A hiker who returned to the trail where she took a survival course 40 years ago almost didn't make it out alive. Victoria Grover, 59, nearly died of hypothermia in the high desert of southern Utah over the weekend.
Grover told reporters from her hospital bed on Sunday that while she didn't have food she did have water, and figured that could keep her going for days. "The thing I was worried about was hypothermia -- that that was going to kill me," she said.
A physician's assistant from Wade, Maine, Grover had gone to the trail in Dixie National Forest where she took a survival course at Brigham Young University 40 years ago.
What was supposed to be a six-mile day hike turned into a four-day, three-night ordeal that began when it got too dark for Grover to find her way back.
The next day she broke her leg after jumping a four-foot ledge.
"I really wasn't scared until I stopped shivering," she said, "because that was the point where I thought, 'If somebody doesn't find me pretty soon I'm going to die of hypothermia.'"
The lodge where she was staying alerted the local sheriff when she didn't check out as planned, and a search team found her two days later -- suffering from hypothermia.
So what went through her mind during those cold nights where the temperature dipped into the low 30s and the only warmth she had came from a light poncho?
Besides praying, she also "was dreaming of oranges, which is one of my favorite foods," the Associated Press quoted her as saying. "But there are people who can go for weeks and weeks without food in this world. We have it easy in America."
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