Snowmobiler wearing shorts rescued by wardens

TOWNSHIP 16, RANGE 5 – A Fort Fairfield teenager who got lost while snowmobiling on Square Lake northwest of Caribou was rescued early Thursday by game wardens who found him curled up in the woods in 10-degree temperatures with blowing snow.

The Maine Warden Service said 19-year-old Lyman Messer was fading in and out of consciousness when Wardens Gary Sibley and Adrian Marquis found him at 12:30 a.m. after following snowmobile tracks.

Messer was wearing a wool pea coat, a T-shirt, shorts and boots. After Sibley gave Messer his snow pants and Marquis wrapped him in blankets, the wardens drove him by snowmobile for 45 minutes to a waiting ambulance on the closest plowed road, Route 161.

Messer was treated for frostbite at Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent. The incident remains under investigation, including whether alcohol was involved.

A friend had notified the Warden Service on Wednesday night when Messer failed to return from a snowmobile ride.

When he did not return within a few minutes, Messer’s friend, 22-year-old Jacob Chambers, took off on his snowmobile to look for him. Chambers was forced to return to the camp because the machine wasn’t working properly.

Messer was found about 30 yards into the woods on the other side of the lake, northwest of his camp.

“We started hollering for him and lo and behold he hollered back,” said Marquis. “I said, ‘Whoa!’ We were hoping for that but given the conditions and what he was wearing we were thinking the worst at that point.”

Square Lake does not have any year-round camps on it and is accessible only by snowmobile. Because the camps are vacant, there are no lights along the shoreline to guide nighttime snowmobilers.

The lake is popular with snowmobilers, and numerous tracks were in the snow when the wardens started their search. Even though snow was blowing and filling in the tracks, the two wardens were able to determine which tracks were made by Messer’s snowmobile.

They followed the tracks, which looped and zig-zagged across the lake until they went up onto the shoreline on the other side and into the woods. The snowmobile came to rest against a tree and was not damaged. The wardens noticed that Messer had set out on foot, going from the woods to the lake and back again several times in snow that was 3 to 4 feet deep.

Sibley said that seeing the tracks go onto the shoreline and into the woods provided a small sense of relief because they had feared that Messer may have reached the outlet between Square and Eagle lakes.

“We were afraid that he was going to be in the outlet in open water and that he had possibly drowned,” Sibley said.

“I don’t know how much longer he had out there,” Marquis said. “He was lucky. I’m glad we found him when we did.”