Pat Norvell says she wasn’t worried, even as one night turned to four, two feet of snow piled up outside her and her husband’s stuck SUV and their rations whittled down to a small bag of jelly beans and snow melted into drinking water.
“We knew they were smart and eventually they would find us,” Norvell, surrounded by her family in the living room of her and her husband’s Salmon Creek-area mobile home and sitting in a chair far more comfortable than the one inside the green Jeep Grand Cherokee, said of her children and grandchildren. “I had no doubt whatsoever.”
John Norvell said he, at times, felt dark, even as his wife remained positive. The 63-year-olds spent four nights trapped on a secluded forest road near Mount St. Helens after their Jeep hit an icy rut and slid into a ditch.
The Norvells are both diabetic, and their family worried that they didn’t have insulin with them. After law enforcement officials said they couldn’t help, the family organized its own search effort and even started a Facebook page trying to get the word out.
Happily, both were still in good physical condition when their ordeal came to an end Friday as John got out of the SUV and spotted other people on the remote road.
“I heard him talking to someone,” Pat said. “I thought he was going crazy.”
But the woman in front of John was no hallucination. Nor were the three men with Toyota trucks she was camping with nearby. It took a couple of hours, but the men — known only to the Norvells as Tim, Luke and Dan — dug out the Jeep and drove the couple 20 miles to safety.
“They gave us five gallons of gas, sandwiches and water and wanted nothing in return,” John said. “You want to talk about good Samaritans; I’ll never forget these guys.”
Photo excursion
The Norvells had set out on Monday, shopping at a Salvation Army, paying cash for lunch at Cougar Bar and Grill —John had a mushroom Swiss burger, Pat, fittingly, she joked, a patty melt — and searching out landscape for John to photograph with a new camera given to him by Frito-Lay after his January retirement.
They drove about 20 miles on unpaved road, going deeper and deeper as snow remained elusive. Eventually, the frigid powder went from hard to find to abundant
“Every two or three corners, it would be more,” Pat Norvell said. “Two or three corners and more. After two or three more, it got a lot worse.”
When the Norvells tried to turn around, they hit an ice rut and slid into a ditch. John got the Jeep to move, only to end up even worse off — stuck in the rut. They were out of cell phone range. They weren’t dressed for the cold. Leaving the vehicle behind wasn’t an option.
During the Norvells’ four-day nightmare, two feet of snow fell and temperatures dropped to as low as 19 degrees. They passed time playing cribbage and talking. For warmth, they briefly turned on the engine and turned on their car’s seat warmers. They tried to sleep under a fleece blanket, occasionally drifting off for about an hour, never much more.
“I’m never sleeping in that thing again,” John said.
Search begins
By the middle of the week, the Norvells family grew worried. Leland Foster, who’s married to Jessicca, one of the Norvells seven grandchildren, scoured maps of Oregon and Washington on Thursday and Friday. He recruited about 200 people into a search party.
Cell phone records, bank statements and a search of hotels in Port Angeles all failed to provide clues. Paying cash for lunch in Cougar meant no credit card trail to follow.
“We were worried it would be a search and retrieve instead of a search and rescue,” Leanne Sosa, one of the couple’s three children, said.
Sosa filed a missing persons report with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday, but because the family had no idea where John and Pat might be, the sheriff’s office said it couldn’t send a search and rescue team after them.
“We kept telling them that maybe their car had gone off the road,” Sosa said. “They said that was a one in a million. They said if they were still missing next week, they’d do more.
“They would have been dead next week.”
When the call came in Friday that the Norvells were OK, Foster drove up to meet them. John and Patricia’s blood sugar counts and vitals were normal when Foster examined them.
“Thank God, you know,” was the family’s collective response, said Foster.
Save for fatigue, the couple said on Saturday they are both fine.
The takeaway from the experience for the Norvells was this: The next time they need a vehicle, they’re buying a Toyota. “You should have seen those things drive over waist-high snow like it was nothing,” John Norvell said.
Bob Albrecht: 360-735-4522 or bob.albrecht@columbian.com.
