Video captures rescue of river tubing group stranded for 3 days, living off bark and flowers

Pushing through dense, shoulder-high brush near a river in west Michigan, a trooper yells out: “Make some noise!”

A boy’s scream can be heard in the distance on body camera footage released by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources showing how rescue teams last week found two women and a 9-year-old boy who had been stranded for three days when their river tubing trip went wrong.

“We’re coming, guys,” says Cameron Wright, a conservation officer from Newaygo County, his breath heard in ragged gasps.

The team picks up their pace, pushing through sharp switchgrass and stinging nettle. A few moments later, they find Sarah Vida, 28, and her son Kayden Kovalcik, 9, along with Jazmin Hock, 28; wearing just their swimming suits.

Hock’s legs are almost entirely covered in deep, red cuts from scrapes after walking for days through the brush. They have a broken phone and a single water bottle with only a few sips left.

“You’re talking about vegetation that’s higher than your eyes and switchgrass that cuts you when you touch it and stinging nettles that makes your skin set on fire,” Anna Cullen, a conservation officer from Muskegon County who helped with the rescue, said Tuesday.

The trio had been on a tubing trip on the Muskegon River in the small community of Twin Lake on Tuesday when they’d hit logs and their tubes popped, according to officials. They were reported missing after one of the women didn’t show up to her dentist appointment.

“I was just in disbelief at finding them because we were just running out of ideas and places to search and it was nothing short of a miracle that we ended up finding them the way we did,” Wright said.

For days, teams had scoured the river and rugged terrain.

The group was found Friday about 7 miles (11.27 kilometers) from where they entered the river, according to Wright. The rescuers had tracked them from a tube next to the river, following footprints, broken twigs and knocked over grass.

In the video, Kayden explains that they’ve been eating bark and flowers, while Hock says they had to drink river water.

Hock explains that they’d been tubing down the river and kept hitting log jams.

“The last one that we ran into just popped everything,” she said.

They started walking and soon realized they were going in circles, she said.

Members of the rescue crew handed over their own shirts to protect them from the bugs swarming their cuts and put medical gloves on some of their hands and feet. Wright inflated his life vest for Hock to sit on. As she answered the rescue team’s questions, her legs, lined with scratches, shook.

“There was not even an inch of their exposed skin that was not just covered in cuts and bug bites and mud and scrapes where they were just physically not able to go any further,” Wright said, explaining that he still had cuts on his arms.

Cullen said the women later explained that when they saw the rescuers, they thought they were hallucinating.

The two women couldn’t walk, so they put them in Stokes baskets, a type of stretcher, to get them out of the brush, while Wright carried the boy on his back. Along with their scrapes and cuts, they were also dealing with dehydration and exhaustion, and were taken to the hospital, according to Lt. Pat Agema, a spokesperson for the Michigan State Police.

“The entire hike out, he’s just telling me about all of the root beer he’s going to drink and the slushies and the pizza and doughnuts he’s going to eat,” said Wright.

He adds: “You would have no idea that he had just spent 72 hours in the woods from how happy he was.”