Adam and Mike are buddies. They particularly enjoy getting into the wild on their ATVs.
On a recent off-road adventure in Minnesota, Adam Sandbeck and Mike Gravalin experienced a lot more adventure than they anticipated!
By what they believe was divine guidance, they found Kathryn Woessner, an elderly woman who had been listed as missing for three days.
"So, as we were going down that trail, the main trail, we actually bypassed that smaller trail that Kathryn was on. So we actually turned around, which we would've never done if it was just the way we always did it. And it was a minimum maintenance road and it kind of broke off ... So, on that trail, it was a pretty nasty trail. There was a lot of mud holes. There was a lot of trees. There was actually a tree that had fallen and crossed the path so you had to get off the path and go into the trails. Now, mind you, these trails are very thick with trees. So, once we got around that, we probably went another, I don't know, 200-yards or whatever and we came upon Kathryn," explains Adam.
As they rolled in, the first weird thing they spotted was a van that shouldn't be there - and shouldn't have been able to actually get there.
"Very strange. Yeah," says Mike, a retired deputy U.S Marshal.
"Yes. Yeah, like we said, it was like a scene out of a movie. It just looked too perfect and something wasn't right."
The men, experienced with the outdoors, did a double-check to ensure they were safe, that nothing dangerous was going on.
Adam adds, "So, as we pulled up on the van, like Mike said, we thought it was too perfect. We thought it could have been an ambush, crazy. And once we saw the body sticking out of the water next to that van, that's when everything got real."
They thought the person in the deep mud pit was dead.
Mike shares the spooky surprise: "That's when we heard Kathryn say, 'Help me!'" (rather listen?)
"So, Mike took the lead on this one with what to do," Adam recalls. "So, we asked her if she was okay. She was able to speak.
She was looking at us, but the only thing sticking out of this puddle was just her cheeks, her eyeballs, her nose, her mouth. You couldn't see her ears.
So we asked her a couple questions real quick and then we pulled her out of the puddle and laid her next to where she was because we didn't want to hurt her, but we knew she needed help. So Mike told me to get on 911, and I did."
The men carefully removed the 68-year-old woman from the murky entrapment. And one of them went back to help direct the rescue team to the extremely remote site. Both Mike and Adam salute the bravery and determination of the deputies and volunteer paramedics who came to take Kathryn to the hospital. She was suffering from exposure and dehydration, but recovering. Before she was found, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office had issued an endangered missing person alert, but why she drove there has not been fully explained.
Reality started to soak in
"And it was, 'Wow, Mike, what did we just do? Wow.' And then we started to understand what was going on because it was so out of the normal finding a minivan on a trail that it was not supposed to be on, probably wasn't even capable of being on, but apparently she has Jedi driving skills to get a minivan down a trail like that!"
Unpacking the God Story
Richard asks: "You're pretty sure that God had something to do with getting you guys there?
"100%, 100%," says Adam. "We were supposed to go on an organized run on Saturday, that Saturday. Well, on Friday, the night before, we found out that it was the following week, we were like, okay, well, what do we do? What do you want to do? And like I said before, Mike and I never take the same machine (ATVs). We always take two and then we never go on those back trails. We always stay on the ones that are fun for us and we know really well. And there had to be a reason why that happened. And for me, I 100% know that that was the hand of God that 100% brought Mike and I down trails we've never ever been before, down trails that people hadn't been in three days to find her before we did. She went missing on the 3rd of June and we found her on the 6th at 2:00 PM.
For me anyway, there's no other reason why we were there, but because God was guiding us."
Mike: "And I second that. And it's like I mentioned to another news outlet, I've always been a person that believed in you are where you're supposed to be and just appreciate that time and don't get mad at some of the annoying things that happened because that's where you're supposed to be and you might be slowed up by something or something gets in the way and you're annoyed because maybe you're running late, but that's where you're supposed to be. And that day there's a lot of little things that got in Adam's way and my way, whatever that day and made us turn here, made us turn there and made us turn around to go back down that trail to find Kathryn."
We invite you to hear our complete interview - just below - sharing the amazing elements of an unlikely rescue, an intervention by God Almighty, and a faith refresher for all of us!
