Ten-year-old Joshua Dennis slept peacefully in a Salt Lake hospital room Thursday, far from the terrifying darkess of the mine ledge where he huddled cold, hungry and exhausted for five days until rescuers heard his faint cry for help.
The Kearns boy's survival was called a miracle. Despite having been in the abandoned Hidden Treasure Mine near Stockton, Tooele County, since Friday evening, Joshua suffered only frostbite on several toes, dehydration and exhaustion and was listed in stable condition at Primary Children's Medical Center.Joshua's perch, 150 feet above the main floor of the mine and about 500 feet away from where he was last seen with a Boy Scout troop, was passed by searchers at many times during their sweeps of the mine.
But not until three of the hundreds of law enforcement officials and volunteers who participated in the search heard a distant voice about 2 p.m. Wednesday was Joshua able to be found.
"I thought I heard something. I asked the other guys to be quiet, and we heard it again. It was a real faint, `Help,' " said Ray Guymon, the leader of the Huntington, Emery County-based Utah Power & Light Mine Rescue Team.
Guymon, accompanied by another team member, Gary Christensen, and local historian John Skinner, began hollering back and split up to locate where the tiny voice was coming from.
Around 2:45 p.m., Christensen discovered the ledge, actually a mined ore pocket about 5 to 6 feet wide and extending back some 30 feet and about 2,000 feet from the mine entrance.
Christensen described what he found as, "One brave little boy. He wasn't crying. He wasn't scared." Joshua was, however, disoriented and did not realize how much time had passed.
"I told him I was taking him to his mom and dad and he said his dad was out there, but that his mom was home and wouldn't be there," Christensen said. Joshua said he had heard searchers earlier in the day.
The trio had stopped to determine which way to proceed when they heard Joshua's voice. "We were lucky. Anybody could have found him. We just happened to be there at the time he yelled," Guymon said.
The location of the ledge helped hide the boy from searchers during at least six separate searches of the mine, including one on Wednesday morning, and led rescue crews to shift their efforts to the surrounding area.
"He was just isolated up in this little hole that you couldn't see until you got right on top of it. You had to step on it to find it," Guymon said, adding it appeared Joshua wandered in the darkness until he reached a dead end.
Once he could go no further, he had no choice but to wait for help. "If you've never been in a mine, you don't know what darkness is. He could see nothing," Christensen said.
Marks in the mine walls showed Joshua's path to a point along the main pathway where he apparently made a wrong turn. Guymon said that had the boy turned left instead of right, he would have made it to safety.
Joshua emerged from the mine in the arms of his rescuers to cheers. "It was like he was our own son," said Rich Townsend, one of the first searchers outside the mine to see him.
The boy said little, merely nodding when asked if he was thirsty, but drank water in big gulps before being transported in one of the searcher's cars to the Tooele Valley Regional Medical Center.
There he was examined in the emergency room while his parents, the family's LDS bishop and his wife, and other relatives and friends waited nearby. Nurses at the hospital said Joshua was talkative and in good spirits.
Dr. Ben Buchanan said Joshua told him that he stayed put waiting to be found, accounting for his lack of injuries. Searchers called the boy's condition amazing.
Because the family wanted him closer to their own doctor, Buchanan said, Joshua was flown to Primary Children's Medical Center, where he is expected to stay two to three days under the care of Dr. Tony Woodward.
More than 200 volunteers joined the Tooele and Salt Lake County sheriff's offices and Search and Rescue teams, two search dog teams and rangers from the Dugway Proving Grounds in the search for Joshua.
The boy was reported missing at 2:30 a.m. Saturday after he became separated from the Scout troop during an exploration of the mine. Joshua, who had become ill, decided to leave the cave.
After spending the weekend combing the shafts and tunnels of the mine, searchers began to focus on the nearby Dry Canyon area, made up of sheer cliffs and rough terrain.
The UP&L team, which usually responds to fires and explosions in mines, joined the search on Wednesday. The local historian, Skinner, also got his first chance to go into the mine on Wednesday.
Skinner, whose grandfather was superintendent of the mine before it closed in 1957, said he believed he could lead searchers to areas that may have been overlooked.
He and the UP&L team, unlike many of the other searchers who had been through the mine, believed Joshua had never found his way out. "We just had a feeling he could still be there," Guymon said.
"Before we went into the mine, Gary turned to me and said, `We can't stop. I just know we can't stop. Our job's not done yet,' " he said. "It was no great premonition. I think it was just determination. People didn't want to give up."
That determination was rewarded Wednesday when Joshua was found. At a 6 p.m. briefing called by Tooele County Sheriff Donald Proctor, the mood was jubilant until a television news report about the search came on.
Then the dusty, dirty searchers fell silent as they saw the tearful reactions of Joshua's family and friends for the first time. "I don't even know where to start giving thanks. To everyone, I guess," Proctor said.