For about 20 miles, 85-year-old Ruby Stein wrestled her 2007 Nissan Sentra up an unpaved, steep mountain road south of Gypsum. She was lost and searching for Interstate 70 after taking a wrong turn while trying to beat a winter storm home.
Alone, with no one in sight and only a backcountry skier’s tracks around her, the steel-haired woman then found herself stuck at a dead end. Stein tried to rev her tiny maroon vehicle back and forth, as she had learned from years of ranching on the Eastern Plains, but her car was swallowed by mud, snow and ice as her cat, Nikki, looked on with a curious stare.
“I blowed my horn and blowed my horn and flashed my lights until the battery ran down,” said Stein, who lives in the northeast Colorado town of Akron. “Then my car went dead. I had a cellphone with me, but it wouldn’t work.”
“To me,” she added in her slight drawl, “it was a normal life until this happened.”
Stein ended up spending four nights and five days stranded in the Eagle County wilderness, using MacGyver-like resourcefulness to keep herself alive as snow fell on and off. She rationed what little food she had — a partial sweet roll and a Rice Krispies Treat — and used safety pins to fashion a blanket from the clothes that were in her car.
She scooped up and melted snow in a cat food container to stay hydrated.
“I was keeping myself very, very calm,” Stein said. “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.”
One wrong turn
Stein had decided to make the 245-mile trip from Akron to see her granddaughter Alee Preuss because three years had passed since she last saw Preuss and her four children.
“I thought, ‘I want to run over and see them for a little while,’ ” Stein said.
But on March 21, after a few days with her grandchildren and with a storm looming, she opted to cut her trip short to avoid the hassle of being stuck at the Eisenhower-Johnson tunnels, remembering a sour experience she had there a few years back. Stein got directions, packed up her car and took off for home.
“I don’t understand what happened,” Stein said. “I thought I took a right turn.”
Instead of heading toward I-70, she drove farther and farther away from civilization into the LEDE Reservoir area in Eagle County, way outside cellphone range. Stein says she realized right away how serious her situation was.
“I went as far as I could possibly go, I guess,” Stein said. “I tried to get up on the snow to keep traction, out of the mud, and my driver-side wheel went down into the mud — and that’s where I stayed.”
She took stock of the few items she had, discovering the butterscotch-flavored Rice Krispies Treats snack that she didn’t know was there and thankful that she had decided to keep the sweet roll. Stein allowed herself two bites of each every day. There was plenty of dry cat food for Nikki, and at one point Stein pondered whether she might also have to indulge.
“When my Rice Krispies treat was getting close, I thought, ‘It might be good,’ ” Stein said. “I was looking out the window for foliage or something else to eat.”
To keep warm, she stuffed the clothes her granddaughter had given her to donate in the door and window crevices.
The first day came and went without any signs of hope. On March 22, a helicopter flew overhead and Stein thought she would be rescued — telling Nikki, “They’re here to save us!” — but it never returned.
She didn’t get out of her vehicle, which was surrounded by snow. Instead, she spent time thinking and reading a book.
“I just did a lot of thinking,” she said. “You know, ‘What if? What if?’ Just take it as it comes is how I felt.”
March 23 also came and went. As did March 24.
“On Saturday, I would have run out of everything I had,” Stein said. “I thought, ‘That’s it. Whatever God wants, God wants.'”
Spur-of-the-moment hike
Dan Higbee and Katie Preston made plans to ski Saturday and were debating a trip to the mountains in Aspen or going to a resort in Eagle County. Eventually, they settled on Beaver Creek, but by the time they got there — just before 11 a.m. — the ski area’s parking lots were full, so they decided to hike instead.
Preston began searching on an app for a place to go and found three trailheads, one of which was up Gypsum Creek Road, south of Gypsum and near LEDE Reservoir. They hopped in Higbee’s Toyota Tundra pickup and headed up.
“It was muddy and slushy, and he was in four-wheel drive and we were swerving everywhere,” Preston said. “In four-wheel drive, it was pretty nasty.”
The couple couldn’t find the trailhead, so they opted to drive toward the reservoir and hike there.
“We kept going, and it was kind of a little nerve-wracking — slipping and sliding,” Higbee said. “If I would have stopped my momentum, we would have been stuck. We drove until we couldn’t drive anymore. And then there’s this Nissan Sentra.”
Initially, the pair believed the vehicle had been abandoned, thinking there was no way such a small car could make it up such a rough road. But because one of its doors was propped open, they decided to make sure no one was inside.
They called out, asking if anyone was there and if they were OK. A faint voice answered, Higbee recounted.
“She was in the back of the car,” he said. “She said, ‘No, everything is not OK.’ ”
It was Ruby Stein, a bit disoriented and shocked to see a human after five days alone, but she was otherwise unscathed. She wasn’t hypothermic, and she had no frostbite. Nikki, the cat, lounged inside the small car.
“She had more food out for the cat than she did for herself,” Preston said. “A full bowl of cat food was just sitting there. We gave her food. We got her water. We got her cat, her keys and her purse.”
The couple says as they drove back toward Gypsum, they had to remind Stein — who was talking nonstop — to keep drinking and eating between words.
Jessie Porter, spokeswoman for the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office, said the road where Stein got stuck is just a dirt road in a rural mountainous area.
“It’s not a fully maintained road at this time of year,” she said, “and it’s not well traveled this time of year because it can be very muddy.”
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Akron had issued a statewide “Be on the lookout” bulletin for Stein after her family members reported that she never made it home.
But Porter says no major search team was launched because of limited staffing at the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office and authorities had no idea where Stein had gone.
That left it up to Stein’s family to look for her. They were out every day last week, driving around the I-70 corridor in hopes of finding their matriarch. Stein’s granddaughter, Preuss, said she cried all day, every day.
In the end, all it took to rescue Stein was a last-minute decision to go hiking.
“To have Katie and I change our plans as many times as we did during the day to end up in that spot where we needed to be to help somebody is one thing,” Higbee said. “But to see her reunited with her family was so emotional. Katie and I, for the rest of the day we were processing what happened. We are still processing what happened.”
Preston and Higbee took Stein straight to her granddaughter’s house, calling authorities and her family members on the way.
“We weren’t here when she got here,” Preuss said. “We were out driving around looking. My cellphone service was going in and out, and then I kept getting text messages from my grandma’s phone. When we got here, the sheriff was here and paramedics were checking her out. We just cried. Basically everyone who was here was just crying.”
“Always been a doer”
Stein’s relatives are still in disbelief.
“She means the world to absolutely every single one of us,” Preuss said. “We love her to pieces. She’s right back to her normal self.”
Stein has five children, nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007, and for the past several years she has been living in Akron with one of her sons.
Stein attributed her survival, in part, to her upbringing. “I’ve got scars on my body from horses,” she said. “I’m only 5 foot and 110 pounds. I’ve just always been a doer. I’m an old farm girl from the day I was born.”
Stein said her children have talked in the days since her ordeal about taking her car away, but she won’t hear of it.
“I said, ‘They better not take my car!’” she said. “I’ve driven since I was 12 years old out on the farm in Kansas.”
Meantime, Nikki, the cat, seems unfazed by the ordeal.
“The cat’s great,” Stein said.
