Snowmobiler finds family of 5 stuck in wilderness

Although the exact details on how this family came to be stranded in the frozen wilderness is not confirmed, it seems the family may have been using their cellphone as their navigation, which is not always reliable.

Phil Waldner wasn't expecting to come across a stranded family of five when he went out for a snowmobile ride in rural Manitoba after Christmas last month.

The Steinbach, Man., resident was on a trail near Whitemouth Lake, which is nearly 130 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg, when he saw car tracks, which seemed odd.

"It was about 15 or 16 kilometres in when I came upon the car that had broken through the ice, and in the car there was an elderly gentleman and two young children," Waldner said.

"They were huddled up in blankets trying to keep warm and I asked them, 'What in the Sam Hill are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?' and they said they're going to Toronto.".

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/family-rescued-snowmobile-manitoba-1.5439399

Sounds like this snowmobiler did a lot of things right:

• situational awareness (saw the tire tracks and knew they didn’t belong there)
• prioritized well (saved the parents as his top priority, then got everyone warm)
• knew the area (brought them to an emergency warming shelter)
• had the right gear (wearing layers so that he could share, had a SEND or a PLB)

Impressive!

Yep, that was a nice save. You’d like to believe every snowmobiler who goes long in the Canadian wilderness would have that knowledge, SA and equipment, but it’s possible this family was saved by an exception.

It’s back to the idea we’ve discussed many times before. How many emergencies start off with someone getting lost? Navigating with a cellphone in Manitoba??? WTF? That nav tactic works while walking in urban areas where the only thing you need to worry about is tripping on an open manhole cover or stepping in dogs**t, but using one for driving off-road in Manitoba in winter?? Did they even realize they were off-road? Again, WTF.

Okay, those thoughts are from someone who uses a dedicated GPS receiver (one without a cell receiver) to calculate ETA’s while driving, paper maps and has been known to use a sextant. But the idea of blindly following GPS directions just put a thought in my head regarding filters for even a dedicated vehicle GPS (like my Garmin Nuvi receiver). I have mine set up for driving primarily on highways and prioritize time over distance. But I wonder if a filter could be used to remove roads that are not serviced in winter... I’m sure it could.

A big tip o' the hat to Phil Waldner. Well done sir!

This could have easily been a recovery. It's a classic cascade of small decisions and errors that almost led to tragedy.

A brief rant: No basic gear in the car for being stranded in a Canadian winter? Relying on a cell phone for navigation in areas known to have spotty/no reception? Three adults in the car and no-one looked out the window and said "This doesn't seem right, let's turn back!"? No basic gear to get the vehicle unstuck (it doesn't look bad to me). Walking out in sneakers? ARGH!

Glad everyone is safe, and hopefully a hard lesson learned. It's a reminder that your planning, skills, and gear may well be used to save someone else.

I haven’t traveled in Canada for over 20 years, but this is almost exactly the “worst case” scenario that I built my car kit for.

Particularly in unfamiliar areas, I’m not even a tiny bit embarrassed to declare an “abort” and turn the car around to get back onto the pavement.

I begin to think this is a learned skill. After you have been turned around enough times, you don't take it as a personal failure to say "Ah stuff it, this route isn't working out; I don't know where I am but I know where I've been, so back I go, and I'll re-calibrate from there."

A thought exercise, everyone:

I was looking at the photo from the news story, and speculating how to use the resources at hand to improve the situation.

Assume, for a moment, we were riding in someone else's vehicle and asleep in the back when navigation went sideways. Now, here we are. What do you think?

1) I’m pretty good at getting cars out of jams compared to many folks I know, especially if they have 4WD or AWD, and also if there’s a shovel handy. It’s possible that I’ve had some bad judgement that led to experience here.

2) I’ve used a jack to get a car out of a jam before, by building a platform for the jack, getting a wheel up out of its difficulty, and piling locally sourced wood or rocks under the wheel in the hole. This is time consuming but has worked for me.

3) It looks like there is no winch. If there’s tow rope and good sticks, I’d try to make a flip-flop winch and pull it out that way.

4) if there is no flip-flop winch option, I’d be looking at using whatever natural resources available to get the car unstuck.

5) Each car and my laptop bag has a ham radio VHF/UHF transceiver in it, that’s worth trying if there is one.

This is a pretty good example of why you should always have a shovel in your vehicle.

Yeah, the flip-flop winch would be a good option provided you had a tow/recovery strap and a few tools (a saw would be helpful, a shovel doubly so). I do need to get a recovery strap!

