Canadian Woman Survives Four Days Stuck in Her Car

On the morning of March 15th a four day search for Canadian Lorraine Muller ended. Muller had been stuck in her car from Sunday night to Thursday morning and had survived more than 100 hours in the snow near Winnipeg. The amazing 68 year old was not willing to give up.

Sunday night Muller was driving to her brother's house and made a serious wrong turn, leaving her stranded. While Muller was able to leave her vehicle, when attempting to leave the old farm yard where she had gotten stuck in the snow her arthritis became too unbearable and she returned to her car. I guess you could say the Muller attempted to make the best of a bad situation.

"You're stuck there. You can spend two hours feeling sorry for yourself or you can spend two hours trying to help yourself," Muller said on Friday, while at her son's home in Winnipeg.

Since it was the evening Muller new that her chance of being found would be slim throughout the night. By popping the trunk of the car Muller was sure that anyone who would see the vehicle would stop, and she placed a red mitten on her car's antenna. The helpful items that Muller had with her were limited, matches, a candle, leg warmers, a scarf, a pair of men's wool socks, a cardboard box, a Sears catalog and an almost empty bag of peppermints, and she knew this was all that she had to work with. She also knew that it could be a long night.

"The first night I woke up every half hour," she says. "It was just so cold."

In hope of attracting someone Muller turned on her four-way flashers and let them blink all through the night, in spite of a fog that blanketed her vehicle she remained hopeful and continued to keep her lights blinking through the entire night. By morning her car battery was of course dead due to the excessive blinking. However by this time her three sons had been notified and knew that their mother was missing.

"We were just hoping and praying," Mike Muller, 43 said. "The RCMP were called right away, that first night. We feared the worst, to be honest."

Another attempt to get someone to find her Muller managed to light her snow scraper on fire. There was nothing she could do about the winds though and since her flames kept going out she decided to light her candle and go to sleep for the night. In another attempt to get help Muller took the cardboard box and tried to make a shelter from the wind. She even managed to find some straw from a nearby field, but it was too wet to light. So she began burning pages from the Sears catalog, but the wind blew everything out. For the fourth night Muller went to sleep.

The next morning found Muller still strong and ready to face another day in her situation. She wasn't going to lose hope now, after she had worked so hard to survive. That day a local farmer, Warren Doerksen, discovered Muller's car while driving on the road.

Muller owes her survival to her stubbornness, "I'm too stubborn to give up," she says with a laugh. While others would call it more courage than anything.