RCMP officers save stranded snowmobilers

Imagine being stranded in the middle of the woods in northern Saskatchewan, soaking wet during a frosty -18 C evening.

That was exactly the situation for two men who were out snowmobiling between Meadow Lake and Green Lake on Jan. 31.

Their machine had broken through waist-deep water at the bottom of a 20-foot-deep ravine. The men managed to build a fire and keep warm for a time, but they were soaking wet and the flames were quickly dwindling.

Thankfully, dedication from two police officers and a local outdoorsman meant a happy ending to the story.

Const. Frederike Carignan and her partner, identified as Const. Goodfellow, noticed that five 911 calls had come from a remote location about 30 kilometres into the wilderness. Each time they tried to pick up, the calls were dropped.

They looked up the phone number and found the men’s families to get more information.

Then, the officers met up with the families and hit the road, to get as close as possible to the rough location where they tracked the calls.

Then, they took off on RCMP snowmobiles to try and find the pair.

A local trapper, who they refer to as Mr. T, was a big help in eventually locating and saving the men.

“He had also been made aware of the circumstances and was out searching on snowmobile, too. I showed him a map of where they were believed to be and Mr. T identified the area immediately and guided us directly there,” Goodfellow said in a news release.

When the officers found the two stranded men, their fire had just gone out 15 minutes earlier.

“It was a stressful event. We found two people who may not have survived if we hadn’t located them. We didn’t know their fire went out, we didn’t know if they were injured. Your brain goes to the worst-case scenario and you don’t know the timeline you have. It just so happened the timeline was good in this situation,” Goodfellow continued.

In a later interview with 980 CJME, Carignan expressed how worrying it was on the way to finding the men.

“It was very scary for us to go and look for them, seeing that we (didn’t) know where we were going (at first),” she said.

But it all worked out in the end.

“It’s something very, very rewarding for myself. It’s something that doesn’t happen every day. We deal with a lot of things, and seeing a happy ending once in a while is really nice,” she said.

The entire rescue operation took more than five hours.

Mr. T was given a certificate of appreciation from the RCMP for his part in the rescue.

— With files from 980 CJME’s Britton Gray