Wyoming Rancher Becomes Guardian Angel For Lost, Snowbound Wisconsin Couple (+video)
By Penny Preston – KULR 8
Troy Barnett is a rancher and outfitter in northwest Wyoming. He had just returned from a hunting trip Sunday when his wife told him about a Wisconsin couple who were lost. The Sheriff’s Office had issued an alert that Mark and Kristine Wathke were missing after leaving Yellowstone’s northeast entrance Tuesday afternoon.
“Kind of knew right off, there’s pretty much one place they could be being gone that long,” said Troy Barnett, K Bar Z Ranch owner. Barnett says he couldn’t sleep that night, “just thinking about it.”
Monday morning, he drove north to the Beartooth Highway, which is not plowed this time of year. Hunters still drive up the road, but two signs alert motorists the road is closed ahead. The Wisconsin couple drove past the signs. But as they went up the road, the snow got deeper. They got stuck about 16 miles from here. When Barnett found them, they had been stranded six days.
Barnett hauled his snowmobile up on his pickup twelve miles, then drove another four on the sled. He says when he first saw the car, he feared the worst.
KULR-8 Television, Billings, MT
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Wisconsin couple ‘happy to be alive’ after Yellowstone rescue
by Associated Press
By the end, they had just eight pieces of bread and half a tank of gas left.
It was Sunday night, and Wisconsinites Mark and Kristine Wathke, missing since Oct. 28, were sitting in their Kia Forte trapped in a foot of snow above 10,000 feet on the Beartooth Highway. They had come to the realization that probably they weren’t going to be found, that this was likely the end.
It had dropped to 7 degrees below zero that night; Mark’s water bottle, sitting in the back window, froze solid in a matter of hours.
The night before, on Nov. 2, when the idea first truly set in that they might not make it off the mountain, they decided to write goodbye notes to their loved ones and make a recording giving their farewells.
Up until that point, they’d been pretty sure someone would come looking for them.
The couple, from Cornell in Chippewa County, had just finished a weeklong vacation touring national parks in South Dakota, Idaho and Wyoming. The grand finale was Yellowstone, and by Monday afternoon, Oct. 28, they were headed out of the park, bound for home.
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