Courtesy of Fresno County Sheriff’s Office
A woman from Georgia went missing for three weeks in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains and miraculously survived until she was found on Wednesday, May 14, in an unattended cabin in the Vermilion Valley Resort in the Sierra National Forest. Her survival is nothing short of a miracle, she says, after getting caught in a blizzard, surviving on leeks and snowmelt, and stumbling upon the cabin whose owner had intentionally left it unlocked on the chance of this exact scenario.
Tiffany Slaton told authorities and media that she first set out on a solo camping trip in late April near Shaver and Huntington Lakes. She says that things went sideways when she fell off a cliff, severely injured her leg, and was knocked unconscious for two hours. Slaton explained that she splinted one leg up and had to “pop the other knee back into place” when she regained consciousness, and attempted to call 911. She wasn’t able to make phone calls but did have a strong enough signal to search for the nearest Starbucks, of all places. She figured making her way to that location 18 miles away would be easier than retracing her path back to the park’s entrance.
“You can’t get me 911, you can’t get me GPS, but you can get me a Starbucks?” Slaton said. “In doing so, I ended up on this very long, arduous journey that I journaled to try and keep sane.”
According to the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office, the last anybody saw Slaton was on April 24. On April 29, her family reported her missing and Fresno County officials began to search for her on May 6. They found no sign of her over several days and eventually decided to scale back their efforts until they could find more clues and reasons to target other areas outside of Mono Hot Springs. Meanwhile, Slaton had been surviving on leeks and drinking melted snow, she said after. According to Slaton, she ran out of food supplies just five days into the debacle while navigating the Kaiser pass through more than 10 feet of snow, as many as 13 snowstorms, and three hellish weeks.
Some 40 miles away from where it all started, Slaton came upon the Vermillion Valley Resort and one unlocked cabin. The owner, Christopher Gutierrez, had intentionally left it that way earlier in the year on the off-chance somebody in the area might get snowed in. He happened to make his way back to the resort just eight hours after Slaton had let herself in to escape the final storm of the ordeal.
“Without Vermilion resort, I would not be here,” she said. “That was the 13th heavy snowstorm I had been in, and it was going to be the last one. If [the owner] hadn’t come that day, they would have found my body there.”
Slaton wore sunglasses when she met with the media because she says she suffered damage to her eyes from over-exposure to sun and snow.
