Teen Stranded 30 Hours in Waist-Deep Snow 'Knew' He Would Die, But Survival Instincts Kept Him Alive

By Amanda Thomason January 13, 2020 at 10:45am

Like many outdoorsmen, 17-year-old Nicolas (Nico) Stacy-Alcantara finds nature rejuvenating and a breath of fresh air after the hustle and bustle of daily life.

“I love hiking, it kind of clears my head,” he told AP News.

On Jan. 2, while visiting Salt Lake City, Utah, the Fresno, California, resident decided to hike through Millcreek Canyon. He was in the area to visit a friend and check out colleges, but why not check out the natural offerings as well?

Stacy-Alcantara packed for what he thought would be a day hike, making sure to bring six peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some water, along with his hiking gear.

But as he got partway into the 16-mile hike, the weather changed for the worse and he realized that he was going to have to make a difficult decision.

“I knew exactly where I was,” he said, according to KSL-TV. While he had no service, he was able to use his phone’s GPS and mapping capabilities with no issue.

Taking stock of his surroundings, he built a snow cave under a tree. He put on all the clothes he had and huddled for warmth.

His fingers and toes soon went numb from frostbite, but he knew that he needed to protect his head and torso to stay alive.

As the frigid hours passed, Stacy-Alcantara kept himself occupied by imagining conversations with his friends. He found a bracelet from his ex-girlfriend in his backpack, which gave him some encouragement, and he wrote goodbye notes to his family in case it truly was the end.

Despite his difficult situation, he just knew he needed to stay awake and alert. As he entertained himself, he also set his phone’s alarm to go off every half an hour so that he wouldn’t fall asleep.

At the first sign of light on Jan. 3, he left his snow cave and struck out once more in an attempt to get home.

The teen attempted to change his wet socks and re-tie his boots, but his fingers had become too frozen to do so, and as he made his way out of the cave, they fell off. Later, rescue crews determined that he’d been pressing on through waist-deep snow.

Thankfully, he soon came upon back-country skiers who were able to make a call with their satellite phone, and he was airlifted to the University of Utah hospital.

After an assessment, doctors informed him that he was doing surprisingly well, and despite the second-degree frostbite which caused some gnarly blisters on his toes, it looked like he’d be able to keep all his appendages.

“People even overnight in the cold in this area often lose both feet and both hands,” Dr. Stephen Morris said, according to KSL-TV.

The teen managed to keep in good spirits throughout the ordeal, and the doctors credited his survival to his positive attitude. He even joked during one interview that he “didn’t want PB&J to be [his] last meal.”

While Stacy-Alcantara’s girlfriend and her mother notified authorities when he failed to show up the evening before, there was little they could do. His own mother expressed her relief at seeing the helicopter that was carrying her son come into view.

“When that chopper came over the mountain … I had no idea if my son was going to come off on a stretcher or walking … and then he came skipping off of it,” she said. “It was so surreal … That was the most amazing feeling ever to see him alive — to see him walking.”

“It was scary, but I was learning something new about myself,” the young man said. “It was discovering that I had something in me that I didn’t know I had. I didn’t know I had this ability to push past a situation where I knew I was going to die.”

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