Mushroom pickers lost hope, considered eating dog

GOLD BEACH, Ore. — Dan Conne says he and his wife and son thought they were going to die after getting lost while picking mushrooms and spending nearly a week in the rugged forest of southwest Oregon.

They spent the nights huddled in a hollow log and considered sacrificing their pit bull, Jesse, for food.

"She's that good a dog, she'd have done it, too," Conne said.

But help finally arrived Saturday when a volunteer helicopter pilot decided to look outside the search area and spotted the family — Dan, his wife, Belinda, and their 25-year-old son, Michael — on the edge of a deep ravine in tall timber. The three were about 10 miles from the town of Gold Beach, roughly 330 miles south-southwest of Portland.

"The searchers were with us within 20 minutes of the first copter that found us," Dan Conne told The Associated Press. "There must have been nine or 10 of them. They just kept coming out of that brush.

"lt was just a real happy feeling 'cause we knew we wasn't going to die out there.'"

The Connes were airlifted to a Gold Beach hospital, where they stayed overnight.

Dan Conne hurt his back, and Belinda Conne had hypothermia, Curry County Sheriff John Bishop said. All three were hungry, and enjoyed their potato soup and sandwiches at the hospital.

Belinda and Dan Conne, both 47, were discharged Sunday. Their son, who suffered frostbite, hypothermia and a sprained ankle, remained in the hospital for more treatment.

While lost, the cold and hungry family could see search helicopters and airplanes flying low and slow overhead. But they couldn't get the pilots' attention through the thick, coastal forest vegetation.

They eventually used the screen on their dead cellphone and the blade of a sheath knife to flash a signal.

"The wife had the Blackberry, and I had the knife," Dan Conne said. "I kept flashing. The wife said, 'You're blinding them.' But I wanted to make sure they seen us. I wasn't taking no chance."

The family was spotted by Jackson County Commissioner John Rachor, spending his first day searching for them in his own helicopter with Curry County Sheriff's Lt. John Ward.

Rachor had been up two hours and decided to go outside the search area, heading uphill from where the family parked their Jeep, instead of down.

"We couldn't find anything in the obvious places, so we decide to go to the not-obvious places," he said.