A mother of four is being hailed as a hero after she dashed onto the ice of Cottonwood Lake to save a 68-year-old man and his dog.
Catie Dahl, 34, said she looked out her window on the morning of Jan. 20, one of the coldest days of the year, and saw a truck sinking into the lake.
Dahl, who is on maternity leave after her daughter’s birth in November, said she could not stand by. She put on her husband’s boots, told her daughters to stay safe and ran the 100 or so yards from her house to the truck.
She crawled on the last stretch of thin ice toward the man. He clung to the edge of the ice with his small dog nearby. “He said, ‘Help my dog,’” Dahl recalled.
The windchill that day hit a staggering minus-30 degrees. Dahl said she could feel her nostrils freeze, and the man in the lake seemed to be going into shock.
Dahl held onto his hand and kept talking to him, giving the man reassurance. “I just grabbed him, just to give him something to hang onto until help came,” she said.
Time seemed to warp, and she lost track of how long they were out on the ice, Dahl said. But at some point, probably within 10 minutes, she could hear the sirens of fire engines nearing, and then first responders arrived.
Those first responders recognized Dahl with a life-saving award at a Cottonwood City Council meeting Feb. 4.
