By TANYA SMITH
A day after walking down Lone Peak Mountain with rescuers, a Draper father credits his children’s survival in a surprise storm to a copy of The Book of Mormon, his knowledge of the terrain and the assistance of volunteer rescuers.
The horseback trip to a secluded cabin on Lone Peak never turned scary for Seth Grover, 9 and Kelli Jo, 5, who played and sang while Erin, 18 and her father, Kelly, planned out the best way to wait out the storm. The trip, a four-hour ride from the Grover’s home, was to be Erin’s birthday treat, and was moved up a day because of weather forecasts predicting a storm on Saturday.
“There was a lot of downed timber, and we had a difficult time getting through the trail,” Kelly recalled of the ride up to the cabin last Thursday. “At one point in time, there was a downed timber log, about forty inches wide, sitting one or two feet off the ground that each horse had to jump. It took 45 minutes for us to get over it.”
The ride took longer than planned because of the fallen timber along the trail, and the family reached the cabin area at dark, but could not see the cabin. They decided to camp out with their tents for the night, and find the cabin in the morning.
“It was a beautiful day, just gorgeous,” Kelly said.
Then everything changed around 4 a.m. Friday morning, when snow started coming down.
“We had prepared for cold weather from the waist up, but we didn’t come prepared for four feet of snow,” he said. By six a.m., there was two feet of snow on the ground, and Kelly had packed up all their gear and got the kids saddled up to find the cabin.
The family was only six minutes from the cabin, but were soaking wet when they arrived. Kelly had put in a couple boxes of supplies in the cabin at one point in time, but found that someone before him had taken and used it.
“We got out our sleeping bags, and all the kids got in them, and then Erin and I went and hunted wood down for a fire,” Kelly said. “The storm had come down so fast that the wood wasn’t wet, but it was damp. The next dilemna was how to get a fire lit.”
Kelly and Erin tried to use toilet paper to light the wood, but it just smoldered because it had gotten wet in the storm as well. In the cabin cupboard, they found two books- Book of Mormon and a Scout handbook.
“It was paper, and we had to decided which we would burn,” Kelly said. “It was a real delimna, and I felt sacriligious destroying a Book of Mormon. We weighed out the scenario and decided that the Scout Handbook, given the circumstances, would be of more use to someone than a Book of Mormon.
“Then we had to decide which pages we were going to burn,” he recalled. “We started with the index, but we had used up every page and the fire still hadn’t started.”
By that time, 20 or 30 minutes had passed by and the children were getting cold. Erin said that they couldn’t rip the promise out of Moroni, and they likewise couldn’t rip out Third Nephi, so the family began at the beginning of the book and began tearing out pages starting with First Nephi, reading as they went.
“We would talk about them and burned them as we went,” said Erin. “It was spiritual and physical use at the same time.” The fire began and then died out, so Second Nephi was used to relight it. All of the pages until just after Enos were used to get the fire going again.”
Kelly’s wife, Diana, says the family now plans to put a new Book of Mormon in the cabin to replace the one they burned, with a picture of the family and their story. “It will have our testimony,” Kelly said. “It not only aided us in dire circumstances, but it saved our lives.”
The family had a few cans of beef soup, which they decided to ration out to last for four days. They remained in the cabin for nearly 48 hours before getting contact from the outside world. Two members of the volunteer search and rescue team found the cabin late Sunday, and spent the night with the family, after hiking for six hours. A few hours before the hikers found the cabin, the storm broke enough for the search and rescue chopper to make several rounds in around the cabin area.
Hearing the cutting of the helicopter blades, Kelly ran out of the cabin and waved frantically. The helicopter pilot missed him the first round, but spotted him on the second round, yelling, “Help is on the way.”
“He’s waving, everything’s fine,” Diana was told by the rescuers. She had waited until early Sunday to call the search and rescue volunteers, and became disheartened as team after team returned from the mountain as the weather grew worse.
The children were taken down the mountain by chopper Monday morning, while Kelly walked the horses down with two other volunteer search and rescue hikers. Part of the six hour hike down took a scary turn as the horses and hikers walked up an 80% incline 1,000 feet above the cabin. One of the horses lost its balance in the four-foot snow, and fell, rolling several times. The horse entangled its foot in its stirrup, and it took Kelly nearly half an hour to cut through the steel stirrup on a ridge with trails only two feet wide.
The family is happy to be reunited again and are grateful to the many search and rescue volunteers who scoured the mountainside to find their father and siblings. “They were anxious to get up and help, even with the weather getting worse,” said Diana.
“It was a real spiritual experience,” Kelly said. For the four of us it was not life-threatening, but from the other perspective, it could have been.”
“I though the whole experience was pretty fun,” Erin said. “The only part that wasn’t fun was when we wanted to get home. But we were pretty close together, and we had a good adventure.”
“It was fun”, said Kelli Jo. “We played games and sang songs.”
