When 85-year-old Ruby Stein left her granddaughter’s house in late March following a long-awaited visit, she never imagined what would happen next. While en route back to her home 245 miles away, the elderly woman took a wrong turn and ended up lost and stranded in the Colorado cold for five days.
“I blowed my horn and blowed my horn and flashed my lights until the battery ran down,” Stein told The Denver Post. “Then my car went dead. I had a cell phone with me, but it wouldn’t work.”
For roughly 120 hours, the great-grandma and her cat used what they had to survive: a sweet roll, a Rice Krispies Treat and safety pins to create a makeshift blanket from the clothes in her car, a 2007 Nissan Sentra, according to the Post.
With her life flashing before her eyes, Stein and her beloved cat, Nikki, were up to their ears in snow, stuck in the car at a dead end.
“I was keeping myself very, very calm,” said Stein, who told the Post she drank melted snow to stay hydrated. “I knew I either had to or it was over with. I have too many great-grandkids and grandkids. I didn’t want it to be over with.”
On the fifth day, two hikers driving toward a trailhead happened upon Stein and her cat in what they thought was an abandoned car.
“She was in the back of the car. She said, ‘No, everything is not OK,’” Dan Higbee, one of the hikers who found Stein, told the Post.
Stein and her cat are happy to be back in the warmth of their home, and Stein’s family is pleased with her safe return.
“She means the world to absolutely every single one of us,” Alee Preuss, Stein’s granddaughter whom she recently visited, said to the Post. “We love her to pieces. And she’s right back to her normal self.”
While spring has sprung, many parts of the U.S. are still covered with snow and ice. We’ve come up with a list of our top 7 winter safety tips for seniors, which can be found here.
