Craig Berg estimates he made the same three-word plea more than 10,000 times during a recent hike on a remote island near the Canadian border.
“Help! I’m lost!”
Berg, 70, set out in late August to spend a week hiking Isle Royale National Park — a rugged island in the middle of Lake Superior. An experienced hiker, he’d spent months preparing for the trip after completing another solo trek last year at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore along the Michigan coast.
When he got to Isle Royale, he took note of a park ranger’s warning: “If something happens to you, it could be several days until somebody finds you.” But he had a satellite-capable phone and had installed a mapping app as he prepared to explore the 207-square-mile island’s network of trails.
But on the fourth day, Berg somehow veered off what he described as a poorly marked trail and ended up in a swamp. He fell, drenching his clothes, bag and food. His hiking boots fell off, but he was able to recover them. His phone, however, disappeared.
“It was like quicksand,” he said.
Berg would spend the next 11 days frantically trying to find help, surviving on his small supply of freeze-dried food and drinking “the most disgusting water that you could imagine.”
Back home, his wife, Debbie, grew increasingly frightened as the days passed without word.
“Am I going to be a widow now?” she recalled thinking as her mind wandered to all the possible dangers on the island, including wolves and moose.
She pushed officials for a more extensive search after learning initially that just two rangers would be canvassing the vast wilderness. Still, both she and her husband were bracing for the worst.
Then Berg spotted a pair of kayakers 11 days after he’d gone missing.
‘I studied for a year’
Berg, who recently retired from an engineering career, felt called to the remote patch of wilderness on Isle Royale. He bought a higher-powered headlamp, Debbie got him an upgraded camping mattress, and he installed the AllTrails hiking app on his phone.
“I studied for a year,” Berg said. “I got better stuff. I thought it would be similar to Pictured Rocks, and that just wasn’t the case.”
Berg drove to Houghton, Michigan, from the Detroit suburbs on Aug. 27. He caught the ferry to Isle Royale the next day.
He planned to be back home in time to run a 5K with his son Evan, an emergency room doctor, on Sept. 7.
The first three days of hiking went about as well as he could have hoped. He averaged nearly seven miles a day, with overnight camping stops at Island Mine, South Lake Desor and Hatchet Lake.
When he veered from the trail, Berg was near the island’s Chickenbone Lake, which sits near a ridge and is adjacent to large patches of wetlands.
After losing his phone, Berg said he spent about the next seven hours trudging through the muck looking for the trail. Darkness was descending.
“Man, I can’t be walking around here anymore,” he recalled thinking. “I’m going to die.”
He found a small patch of slightly elevated land with three trees. It wasn’t big enough to hold his tent. He hunkered down for the night under the stars in his sleeping bag, still wet and without shelter.
“I was just chattering,” he said.
He rose with the sun the next day and, since his boots weren’t dry, started hiking barefoot. He was eager to find an elevated spot to pitch his bright-orange tent, hoping someone might spot him.
He set out his drenched gear to dry it out not long before rain began pouring down.
The next day, dehydrated and exhausted, he found a spot and put up his tent. He tamped down nearby vegetation to make the area more visible. For two days, he rested.
“I knew I had to conserve my energy as much as possible,” he said.
His supply of freeze-dried food was dwindling. He’d eat every other day or so. The fuel for his camp stove eventually ran out.
Finding drinking water became his main priority. He drank from ponds after treating the water with chlorine tablets and built rock basins to catch rainwater running off his tent. Once, he dug into a bog until brown water pooled, treated it and drank.
He knew he could’ve gotten sick, “but I needed water,” he said.
He also wrote daily notes in a small pocket journal. He labeled the entries “LOST,” under his full name.
“I think by now everybody knows I’m missing, so I do have hope that I will be rescued,” he wrote the fifth day after leaving the trail. The next day, he noted that, for some reason, he had “a craving for a Coke, bad.”
The retired engineer started tinkering with wires connecting headphones to an old MP3 player he’d brought on the hike. He fashioned a radio antenna out of those wires. He turned on the volume and, to his astonishment, he could hear a Top 40 station broadcasting — 91.5 FM from Thunder Bay, Ontario. Bruno Mars was playing. He’d later listen for the weather forecasts.
“It was great to hear a voice,” he wrote on Day 7.
His ninth day of being lost was “a good day,” he wrote. “It was the hardest I worked since the swamp. I found water, a little pond that moose drank from. I think I drank 2 liters right there.”
A moose sighting proved to be his only significant wildlife encounter. He saw wolf scat everywhere and slept with rocks to toss in defense. But none came. At night, he listened to barred owls; during the day, ruby-throated hummingbirds fluttered feet from his face.
On the morning of his 11th day lost, he heard sounds coming from a nearby lake.
“Help! I’m lost!” he shouted once again.
Two men in kayaks eventually came into focus. They were veterans of the Michigan National Guard, they told him, and they were expecting to see only moose as they kayaked on Intermediate Lake.
When they heard Berg’s story of survival, one of them joked: “You owe us some beers.”
The kayakers soon connected to officials overseeing the search. Because of the remote location, officials sent a U.S. Coast Guard crew trained in water rescues. A helicopter soon appeared, the rotors kicking up waves in the lake.
“They dropped down the basket thing, and then they hoisted me up into the helicopter and took me away,” Berg said.
When the National Park Service called Debbie Berg to share the news, she said she felt like she was able to exhale for the first time in more than a week.
“We found him,” the Park Service told her. “He is alive.”
Debbie texted Craig’s son in Michigan and daughter in Japan and called Berg’s parents, who are in their 90s, to let everyone know he was okay.
She and Evan Berg went to the hospital in Marquette, Michigan, where Berg was transported. When they entered his room, they embraced. “I was just bawling my eyes out,” Berg said. “I’ve been crying a lot.”
The Coast Guard had reported that Berg was hypothermic, but doctors cleared him for release after several hours of testing. He got emotional hearing about the legions of people — law enforcement, park officials, civilian volunteers — who’d searched for him.
He saved his highest praise for his wife, who recognized the urgency of the situation and pushed for more resources.
“She’s organized, and she’s a bulldog,” he said. “I think she’s a big reason why they got me out of there.”
Debbie said her role involved a heavy dose of fighting back against online narratives as the search went on.
“He is not senile,” she said. “He is not suicidal. He just likes a good solid adventure in nature.”
Looking back, Berg said he wishes he had packed a backup phone or another device that could’ve helped share his location. He said he’s still recovering from the trauma.
“I have some things to sort out,” he said. “Physically, I’m okay. Mentally, I’m still processing. Emotionally, I’m getting there, but I have a ways to go still.”
Debbie and Berg’s children have urged him not to venture far beyond their backyard, mostly jokingly. For now, Berg said, he will stick to running and golf.
His son’s words still resonate: “Dad, you really scared us.”
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