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Army veteran saves Windsor resident and dog from Poudre River

Greeley Tribune - 12/27/2016

Dec. 27--WINDSOR -- At least twice per week, John Owen and Lucy, his 9-year-old Border Collie mix, walk the Poudre River Trail near the old Kodak plant.

Lucy was off her leash and trotting alongside the 72-year-old Windsor resident Dec. 12 just at the edge of the trail, sometimes straying a little farther away. Then she barked.

"It was her, 'Oh, I see something or smell something' bark," Owen said. "She doesn't bark much."

Owen went to check on her, and as a result, he would later be grateful another Windsor resident, Lance Crites, decided to take a walk on the trail that day.

"To be honest, I'd like to think I was going to break through a couple more pieces of ice and I would have been out, but I don't know that I would have. In my mind, if he hadn't come along I would have been in really serious trouble.-- John Owen, fell through the ice at the Poudre River Trail

Owen left the trail, and he found Lucy in the frigid water. She had chased something out onto the ice and it broke under her weight.

Owen admits what happened next was foolish, but he and Lucy are close. So when he saw her in the river, he went after her.

"I don't know who cares about whom more," he said.

Owen thought the river would be low, but he fell in the ice and the water was up to his armpits. He couldn't get out of the ice, and as his temperature dropped and no one else was around, he knew he was in trouble.

Crites, an Army veteran, just happened to pass by and hear Owen's cries for help.

He hadn't been out to the Poudre Trail in months. When Crites moved his family to Windsor earlier this year, he and his wife walked there often. But when the weather turned cold, they stopped visiting the trail as much. But that day, he decided to go for a run. The trail seemed abandoned until he heard Owen's voice. Crites headed toward his cries for help.

Owen could reach Lucy, so he grabbed her and threw her out of the water and onto the ice.

He felt the riverbed with his feet, hoping to find a sudden rise or incline he could use to climb out of the water, but the shore seemed to offer the only hope. More than 10 feet of ice lay between Owen and the shore. He started slamming his elbow into the ice in an attempt to break through.

Owen managed to break off quite a bit of ice, but it grew thicker as he got closer to the shore and the cold sapped his strength.

It was Lucy's turn to find help. She'd sat shivering on the ice near Owen after he pulled her out. When her ears perked up and her head pointed in the direction of the path, he could tell she'd heard something.

Looking through the trees, Owen just barely managed to see a head moving along the trail. He started yelling.

Crites couldn't see anyone from the trail. He ventured over the berm, through the trees and saw Lucy soaking wet, shivering and scared. Then he spotted Owen chest-deep in the water.

With the help of a long stick, Crites pulled Owen out of the water, onto the ice and safely to shore.

"To be honest, I'd like to think I was going to break through a couple more pieces of ice and I would have been out, but I don't know that I would have," Owen said. "In my mind, if he hadn't come along I would have been in really serious trouble."

Back on the trail, Crites tried to warm the man up.

"He was pretty waterlogged," Crites said.

Even out of the river, water pooled in Owen's pockets, his fingers were blue and his legs numb. He had trouble walking from the shore to the path, and the trailhead was still a half-mile away.

Owen sat on a bench and gave Crites his keys so he could drive back to get him. Crites gave Owen his coat.

Owen wanted to drive himself home, but Crites could tell the waterlogged man couldn't feel his own fingers, so he drove Owen home.

"I wanted to make sure he was all right," Crites said. "It was not the first time I've had to deal with a cold-weather (situation). When I was in the military, a couple of young guys got lost in a land-navigation course. They'd been out for hours and they'd been hypothermic. So I kind of knew what it looked like, having dealt with that."

While Owen's wife took Crites back to his truck in the trailhead parking lot, Owen warmed up in the shower.

When his wife got back, the couple went to the emergency room at Medical Center of the Rockies on the advice of his doctor. Owen's toes and fingers still were blue, but he warmed up under a blanket and they sent him home.

More than a week later, Owen's arm and elbow still were black and blue from where he tried to break through the ice. The doctors told him he was lucky.

When Crites thinks back on that day, he remembers only worrying about Owen and wanting to make sure the man was OK.

"The more that I've thought about this after the fact, it really is kind of a Christmas miracle," he said. "It's just a fluke I was there."

___

(c)2016 the Greeley Tribune (Greeley, Colo.)

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