utah, where she was treated for exhaustion and frostbite.
"Hugging them, it just reaffirmed my commitment to them," Karen said from her hospital bed. "If I lose a few toes, in the grand scheme of things, they’re just toes. We made it. We’re a miracle. We’re still here for each other and that’s all that matters." Eric, who calls his wife the "true hero," said their experience "proves that you can influence your own narrative." "It might not be a first edition, but if you keep writing, you’ll get to an outcome better than if you wallow in self pity and dwell on the bad situation you’re in. Karen used everything she had to give our story a happy outcome. Between her and the unselfish, dedicated people who came to our rescue, we now have a new chapter to write," he said. Karen is expected to be released from the hospital on New Year's Eve.
