Harwood suffered broken bones and had not eaten in nine days, said Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims, who talked to Harwood at the hospital.
Advertisement
Authorities say she survived by dragging herself to a creek and using a water filter to drink from it.
Kobe Pole, a sophomore in high school, was part of a search team that found 62-year-old Miyuki Harwood on Saturday in a rocky, remote area near Fresno.
But on Saturday morning, the search ended happily when ground crews located Harwood east of Courtright Reservoir in Fresno County, the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office reported.
Miyuki Harwood’s family said in a statement Sunday that she is asking for “uninterrupted rest and quiet”.
Harwood was wearing trousers and had a jacket when she was rescued, Hotchkiss said – clothing that offered little warmth as nightly temperatures dropped to the low 30s. “She had a base camp with a tent and a lot of supplies, but what she took with her was just enough for a day hike into the Sierra Nevada mountains”.
“She was a fighter”, said Rusty Hotchkiss, a California Highway Patrol flight officer and paramedic who flew Harwood to the hospital.
“She was concerned that she might not have been found”, said EMT Bill Schimpf.
Harwood, described as a “very knowledgeable, experienced backpacker”, was found about 1 1/2 miles northwest from where she was last seen, Curtice said.
“She heard them talking, she heard voices and she grabbed a whistle she had with her”, Hotchkiss said.
Curtice, a longtime member of the sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team, said Harwood’s rescue was “one of the longest periods of time that we had a missing person out there with significant injuries”. “It took her about two days to do that”.
“They’re going to spend another night in the wilderness”, she said.
A 15-year-old boy’s youthful ears are credited with finding a hiker from Folsom who had been missing for nine days in the Sierra National Forest.
Conditions for the search were hard, Mims said, because the location was so far away and terrain was so rugged. “This took more resources than normal because of the nature and the challenges that we were working with”.
Advertisement
Harwood is now recovering after surgery to set several bones in her leg back into place.
