SURVIVOR SKILLS
Stranded Near the Grand Canyon for 5 Days: After taking a wrong turn, a college student spends 119 hours alone in the desert
College student Amber Vanhecke tells In Touch how she survived a harrowing 119 hours alone in the desert
It should have been the spring break adventure of a lifetime. University of North Texas student Amber Van-Hecke spent months planning a nine-day road trip that would take her on an epic trek to see six national parks in the American Southwest. With her friends unable to take off work, she’d be making the journey alone, but that didn’t faze her. “I do it often, actually. I’m a traveler,” she tells In Touch, adding that before she set out from her apartment in Denton, Texas, she felt “excited, ecstatic. I felt my heart lift in anticipation of all the cool things I’d see.”
But just two days into her trip, it turned into a nightmare. After visiting New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns and then hiking near the southern rim of the Grand Canyon on March 12, Amber, 24, drove her Ford Edge off the highway onto a dirt road following the route to her next stop, the Havasu Falls, suggested by her GPS app. Ninety minutes later, there was nothing around her except Arizona desert. As night fell, Amber drove for two hours looking for a main road — and ran out of gas. “I had no signal, no way to contact the outside world. I was scared, but I was alive and I planned on staying that way.”
Amber thought someone would drive by and find her in the morning. No one came. Panicked but undeterred, “I followed rule No. 1: Stay by your shelter and water,” says the former Girl Scout, who had parked her vehicle next to an old silo for shade and started rationing her water and food (almonds, dried fruits and ramen). She used rocks to spell out “HELP” and made a signal fire using notebook paper and a lighter to alert helicopters
and planes. When Amber didn’t contact her family, her friends assured them that she was likely camping in an area without cell reception. She passed the time reading Harry Potter books and strategizing her next move. By day five, she
was desperate. With a pack of essentials and a phone charged off her car’s battery, she left a note explaining where she’d gone and hiked east for 11 miles looking for a cell signal. “I called 911 76 times that day,” she says. When it finally connected, she gave the operator as much information as she could. Four hours later on March 17, her car was spotted by the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Their helicopter then located Amber and transported her to a Flagstaff hospital, where she was treated for dehydration and seconddegree sunburn.
She’s now in counseling to deal with panic attacks and PTSD. But Amber, who started a Go Fund Me page to raise money for hospital costs ( gofundme.com/4b6p2ambers-medical-expenses), went back to school and is already planning her next trip: a hiking excursion to Maine. This time, she’s going with friends. “I’m not going to let one bad experience change who I am.”