A 79-year-old cruise ship passenger spent Wednesday night in the woods alone and without any camping gear after she got lost while hiking near the Mendenhall Glacier.
The Juneau Police Department launched a multiagency search for the woman, whose name hasn’t been released, after she missed her ship, the Coral Princess, which departed Juneau at about 4 p.m. Wednesday. Working with the U.S. Forest Service and the Cruise Line Agencies of Alaska, JPD officers searched for the missing woman until about midnight Wednesday.
Before they could find her, however, she found them.
At about 9:30 a.m. Thursday, the woman walked into the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center, tired and a little wet, but no worse for the wear.
“She’s a hardy soul,” said Kirby Day, port manager for Princess Cruises. “She is a strong lady, and she knew what she was doing. She did all the right things except for making one wrong turn.”
After veering off onto the Nugget Creek Trail while attempting to hike the East Glacier Trail, the woman became lost, according to Nikki Hinds, assistant director of the visitor center. Disoriented and alone, the woman decided to spend the night on the trail and head back in the morning.
Though her impromptu camping trip was probably less than fun, the woman, a resident of Ontario, Canada, was “well prepared to be hiking in a rainforest,” according to Hinds.
“She didn’t have camping gear, but she wore layers and a rain coat,” Hinds told the Empire in a phone interview Thursday. “I’m sure she was still cold, but it was a happy ending when she came in this morning.”
Hinds said she doesn’t know of any other visitors who have gotten lost on a trail, spent the night alone and then walked back on their own.
Police officers picked the woman up from the glacier shortly after she returned to the visitor center and rushed her to the airport, where she caught a plane to Ketchikan and rejoined her ship, according to Day.
“This was one of those ones that turned out good,” he said. “We’ve had a couple over the years that didn’t.”
Though the woman ultimately ended up rescuing herself, Day and several people worked well into the night Wednesday to locate her. Because she traveled to the glacier independently — not associated with any tours — the search team didn’t have much to go on.
JPD and the cruise ship employees looking for the woman called all of the tour groups in town, searched hotels and checked with the hospital to turn up any leads on her whereabouts.
JPD spokesperson Erann Kalwara said that one officer patrolled the downtown area for four hours asking about the woman.
“Everybody comes together, and you scratch your head and go 10 different directions and ask 20 different people,” Day said, describing the search process. “Ultimately, it’s really a group effort.”
City Manager Rorie Watt, who was notified about the missing woman Thursday morning, commended everybody involved in the search for doing everything they could to help return the woman to her ship.
“Just another day in the life of an Alaskan town that gets a million cruise ship passengers coming off boats into our community,” he said.
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
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