‘Desperate situation’: Stuck sledders feared the worst before rescue

A group of four snowmobilers started digging in for the night last Tuesday and feared the worst after they got stuck in massive snowdrifts on a northern New Brunswick trail they’d never taken before.

But just as they were giving up hope of rescue, an off-duty RCMP officer and his partner, both with an intricate knowledge of the trail system in the area and hearing of their plight from the police station after a 911 call, found them in time to lead them to safety.

“Grateful is an understatement,” said David Brewer of Zealand, a community just north of Fredericton. “Without the heroic actions of this man and woman coming out in unknown conditions to find us, we could all possibly not be here to tell our story today.”

He and three friends had taken off for a sledding trip around the province a couple days earlier, and on Tuesday had planned to cover the leg from Edmundson to Bathurst – a trip that would have normally taken them eight to 10 hours.

But two big snowstorms that had recently dumped 75 centimetres of snow in the area were followed by windy conditions that created massive drifts.

After 10- 11 hours of hard sledding, they ran into a group of Quebec snowmobilers who warned them the way to Bathurst was unpassable, so the friends decided to change their route toward Campbellton instead.

“The trail system app that we all use showed that the trails had been freshly groomed within the last couple days so we figured we would have an easy time making it,” Brewer said.

But in those two days, the drifts had taken over that section of trail too. And the wind was creating white-out conditions as the sky grew darker.

“It was very nerve-wracking,” Brewer recalls. “At first it wasn’t too bad, but as we got further into it, near the hydro lines, we would keep running into huge drifts … We tried to fight our way through, knowing we had 30 to 50 kilometres to go but we didn’t know the trails because we have never been on them before.”