Cell Phone Saves Woman Trapped In Blizzard

Karen Nelson said there were times when she prayed and times when she cried while huddling alone inside her pickup truck, snowbound in the middle of a howling prairie blizzard.

Trapped in a remote part of northeastern South Dakota, her only contact with the outside world since Thursday morning had been by cellular phone.

Friday night, after she had been without food or water for 40 hours, with just a few blankets and a sleeping bag to keep her warm, rescuers found her off a county road outside Webster. She hadn’t suffered any frostbite and was in good condition, her husband said.

“I just sat there, I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything so I just made a tent out of my sleeping bag and put it over top of me and put my cell phone in the middle of my tummy and just sat there,” Karen Nelson, 51, told The Associated Press from Lake Area Hospital in Webster on Saturday. She was expected to be released today.

“I prayed a couple of times. I cried a couple of times.”

Police were in contact with Nelson every half-hour Thursday, but limited their phone use through Friday as her car battery weakened.

On Friday, she talked to a civilian pilot sent out as part of the search, telling him when she could hear his plane flying overhead.

Then, when she flashed her headlights to pinpoint her location, her car battery lost power and the phone went dead.

“I thought ‘Oh no, this is it.’ Then I sat there and thought, ‘Well, they know I’m here and maybe, maybe by chance they did do whatever they had to do to find me.”

The rescuers had already spotted her and soon reached her by snowmobile.

At the time, the temperature was about 20 degrees below zero.

Karen Nelson said Saturday that she was still angry at herself for trying to return home to Webster from her job at a nursing home in Roslyn, 12 miles to the north.

Wind-whipped snow cut visibility so much that she got disoriented, wandering four miles west of the highway to Webster and skidding off a road into a slough.

“I should have never left. I was kind of angry at myself because I did that. All these poor people had to help me, because it wasn’t too smart of me to do that,” she said.

Of the rescuers, she said, “I love them all, the lot.”