Snowmobilers rescued; weather warms in East

CONEJOS, Colo. – Six snowmobilers missing in the mountains for 2 1/2 days while a howling blizzard swirled around them were rescued Monday – hungry and cold but unhurt – after taking shelter in a cozy cabin and calling 911 on a cell phone when the storm eased up.

The group, consisting of two couples and two teenagers, broke into the cabin, where they huddled around a gas grill and dined on popcorn and chicken bouillon they found inside.

“We counted 18 blankets. We were cozy,” 31-year-old Shannon Groen said after rescue crews on snowmobiles brought the group to safety. “God was looking out for us.”

Groen and the others were trapped by one in a series of storms that killed at least three people across the West and unloaded as much as 11 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada range.

Groen and her husband, Jason, had gone snowmobiling with their daughter Aspen to celebrate her 14th birthday. Also along were one of Jason Groen’s employees, Mike Martin; Martin’s wife, Missy; and their son, Jessie, 13. All are from Farmington, N.M.

The group had set out on what was supposed to be a daylong adventure but got lost and ran out of gas on Friday night near 10,222-foot Cumbres Pass, just north of the New Mexico line.

They sought shelter in a cabin near the isolated and snowbound Osier Station, a small wooden building that serves as a summertime stop on a railroad line for sightseers.

Jason Groen, the 36-year-old owner of a car wash, said his cell phone didn’t work in the cabin and bad weather kept him from leaving to find a place where he could get a signal until Monday morning.

When the storm finally broke, Groen hiked up to a point with cell phone reception and alerted rescuers to their location.

Elsehwhere on Monday, the weather was unseasonably warm in much of the East and South, with record highs in several states.

The high in Buffalo, N.Y., of 59 beat the old record for the date by 5 degrees. The high was 66 in Toledo, Ohio, a record that led some University of Toledo students to stroll to class in T-shirts and shorts.