Cellphone helps find lost Dolly Sods hikers

Two female hikers who got lost hiking the Dolly Sods trails used their cellphone as a Saint Bernard rescue electronics.

The Kanawha County 20-year-olds took several of the trail loops before losing track of where they were.That was Wednesday. At 9 a.m. Thursday they called the Canaan Valley Volunteer Fire Department, which tracked the cellphone’s ping location.

“Once they called us and we got an 'X-Y' ping off their phone,” Canaan Valley VFD fire chief Sanford Green said, “they hunkered down and stayed underneath a spruce thicket, held onto to one another, conserved their body heat, and survived a night, they were lucky to survive."

With wind gusts of 40 to 50 mph and temperatures in the 30s, the wind chill was in the teens.

I’ve hiked in Dolly Sods. It has plants that are not found east of the Mississippi because the Ice Age brought them down Canada, then receded and the unique flora was created.