Hiker found alive two weeks after search called off

A FAINT sound made hikers Albert and Peter Kottke stop and look around as they neared the end of a backpacking trip in the wilds of New Mexico.

A figure moved on the other side of the Gila River. As it drew closer, the two university students saw a woman, hunched over and moving slowly.

The Kottkes crossed the river to find Carolyn Dorn, 52, who had been alone in the Gila National Forest for five weeks after becoming trapped on the wrong side of the rain- and snow-swollen river. The search for her had been called off two weeks earlier.

Ms Dorn was too weak to accompany them to safety. Instead, they gave her food (almonds, dried apples, an energy bar, some hot soup, a little cheese and some Tang soft drink) scavenged firewood for her, filled her water bottles and left her a book — suspense author Michael Connelly’s Chasing the Dime.

Ms Dorn told the brothers she was warm enough at night, but her eyes lit up when they offered her the book, said Peter Kotke. They felt comfortable leaving her because “you could tell she had a positive outlook”, he said.

Ms Dorn, who left for a two-week camping trip on December 6, had a tent, a sleeping bag and enough food and water for two weeks.

They hiked 20 miles over the next day-and-a-half, and hitchhiked into Silver City, where they contacted authorities.

“We got her prepared to spend another couple of nights while we went upstream to get help,” said Albert Kottke, 25, a student in civil engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. A New Mexico National Guard helicopter crew, using night vision goggles and a US Geological Survey map the Kottke brothers marked, rescued the weak and dehydrated South Carolina woman before dawn on Sunday.

Ms Dorn was about six miles from the nearest road in an area where the brothers — who have hiked in the region several times over the past two years — had never seen another human being, according to Peter Kottke, who celebrated his 20th birthday on the day the woman was rescued.