Missing Valley woman found alive in her car
A missing Spokane Valley woman was found in her car Monday morning, alive and cold, about 24 hours after she got it stuck in a ditch on the east side of Lake Coeur d’Alene.
She was unable to exit the driver’s side of the car because it was lodged against a tree, and the car’s broken windows did nothing to keep the rain out all night. But rescuers freed her by simply opening the passenger door, according to the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office.
Inside the car, rescuers also found a nearly empty two-liter bottle of Potters vodka.
Christine K. Arbogast, 44, was reported missing Sunday after her husband got a cell phone call from her around 4 a.m. saying she was lost. She’d been asked to leave the Wild Boar Inn Bed and Breakfast in Harrison, Idaho, for “unruly behavior” and was reportedly drunk when she left, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Arbogast was discovered by a volunteer with the Eastside Fire District who was bringing supplies to the Carlin Bay Fire Station where the Kootenai County Search and Rescue team was gathering, according to Kootenai County Sheriff’s Sgt. Andy Boyle.
Deputies were already combing the side roads off state Highway 97 while a fireboat scanned the shoreline. On Sunday, two helicopters, U.S. Forest Service agents, Eastside Fire District volunteers, Idaho State Police and sheriff’s deputies unsuccessfully searched the area roads, including Wolf Lodge Bay and other roads on the northeast end of the lake, Boyle said.
The fire station was to be the command post for a more thorough search, Boyle said. The volunteer firefighter, remembering that Arbogast had told her husband that she had left the pavement and was on a gravel road, decided to swing onto Whistle Road out of Turner Bay and check out a couple of gravel roads there, Boyle said.
In her last phone call to her husband, at about 11:40 a.m. Sunday, Arbogast said she had crashed her car and was upside down in a ditch with branches poking through the windows.
Off a driveway, not a quarter mile from the highway, the volunteer found Arbogast’s blue Nissan Maxima sedan down a steep embankment, upright, its front end pointing toward the road – nearly a full day after she became stuck.
The driver’s side windows were broken, but the passenger side of the car was unharmed.
Arbogast had apparently tried to back down the driveway and backed over the embankment instead, according to the Sheriff’s office.
She reportedly was still intoxicated when rescuers found her and complained of shoulder and hip pain. An ambulance transported her to Kootenai Medical Center, where she was treated and released.