A Michigan electrician on a hunting trip spent a week stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with no food, shelter or warm clothes. Adrian Knopps was stranded for seven days in September after his hunting partner, Garrett Hagen, drowned while boarding their boat, according to a report from Detroit News.
Knopps, 51, who is a self-employed electrician from Grand Ledge, Michigan, was sleep-deprived, hallucinating and slipping into hypothermia.
Sharing a river delta with bears and wolves, he was pelted by rain the whole time including a storm packing 70-mph winds. Because of the wet conditions, he rarely sat or lay down, sleeping three hours the entire week. During high tide in the middle of the night, he clutched the upright roots of an overturned tree while surrounded by a mile of water in all directions.
“You try to live one moment at a time and do what you have to,” he told The Detroit News in his first extended newspaper interview about the ordeal. Coast Guard officials in Alaska said they had never seen anyone survive so long under those conditions....(Detroit News)
Knopps was convinced was going to die and carved a goodbye message into his rifle, hoping a hunter would find it and pass along to his family. But a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter rescued him. He attributed his survival to God, luck and guile.
