A local man and woman are alive today after what emergency responders describe as a rescue high up on Scout Mountain built on a series of near-impossible strokes of luck — any one of which, had it gone differently, likely would have had tragic consequences.

Authorities called the victims' survival a miracle. They weren't exaggerating.

The ordeal began around 8:20 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 30, when Bannock County Sheriff's Office dispatchers received an unusual 911 call. Dispatchers could hear the victims talking to each other and could tell they'd been in a crash — but the victims couldn't hear the dispatchers at all.

Using GPS technology, dispatchers traced the call to an area of Scout Mountain known as a cell phone dead zone where calls normally never go through.

The man was driving a UTV with the woman as his only passenger when he failed to negotiate a curve on Top Scout Mountain Road. The vehicle left the rough gravel roadway and tumbled down a steep ravine before slamming into a tree. Both victims were pinned inside, their legs trapped — and the wreckage was so far down the ravine it couldn't be seen from the road above.

Dispatchers made a critical call of their own: they kept the line open, listening to the victims' voices to confirm a crash had happened and that the pair was trapped. Sheriff's deputies, search and rescue crews and a Pocatello Fire Department ambulance were sent up the mountain, guided only by GPS coordinates that, in a stroke of unusual luck, turned out to be far more precise than dispatchers typically expect in such remote terrain.

Sgt. Mike Jons, a 25-year veteran of the Bannock County Sheriff's Office, was first on scene. He drove Top Scout Mountain Road again and again, searching for the wreck — and couldn't find it.

So dispatchers, still holding the open line, told him to turn on his siren.

It worked. Dispatchers heard the wail of Jons' siren over the phone and radioed him that he was close. Jons stepped out of his vehicle and spotted the wrecked UTV, the two victims trapped inside and their Rottweiler, miraculously unhurt in the crash.

"The dispatchers listening for my siren is how we found them," Jons said. "I had already passed right by them but couldn't see them from the road."

Jons tried to free the victims himself but couldn't. Search and rescue personnel arrived soon after, along with an off-duty deputy, and together they used a winch and a jack to lift the UTV off the tree and pull the pair free.

Getting them to a hospital posed its own challenge, given how remote the crash site was. The man, more seriously hurt, needed an air ambulance. After a couple of failed attempts to find a safe landing zone on the mountain's rugged terrain, emergency crews finally found an open stretch of ground around 11:50 p.m. — nearly three and a half hours after the crash was first reported. The helicopter airlifted the man to Portneuf Medical Center in Pocatello.

Around the same time, the woman was loaded into a nearby Pocatello Fire ambulance for the drive down the mountain to PMC.

Both victims survived. Their names haven't been released but the Sheriff's Office confirmed both are Pocatello residents.

Authorities said it took a chain of near-impossible breaks for tragedy to be averted.

First, that a 911 call somehow connected at all from inside a known dead zone. Then, the dispatchers' quick thinking to keep the line open and use the siren to guide Jons in. And beneath it all, a brutal truth: if that call hadn't gone through, the victims were far enough down the ravine that no one would have spotted them from the road.

"They were 100 percent lucky," Jons said. "They were pinned in their vehicle and hypothermia and shock would have killed them."

Neither victim was wearing a seat belt. As the UTV rolled down the ravine, they easily could have been thrown from the vehicle and killed instantly. Instead, they somehow stayed inside the vehicle as it overturned — one more break in a night that seemed to demand one after another.

"It just wasn't their time to go," Jons said.