Waitress Plods 11 Miles Through Deep Snow to Get Help for Pair

Stuck overnight in below-freezing temperatures on a remote Utah mountain after taking a wrong turn during a day trip, a Las Vegas cocktail waitress walked 11 miles get help for her diabetic mother and wheelchair-bound, 92-year-old grandmother.

Rescuers found the pair shivering but unhurt in their Toyota about 9,000 feet up a mountain Thursday morning after they spent the night trapped on a road in their stalled car.

“I do a lot of walking in my job so I knew I would make it as long as nothing got me along the trail,” Susie Osburn said Friday.

Their Only Hope

Piute County Sheriff Brent Gottfredson said the woman’s trek down the mountain was the older pair’s only hope for rescue.

“The only people up there this time of year would be an occasional trapper or something,” Gottfredson said. “It would have been a long time before anyone would have found them.”

Susie Osburn, 33, said her mother was hyperventilating and her grandmother was having severe chest pains after the car got stuck in snow about 10 p.m. Wednesday on a gravel road in Southern Utah.

The three, who were returning from a day trip to Bryce Canyon when 59-year-old Betty Osburn took a wrong turn in the dark, ran the car engine periodically while trying to keep warm in temperatures of about 20 degrees above zero.

The engine failed about 2 a.m., however, and the bitter cold began to set in on the women, who had light jackets but no blankets.

“All the stuff we had in the car we piled on my grandmother because she was starting to get real cold,” Susie Osburn said. “My mother is a nurse so she knew we had to calm down and get control.”

Betty Osburn remembered that she had seen a tiny town several miles before they got stuck in the snow, which was two feet deep after a recent storm. They decided that Susie Osburn would follow the gravel road back down the mountain at first light in the hope of finding the settlement.

Plastic Bags on Feet

“My shoes were soaked from trying to push the car out of the snow the night before so I put plastic bags over my socks,” she said. “I just had a light jacket on but the walking warmed me up.”

Susie Osburn made it to the small town of Junction in slightly more than three hours, walking as quickly as she could through the snow. On the way, she was spooked by a herd of deer that ran by her and a mountain lion that trailed her for several miles.

A volunteer rescue crew in a four-wheel-drive vehicle went up the mountain and found the two women still in the car.

Susie Osburn, who underwent therapy Friday for possible damage to her hip from the walk, said she and her mother and grandmother take day trips at least once a month to different places. Now, she said, they may slow down.