A snowmobiler lost his legs after being stranded in subzero temperatures in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains last month, according to a report.
After David Madsen’s snowmobile got stuck at an elevation of about 8,000 feet on Feb. 21, the 65-year-old decided to wait out an incoming snowstorm by digging a cave under his snowmobile with a screwdriver, he told KTVQ Friday.
“It changed within an hour,” the Hawick, Minnesota, resident told the station of the storm that brought 23 mph winds.
“When I got stranded, it was zero visibility. You couldn’t see your hand.”
By midnight, the temperature had dropped to 2 degrees and fell to below zero the next day, with a low of minus 17, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
“It was really dumb how I was out there,” Madsen told KTVQ.
“I didn’t have much survival gear or anything with me.”
Madsen, who survived on snow and a Baby Ruth he had in his glove box, said he knew he wouldn’t be able to walk due to the high snow drifts, and mulled making snowshoes out of snowmobile parts as the frigid weather and winds continued to barrage him.
Things got so bleak as the days and nights wore on that he told the station he considered killing himself.
“By that time, I knew I lost my legs, there was no problem with me knowing that,” he said.
“They were frozen in a solid block of ice.”
Digging the snow and ice around him kept his fingers from suffering the same fate.
“You have to keep moving,” he said.
Madsen told KTVQ that he started seeing “mirages,” thinking at one point he saw a snow tractor and an airplane.
When he was finally located by two snowmobilers three days after his ordeal began, he thought they were another hallucination.
“I said, ‘Are you guys for real? Or is this another mirage?’
And they said, ‘No we are real.’ And I just broke down,” he recalled.
That same day, his hotel, the Bear Lodge Resort at Burgess Junction, reported him missing after his bill went unpaid, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.
Madsen was taken to St. Vincent Healthcare in Billings, Montana, where he is still being treated and will eventually be fitted with prosthetics before he is sent home.
“As soon as I get good on them, I am going to do everything I did before,” he told KTVQ.
And he vowed that his frightening experience won’t keep him from returning to the Bighorns on his snowmobile.
“I am going to go back to the mountains, and, as soon as they get snow, spin all over that mountain, but not before a snowstorm and not without someone with me.”