It was a Christmas miracle — two groups of hikers were rescued by Blackhawk helicopter from the Gila Wilderness on Christmas Day. It was a rescue that challenged even the most experienced Search and Rescue volunteers, with weather, terrain and timing.

For four childhood friends from New Iberia, La., the adventure began the Thursday before Christmas.

“My friend Brandon and I had been throwing around ideas and said let’s go to New Mexico,” said 19-year-old Ethan Riggs.

The four headed off, taking turns driving the 15 or so hours from Louisiana, arriving in New Mexico Thursday morning. They stopped in at the Visitor Center at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument and picked up a map.

“We thought we’d hike out, spend some time at the hot springs,” Riggs said.

Riggs was with three friends he had grown up with in New Iberia, Brandon Kongphongmany, 20, Casey Meaux, 20, and Liam Himel, 18. Ethan and one of the others had never been on an overnight backpacking trip before.

At the beginning of their second day, they decided to head back, but the light rain that had been falling all day Thursday had swollen the river.

“The water level was nowhere near where it was just a few hours earlier,” Riggs said. “It was like eight feet higher and by the second day we realized we were trapped, so we started rationing our food.”

They were hoping to outlast the flood and make their food last while they waited for the river to subside, but by then family members had started to get worried and one of the boys’ mothers had called police.

On Friday afternoon, Forest Service employees at the Visitor Center got a surprise when one member of a five-person party walked in and told them the others in his party — two adults, two teens, and two dogs — were trapped along the Middle Fork by the rising water.

“That’s when it began,” said Rita Garcia, chief of interpretation for the Gila National Forest.

Garcia said the man was able to hike out via a route the rest of his group could not.

As Search and Rescue volunteers began to mobilize, State Police SAR Field Coordinator Marc Levesque got a phone call alerting him that another group of hikers were overdue — the four teens from Louisiana. So, on Christmas Eve, under Levesque as incident commander, a dozen Search and Rescue volunteers from two different organizations, including teams on horseback, headed out to try to rescue the stranded hikers and bring them back safely.

“We had an approximate location of the first group and we were finally able to confirm that they were at the same trailhead,” said Levesque of the two groups.

The three vehicles parked at TJ Corral belonged to people in both groups, Levesque confirmed.

Complicating matters was the fact that the region the hikers were in is part of the Gila Wilderness, meaning there is no motorized use allowed, including the flying of helicopters in or over, without permission from the U.S. Forest Service, and it was Christmas Eve.

Volunteers from Grant County Search and Rescue and Organ Mountain Technical Rescue were already heading out into the wilderness to reach the hikers, but found they too could not cross the raging river.

“The horse team tried crossing the river and the horses and the riders almost got swept away,” Levesque said. The same for the ropes team.

For their part, the teens had tried again too, with almost deadly results.

“We had made it through two river crossings,” Riggs said. “We made a first crossing when the sun came up in the canyons about 10 a.m. The second one was scary. We had hammocks and tried to make a tether, but if you fall when you are crossing those rivers, you are not getting up because the water is so cold and your legs just go numb,” he said. “A lot of us fell going through that second crossing. The third crossing, my friend almost died. He almost got swept away. We pulled him back in but it took all our strength and we all just collapsed. The currents were stronger than anything than I have ever seen before.”

Cold and shivering, and out of energy, the boys took off their wet clothes and got under a heat/survival blanket one of them had brought to try to recuperate.

That afternoon, a Border Patrol helicopter spotted them. But their adventure wasn’t over yet.

The first helicopter couldn’t land, Levesque said. The Cajun kids, as Levesque had dubbed them, were tiring.

“We had low points,” noted Riggs, as they waited for help to arrive.

By Saturday they had run out of food. They lost their water purifier in one of the river crossings and had been drinking — and throwing up — muddy river water.

“The snow was a blessing,” Riggs said, because they had fresh water.

They layered their hammocks together and wrapped themselves up in tarps like a cocoon, and tried to stay warm.

“We flagged down a chopper and they threw us water bottles and told us over the speaker they had a land team coming to us in about two hours,” Riggs said, “but no one could get to us. That night the wind gusts got up to 40 miles per hour.”

They huddled together, conserving body heat, and tried to stay positive.

A Blackhawk helicopter from the National Guard in Santa Fe arrived on Sunday, Christmas Day. The river had remained too perilous to try to cross, Levesque said.

“Even on Sunday,” he said. “It was too dangerous to try. We knew we had to get them out by helicopter extraction and we had to request and receive permission to do a helicopter extraction because it is a federal wilderness area in the Gila Wilderness.”

By Sunday afternoon, both groups had been rescued and were warming up in the Visitor Center at the Cliff Dwellings National Monument.

“I really couldn’t ask for a better Christmas present than seeing that chopper and being given water and food,” Riggs said after the Blackhawk landed. “We really weren’t doing well at that point. The volunteers, the people at the Visitor Center, they were just incredible people. I can’t thank them enough.”

“This was just another example of great cooperation among all the agencies,” Levesque said of the many state and federal groups that participated in the rescue including U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Forest Service, the Gila National Forest, Grant County Search and Rescue, State Police Search and Rescue, Organ Mountain Technical Rescue, the U.S. National Guard, and the National Weather Service.

“Luck really did play a part,” he added. “We got great info from the weather service guys in El Paso so I knew that we were going to have a window of good weather Sunday afternoon to do the extraction.”

Garcia said the teens did some things right like staying in one place and staying in their sleeping bags and being careful with the food they did have. She said she always cautions people when going into the backcountry to always have at least one extra day’s worth of food.

“Both groups were either out or very low on food,” she said.

Throughout the rescue, the Cliff Dwellings kept people — including the families of those missing — updated on the rescue’s progress via their Facebook page, which brought some unnecessary comments, Garcia said.

“A number of people made comments without really knowing what was going on,” she said. “That’s not really fair to the two groups who got stranded out there and all the volunteers who gave up their holidays and gave up a lot of time and effort to come out and rescue them. It doesn’t help to have people armchair quarterbacking like that,” she said.

Garcia commended everyone involved with the rescue efforts — from the supervisor at the Forest Service who helped secure permission to fly into the wilderness, to the supervisor who assured them they would have fuel for the choppers at the Grant County Airport on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, to all of the Search and Rescue volunteers.

“Everyone was cheerful and positive the entire time,” she said. “There were no injuries, no serious illness, they were cold and they were tired, but that was it.”

For Levesque, an experienced Search and Rescue field coordinator, the mission was the most challenging one he has ever run.

“We had two groups, weather coming in, and given where they were and how we had to get to them, and it was Christmas weekend,” he said.

As a side note, the road to the Cliff Dwellings is washed out and Garcia did not know when the Department of Transportation was going to be able to get up there to make repairs, so the Dwellings will remain closed until further notice.

For at least one of the Cajun kids, the experience has made him stronger, and the adventure has not soured him on backpacking — or New Mexico, although he isn’t in much of a hurry to come back.

“I do want to go backpacking again,” said Ethan Riggs. “I just want to be better prepared in the future. But I think I might take a break from the Gila Forest for a while. I got to see a lot of it on the helicopter ride out. It’s incredibly beautiful, but it’s also deadly.”

Christine Steele may be reached at [email protected]