Some very lucky motorists are alive today to tell their tale of being stranded in a remote section of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wilderness for two weeks. Leslie Roy, 52 and her sister Lee Marie Wright, 56 stated they were on vacation when their SUV became stranded from a heavy snow fall on April 11th.
“The bears would show up about midnight,” Roy told ABC News. “They would wake us up. We could hear them scratching on the truck.”
The sisters were stranded for two weeks but they told ABC News they tried to call for help. “We tried 911 and actually it just rang, it never made the connection,” Wright said.
When the cell phone failed to connect them with emergency services, the sisters tried other means of contact, including writing “Help 9-1-1” on a t-shirt and hanging it on a nearby stop sign in hopes someone would pass by and notice. They said their battery died about four days into the ordeal, leaving them without lights, radio or heat.
“If we didn’t have the food in the truck, it would have been a totally different story,” Roy said.
According to police reports, the women managed to ration Girl Scout cookies and cheese puffs, while melting snow for drinking water as they tried to stay warm inside their frigid SUV.
After rescue efforts combed the surrounding woods for days, a search helicopter managed to spot their SUV two weeks after getting stuck. “We heard them hollering and that was excellent,” Wright said. The sisters were subsequently airlifted to Helen Newberry Joy hospital in Newberry, Michigan.
