A 68-year-old Minnesota woman who had been missing for three days was found alive but trapped up to her ears in mud beside a remote trail, after two friends on ATVs took an unplanned detour and stumbled across her by chance.
Kathryn Woessner disappeared on 3 June without any personal belongings near Akeley, Minnesota, around three hours north of Minneapolis, according to the Cass County Sheriff’s Office. Police had classified her as endangered and raised concerns for her safety given her medical conditions.
Three days later, friends Adam Sandbeck and Mike Gravalin set out on their ATVs to explore a route they had never taken before. They told NBC affiliate KARE they stopped when they spotted a van parked in the middle of nowhere, noting it lacked the off-road capability to have reached the spot under its own steam. “We could see that there was a body in the puddle next to the van, and then that’s when it got real,” Sandbeck said. “When we walked up, we thought she was dead. We thought it was just a body, and then she whispered, ‘Help me,’ and it scared the crap out of me.”
Sandbeck said only the top of Woessner’s head was visible, with the rest of her body submerged from the ears down. He described her as looking like she was in “really bad shape” and as though she had been stuck “forever.” “She said it was like quicksand, and she couldn’t get out,” he explained.
The two men pulled Woessner from the mud and called emergency services, using their ATVs’ location-tracking to give paramedics and volunteer firefighters precise coordinates. Gravalin said it was sheer luck they had come across her at all. “We’ve driven past it for the last eight years and never went down,” he said.
Sharing the story on social media afterwards, Sandbeck wrote that the pair had originally planned a different ride for that Saturday morning. “Instead we went exploring and found Kathryn…. Thank God we did!!” he wrote. “If there are two positives I can take away from this and promote it would be… God is real…. and how important rural volunteers of the fire department and paramedics agencies are to local areas. The real heroes are those people.”
The sheriff’s office cancelled the missing person alert for Woessner, who was taken to a local hospital following the rescue. Sandbeck told KARE he has since called Woessner to check on her, describing her as a strong woman.
