KANE COUNTY, Utah (ABC 4 News) - A group of 20 people, adults and children, driving through some of the most beautiful but remote country on earth took a wrong turn and became stranded in 100 plus degree heat. ABC 4 was able to contact the group on a cell phone while the Kane County Sheriff's Deputies were still trying to find them.
Aharon Wiesen, with friends and relatives, including ten children left Bryce Canyon around 8pm Saturday night. They were using GPS which showed a short cut to Kanab where they planned to spend the night. “We have, like four GPS systems and all told us the same so we didn’t see that something is wrong,” said Wiesen.
Those units were in four different cars but the group missed the turn off that would take them to highway 89 and Kanab. “After awhile it starts to be not a good road and we were thinking okay, it's construction, it could be two miles three miles.”
It turned out to be more like 75 miles and three hours of traveling on rugged, remote dirt road, in the dark, going the opposite direction of Kanab. Wiesen says they continued on because the GPS showed they were closer going ahead than back tracking. “In the end we got to a point that we were like three from the top of the mountain and nowhere to go. It's like on the right, on the left, continue---nothing.”
Wiesen says along the way one of their cars broke down. The car full of people doubled up in the remaining three and left it behind. By then they were low of fuel and running out of water. “We don't have water, we don't have food, we don't have nothing. We have ten kids and one of them is sick,” said Wiesen.
At one in the morning Kane County dispatch got a frantic call from Wiesen but he could not tell them where to look. “I think they were just panicking to the point that they were really lost and no one was going to find them,” said Kane County Sheriff Lemont Smith.
Wiesen says that's exactly how his group felt. “I called the police. Someone is going to come to rescue us, to give us water... But it was like nobody cares,” he said.
By cell phone deputies were able to tell the group how to set their GPS units to show directional coordinates. At 11:30 Sunday morning those coordinates helped locate the lost travelers in the Wahweap Drainage area near Glen Canyon. They were a little dehydrated but okay.
The GPS units that got them into trouble ended up helping rescuers locate the group. Sheriff Smith says they answer so many calls like this that his deputies carry extra gas and water in their vehicles at all times. He warns people when traveling in Kane County not to depend on finding the shortest distance on GPS because that doesn't always mean there's a road to take them that way.
