Volunteers and emergency responders alike are calling it a miracle that 84-year-old Mary Byman was found alive and without serious injury. 

Byman disappeared in the RM of Piney on Thursday while blueberry picking with a friend. She was located just after 9 p.m. Sunday night by a handful of individuals who refused to give up.

Jason Ginter was among those volunteers who first came into contact with Byman after she was located. As he tells it, Byman was found by two men roughly a mile and a half from where she had originally parked. Upon learning this, the whole search party was instantly flooded with unexpected relief.

“After that many days out there, there was less and less hope every day," Ginter says. "Then, when she was alive, we just looked to the heavens and thanked the Lord.”

However, Ginter explains that the secondary task of getting her out of the forest was still formidable.

“It was terribly dense, and swampy too,” he says. “We were going through mud and water while climbing over deadfall, and maneuvering around trees.”

Ginter says everyone on the team was needed to push bush and flatten bush in order to make enough of a path for others to carry Byman through on a stretcher. “It took a lot of people,” he stresses.

Byman herself was in surprisingly good spirits when she was found considering she was cold, dehydrated, and tired from her many days in the woods.

“She was humorous and joking with us,” says Ginter, “but she was definitely banged up from the conditions she had been living in for the past couple of days; who wouldn’t be?”

The search crew ensured Byman was warm and fed as they carried her through the woods. Ginter says she even fell asleep on the backboard momentarily. He expects that was probably some of the best rest she had received in days.

It took Ginter and his fellow volunteers nearly four hours to clear a path and carry her out. Still, he considers the whole ordeal very fortunate indeed.

“For an elderly person to be out in the woods like that ... man, she’s a tough lady!”

Byman has since been taken to hospital for a precautionary examination.