CARIBOU – An elderly Caribou woman missing since last week was recovering Sunday in a local hospital after apparently spending four days and nights on her hands and knees tunneling through a patch of burdock.

A Maine Warden Service tracking dog discovered Goldie Jordan, 67, just before 12:30 p.m. lying in thick undergrowth behind the old Caribou landfill, less than a quarter mile from where the mentally impaired woman was last seen Wednesday after leaving her Powers Road home for a walk.

Jordan had been the subject of an extensive search involving search dogs, more than 100 searchers, and state helicopters and planes.

“It doesn’t get any better than this,” Maine Warden Sgt. Roger Guay said Sunday.

Guay and his tracking dog Reba, a 10-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever, were searching off the trail near the landfill when Reba picked up Jordan’s scent about 400 yards from where the woman finally was spotted lying on her back with her eyes closed.

“My heart just dropped when I saw her laying there like that,” Guay said from the search command post at the Caribou Golf Course. “I called out to her, ‘Goldie, are you all right?’ And she started mumbling, opened her eyes and came to.”

With Guay’s assistance, Jordan was able to sit up and drink some water.

“She is remarkable,” the warden said.

Jordan was immediately taken by ambulance to Cary Medical Center in Caribou and treated for dehydration. She was reported Sunday night as being in stable condition.

“She’s a good, tough lady,” caregiver Ginette Jandreau said Sunday night. Jandreau has been caring for Jordan for five years at a Caribou foster home.

“I feel great. I’ve been given back an angel,” she said.

Jordan was last seen walking north on a rail bed near Ogren Road about 7:30 p.m. Wednesday after leaving her home for a walk about an hour earlier, according to the Caribou Police Department.

She was reported missing to police just before 10 o’clock that evening.

The area in which Jordan was found was heavy with brush and chest-high burdock, a plant with large, flat leaves. Anyone crawling or crouched under those leaves, wardens said, would be invisible from the air.

“Apparently she had crawled around under that canopy of big burdock,” Guay said. “I suspect she spent a lot of time in there.”

The site was riddled with tunnels made by Jordan’s repeated passes through the area, many of which apparently had been on her hands and knees .

This was not the first time wardens were called in to search for Jordan. In 1999, she was reported missing under the same circumstances – having failed to return home from her evening walk, Game Warden Greg Sanborn said.

In that instance, wardens found her several miles from her home, off the side of the trail, on her hands and knees. At the time, she told the wardens she was “looking for her glasses,” Sanborn said.

In this most recent case, Guay said, the area was so thick with brush that he lost sight of Reba on several occasions as they pushed their way through the vegetation toward Jordan.

“Reba made four trips back to me to make sure I was still coming,” he said.

Hellish terrain

It was typical of the kind of hellish terrain that the more than 100 searchers had spent the last four days combing, an area wardens had described as some of the worst terrain Aroostook County has to offer. The area is covered with thickets, marshy wetlands, beaver ponds, cedar swamps, agricultural fields and forest.

So thick is the vegetation that one 10-member search team spent close to nine hours Saturday covering just three-eighths of a mile.

It doesn’t look much better from the air, where the tree canopy completely masks the ground, and even the potato plants obscure the areas between the rows.

Volunteers – virtually none of whom had heard of, much less met, the elderly woman before joining the search – spoke of slogging through waist-deep water, eye-level raspberry brambles and stands of young birch with less than a foot of clearance between trees.

“That’s the kind of area we are pounding people into,” Sanborn said Saturday.

Throughout the search effort, they would straggle back to the command post, grab some coffee and maybe a sandwich, empty the water out of their boots, and, without fail, request another grid to search.

All search teams were equipped with global positioning satellite technology to chart their progress. When they came in from the field, the information was immediately downloaded into a computer at the command post and used to update the search maps.

By Saturday, the endless plodding and pushing through brush was beginning to tell on human and canine searchers.

While the dogs rested in their owners’ trucks or cars, the volunteers caught a few winks wherever they could – on a flat piece of ground, against a building or on the seat of an all-terrain-vehicle.

Their hopes were raised Saturday afternoon, only to sink again, after reports came of an elderly woman fitting Jordan’s description spotted near Madawaska Lake.

Wardens sped to the scene, but quickly determined the woman was a visitor to the area from New Hampshire.

Volunteers from search and rescue teams from Kittery to New Brunswick had converged on Caribou to assist in the search efforts. Helicopters, planes and even a civilian in an ultralight aircraft spent the daylight hours flying countless grids over the area.

Officials were still evaluating the total cost of the rescue Sunday night. Helicopters used in the search cost $875 per hour and were used for 23 hours for a total of more than $20,000.

At least 18 wardens and rangers worked a minimum of 50 hours during the search at an average of $16 per hour, costing more than $3,500.

On Sunday afternoon, there was a general air of elation at the command post with wardens, rangers and volunteers shaking hands and slapping backs.

Sanborn stopped short of saying it was a miracle that Jordan was found alive, but noted national statistics from the National Association for Search and Rescue, which has found that 95 percent of cases in which a person over the age of 65 is lost in the woods result in the missing person being found dead.

“She really beat the odds,” he said.

NEWS reporter Derek Breton contributed to this report.