All Ends Well For Lost & Found Family

Six family members who disappeared more than two weeks ago after setting out on an overnight trip were found Tuesday in a mountainous area of southwestern Oregon, surviving in their snowbound recreational vehicle on dehydrated food and other provisions.

Two parents were found first on Tuesday after they had left their stranded recreational vehicle on Monday to seek help. Rescuers then located the RV and the four others, including two children.

All six were reunited Tuesday afternoon in Glendale, Oregon.

Peter Stivers and Marlo Hill-Stivers ran up to a van as it pulled into town with the two children and Stivers' mother and stepfather, Becky and Elbert Higginbotham of Arizona.

"I love you baby," Marlo Hill-Stivers told her daughter, Gabrayell, 8.

"I love you too, Mommy," she replied.

Peter Stivers rested his hands on the shoulders of his 9-year-old son, Sabastyan.

"He had fun. They enjoyed it," Peter Stivers said. "They didn't know we was in trouble."

Still, for the adults – and their worried loved ones - it clearly was an ordeal.

The six left Ashland, Oregon, on March 4 to go to the coast – a trip that normally takes a couple of hours across the mountains.

But they got lost, and ultimately they got stuck in about four feet of snow, at about 3,800 feet, on a dicey mountain road.

"We thought we'd take the scenic route," said Elbert Higginbotham. "Every time we took a corner, it seemed like we took a wrong corner."

At one point, the RV slid off the road. The family tried to hand-dig the RV out but could not.

Elbert Higginbotham says the family sustained itself on snow and dehydrated food they had loaded for the trip. They had enough propane to keep the RV heated.

"I'm so proud of my family. They stuck together, they didn't lose it," said a bearded Higginbotham.

Stivers and his wife decided Monday morning to go seek help - leaving with a tent, wool blankets, tuna fish and honey, Higginbotham said.

On Tuesday morning, a worker from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management found Stivers, 29, and Hill-Stivers, 31.

Later, rescue workers in a helicopter made contact with the other four, said Sgt. David Marshall, spokesman for the Douglas County Sheriff's Department. Snow machines were sent to pick them up.

Even then, getting out wasn't easy.

"There was a short window," said Elbert Higginbotham, of the family's helicopter rescue. "It was just enough time to land the one ship and dump the medic and get back out as the weather was closing in on the helicopter."

The RV was found near an old airstrip about 14 miles west of Glendale, a town of fewer than 900 people along Interstate 5, about 80 miles north of the California border

After the family was reported missing, rescue teams from Oregon and California scoured the two closest routes from Ashland to the coast. But police didn't know exactly where they had been heading, and they eventually called off the search when there were no leads.

At the time, police said family members did not answer calls to their cell phones, and the bank accounts of all four adults had not been touched since March 4.

The area is too remote for cell phone service.

During the initial search, authorities focused on the U.S. 199 corridor south from Grants Pass, a well-traveled route across the Coast Range, rather than narrow and windy back roads that are more direct routes.

Sgt. Jim Alderman, spokesman for the police department in the city of Ashland, said it was a puzzle why the family chose their route.

"We don't know why they went the way they did," he said. "We don't know why they were up there where they were."

The Stivers family has lived in Ashland for several years but rarely traveled, said Andi Black, general manager at DJ's Video in Ashland where Hill-Stivers worked.

"She's just super-responsible," Black said. "So we knew something was wrong ... this is totally unlike her."

"I knew we were going to hear something eventually," said Char Seward, a close friend and co-worker of Marlo Hill-Stivers. "But after two weeks and two days of not hearing something, it was exhausting."