I do keep enough stuff in my car to survive at least a week in the wilderness in very cold temps; that's a week before things even got uncomfortable! Partly it's due to growing up in the midwest where huge blizzards are commonplace, and partly due to me being an avid outdoorsperson.

Good ideas!

I had never heard of a "flip-flop winch" before. Brilliant! Though it looks like a two-person operation to me.

1) Vehicle Recovery:

I agree with Chaos -- jack up the vehicle. Try to build a platform under the wheels. Break up the "chock" behind each wheel.

Unfortunately, even with a good shovel or a pickaxe, frozen soil is really difficult to chop through. A beater hatchet or ripping hammer can work well. I suppose the tire iron could be used as a crude chisel. It would take a lot of force and patience. Watch out for the sidewall of the tire!

I'll bet the vehicle has all-season tires (which really means three-season; bloody awful in winter). One trick is to drop the tire pressure to increase flexibility and traction.

2) Staying Warm:

I see a lot of dry grass ready to be harvested. Excellent insulation! Stuff it between layers of clothing (it's scratchy). Pile it in the vehicle. It's messy, but at this point who cares? You can detail it later.

3) Water and Fire:

Dehydration is insidious in the cold: you don't feel thirsty but it messes with your reasoning and your body's ability to stay warm and metabolize fats (most of us have a small surplus).

There is a lot of standing dead spruce in the background. The vehicle offers options for starting a fire. I guess it's possible to melt snow indirectly in a glass or plastic drink container, but far from ideal.

First, unless I had some reason to be on lesser traveled roads, my GPS would be keeping me on main roads where at the very least a snow plow might find me (hopefully without tossing me off the road). If I were (not in my right mind and) intentionally driving the backroads of Manitoba, the kit in my truck would do okay. My winter kit would be integrated (adding my parka, boots, heavier gloves and additional wool clothing). The shovel, axe and bow saw are already part of the kit.

The flip-flop winch suggestion is good. Thers’s a YouTube for that...
Off Grid Winch: Making a Flip Flop Winch :

Question: What weight line would be recommended for fabricating the winch? A dedicated tow strap is probably overkill.

Important lesson here. I know the partial-deflation to improve traction trick that dougwalkabout mentions. Sitting in my living room, under no stress, I didn’t think of it or mention it.

It’s a really good idea to mentally walk through all of what you might do, so that you make as many decisions in advance of a stressful situation as possible.

Great point about frozen ground.

A flip-flop winch can be done by one person at need. I wouldn’t want to try it with less than 2000lb test line and 3000lb test would be better. While you can get it done with dynamic rope, static rope makes it a whole lot easier.

So 1/4" x 50' 7700LBs Synthetic Winch Line Cable Rope should work?
TIA.

Gearing up, looking for good insurance.

It certainly should be strong enough, and 50’ seems like a good length. I might get that myself.

Edited to add: Make sure you have some way to connect it to your vehicle.

Another trick for getting unstuck: turn off the vehicle's traction control. There is a button on many vehicles. While it's a great system for preventing a skid at higher speeds, it does so by removing power from the wheels. Sometimes you need those wheels to spin a little and chew through the crud to get you moving.

That synthetic winch rope in the Amazon link from Russ is not the one you want. That rope has a thimble (buckle) on one end and probably has a flat connector on the other end to attach to the winch.

What you want is a synthetic rope extension that has a thimble on each end like this one.

https://www.amazon.com/Astra-DepotS-Extension-Synthetic-Stainless/dp/B07MG8RVCX



As most newer vehicles do not have many to tow point options, an axle strap or 2 is very handy, but first make sure you know where you can attach to your vehicle axle or frame.

https://www.amazon.com/Keeper-Original-Version-04228-Premium/dp/B00I5HRTU4

To tie everything together, use a shackle - but you first need to know the max diameter of the above rope thimble. Hard to tell in the images, but looks like it may accept at least a 5/8 inch shackle pin such as this one.

https://www.amazon.com/Fuzbaxy-Shackle-Threaded-Rigging-Vehicle/dp/B07PXW94G6.

Another option is a Clevis hook.

https://www.amazon.com/Curt-Manufacturing-81560-Safety-Capacity/dp/B000LOLX2E

So the setup would be:

Axle strap on vehicle>>>Shackle or Clevis hook>>>synthetic rope.

I run a very similar setup, but use recovery straps as the synthetic rope is meant only for winching / straight pulls and not to be used as a stretchable / jerking recovery strap.

Above all, practice, practice before using in an emergency.

Good catch. Dual connectors/thimbles is a better option. I may look into getting a dedicated tow strap too. More pricey, but as you indicate, for actual towing, that light line would not be as durable and they always fail at the worst possible time.