Grandfather found safe after 13 hours in wilderness

For a portion of the 13 hours he was lost in the Pine Nut Mountains this week, Chuck Mathews, 82, said he had flashbacks of his time in World War II.

Twice, while serving as a young sailor with the U.S. Navy in 1942, Mathews had the misfortune of being on a sinking ship. On one of those occasions he floated in the Corral Sea for two days before being rescued.

Part of Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, Mathews found himself again dreaming of getting home and hoping for rescue -- or, at the least, the ability to walk over the ridge before him and back to the tiny home he'd built some 41 years before.

Inside that simple house on homestead land seven miles from civilization sat Mathews wife, Wilma; daughter, Tamily Degenhart; and granddaughter Erika Lera.

The women were battling thoughts of their own, but theirs weren't memories or dreams. They were heartbreaking fears -- that Mathews, who had wandered away from his mud-bogged truck at 7 p.m. the previous evening, wouldn't be found alive.

"What can you say? We just sat here and thought about him all alone up there by himself. All we could do was sit and wait," Wilma, 76, said.

The trouble began Tuesday night when son Kit needed a jump start for his truck that died a few miles west of the house. Kit walked to his father's home from the place where his truck had stopped and asked him to jump his battery.

The weather that day was cold and wet, the seemingly endless dirt road to the house was mostly mud and puddles. The evening fog hung heavy in Carson Valley on this night, limiting Mathews' already minimal eyesight.

"I went to get my kid unstuck," Mathews said from the comfort of his easy chair Thursday, his family standing around him laughing at the predicament that fact got him into.

Mathews took Kit back to the truck and gave him a jump start.

Somewhere between there and home, "Uncle Kit lost Grandpa," Erika said. "We were all mad at him for losing Grandpa."

As Mathews headed for his home on Sunrise Pass Road, bad eyes and bad weather sent him up the wrong road at the fork near his house, putting him a few miles into the rolling hills and mud of the Pine Nut Mountains and heading east instead of north.

Out there, when his truck got mired in the mud, the real trouble began, Mathews said.

"I got out of the truck and walked back to where Kit last was, but he'd already taken off and come back home," he said. "I should have never left the truck.

As he headed in the direction he thought was home, he said he became disoriented because of the weather.

"I knew exactly where I was going," Mathews said, scoffing at the suggestion that he wandered. "I know the mountains.

Mathews said he walked through the night because he had to.

"You don't quit. You don't fool around when you're 82 years old and blind."

For hours a handful of family and volunteers combed the area high and low, looking for some sign of Mathews.

"By midnight when my brother found Grandpa's truck we knew he was lost," Lera said. It was then that her husband, Mark Lera, called Douglas County Search and Rescue.

Through the night a team of 10 rescuers methodically searched the area. In the early morning, a tracking dog was sent into the home to get Mathew's scent from his house slippers.

The day was Jan. 2 and marked the Mathewses 59th wedding anniversary.

"I heard on the scanner at around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday someone say, 'I think subject has been spotted -- he's walking,'" Lera said Thursday standing in the living room of her grandparent's home. A broad smile crossed her face as she recalled the words that proved her grandpa was alive.

"When we got the news it was wonderful," Wilma sighed.

According to the police report, when he was found Mathews was "cold, tired, thirsty and hungry, but otherwise alert and oriented." He was located in Juniper Valley, in the foothills of the Pine Nut Mountains not far from his home.

Wilma said he's doing fine now, except he's a little stiff and using a cane to walk.

Mathews admits he had forgotten that Jan. 2 was his 59th wedding anniversary, but no gift was necessary for Wilma. The mere fact that her husband walked back into the house was gift enough.

"I was so happy I gave him a kiss. All us girls were all over him," she said.

Mark Lera said he had never seen such a professional outfit as he did when the Search and Rescue team took over the mission to find Grandpa.

"They were tenacious," he said.

Wilma and Erika echoed Mark's sentiment.

"We can't thank them enough. They were such wonderful people.