Mother Traveled for Hours in Snow to Help Family Reach Safety

family rescue

Karen Klein is a hero. I am not using that word loosely… I mean it in every sense.

Karen and her family were stranded in the snow after their car’s GPS put them in the wrong area. When they tried to turn the car around, it fell into a ditch. Karen’s husband, who just had back surgery, couldn’t have made the trek to find help, so she volunteered.

Karen left her husband and child to find safety, thinking it wouldn’t take that long to get help. Over 40 hours later, she was found, and her family was saved. Everything that happened in between is stuff that you only see on the silver screen at the movies.

family rescue

From KTLA.com:

Stranded in a secluded road with heavy snow falling just days before Christmas, one Pennsylvania mother knew she had to do something. So, she walked for 30 hours in the wilderness, through 26 freezing miles, subsisting on twigs and her urine, to get help.

Karen Klein, 46, was headed to the Grand Canyon National Park with her husband Eric and their 10-year-old son. State Road 67, which leads to the canyon’s north rim, is closed for the winter and their car’s GPS detoured them through forest service roads.

She thought the nearest major highway was only a short trek away. She didn’t know the road had been closed for winter. So, she decided to walk on – toward the park entrance.

Klein had been through so much she felt like giving up, but then something happened.

Terrified of falling asleep and succumbing to hypothermia, she refused to stop until she found the guard shack.

Breaking a window to get inside, Klein huddled under some blankets inside the shack for another six hours until rescuers found her. Her sister says she never doubted her sister’s will to live.

“What kept her going, she says, is she didn’t want her mother to bury her daughter. She didn’t want her son to be without a mother,” Haase said.

Watch her story here:

She could have died out there in those temperatures and away from her family, but her strength and determination were the deciding factors to find help for her family.

How do you think you would have handled this situation? What do you feel about our heroine?

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Wayne is a freelance writer who was named the 2015 American Conservative Union Blogger of the Year and awarded... More about Wayne Dupree

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