Being lost may have saved Longview man’s life 
 
 LONGVIEW, Wash -- A Longview man’s week stranded in the wilderness may have saved his life. 
 
 Dick Sturm went missing Sunday. He left his daughter’s home in Castle Rock, but never arrived at his in Longview. 
 
 “You have all kinds of things going through your head,” said daughter Julie Nelson. “I never gave up hope.” 
 
 Nobody gave up hope. Family and friends spent the week scouring Cowlitz County. 
 
 On Friday, a bow hunter spotted Sturm and his truck at the bottom of an embankment off Germany Creek Road. Nelson says her dad must have taken a wrong turn and slid off the road. 
 
 He survived five nights in sub-freezing temperatures on half a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and his own resourcefulness. 
 
 “He said he took a credit card and scraped the ice off the hood of his truck,” said Nelson. “He said he took a paper towel and wiped the window and sucked the water out of the paper towel.” 
 
 Nelson is not surprised by her dad’s will to live. She also understands how this may have happened. She says her dad has been acting strange. 
 
 “Disoriented, confused, he’d gotten lost,” she said. 
 
 The behavior prompted Nelson to ask doctors to take a thorough look at her dad. Nobody could have imagined what they would find. 
 
 Doctors discovered a tumor on Sturm’s brain. Nelson is convinced they never would have found it had it not been for the accident. 
 
 “We wouldn’t have been able to convince him to go to the hospital on his own,” said Nelson. “A blessing in disguise.” 

 LONGVIEW, Wash. - A Longview man is lucky to be alive after spending five nights alone in the woods during this week's deep-freeze. 
 
 He's just as lucky he went to the hospital. 
 
 Five days after Dick Sturm went missing, a hunter stumbled across him Friday morning. 
 
 "I just kept saying I know he's out there. I know I can bring him home,” said his daughter, Julie Nelson. 
 
 
 
 Sturm has a long road ahead of him - but not because of his ordeal in the woods. 
 
 Going to the hospital, in fact, might have saved his life; when he went, he learned he has a brain tumor. 
 
 
 
 Rescue crews brought Strum from the top of Germany Creek Road, northwest of Longview, to St. John’s Hospital. He remained there all day Friday being treated for hypothermia and dehydration, but he also got another diagnosis. 
 
 
 
 “They took him back for a cat scan and we had to have a pow-wow after that and we were told that he does have a brain tumor and that there's some bleeding around them and there are a couple of different spots,” Nelson said. 
 
 
 
 Strum is at OHSU in intensive care. 
 
 
 
 His entire family knows he has a battle ahead of him, perhaps even more challenging than the one he just fought. 
 
 
 
 "He said he did a lot of praying. He said he did a lot of thinking,” Nelson said. 
 
 
 
 She’s been praying too. She launched a search effort from her kitchen table Monday morning with the help of family, friends, even strangers. By week’s end, Nelson knew time was running out. 
 
 
 
 "This morning was tough. This morning was tough,” she said. 
 
 
 
 Then Nelson got a phone call that a hunter had found her dad alive, with his truck. 
 
 
 
 “I could hardly believe it,” she said. 
 
 Nelson said her dad doesn’t like taking main roads, such as Interstate 5. On Sunday, he was supposed to be driving from her home in Castle Rock to his house in Longview, going over Delemeter Road. He ended up almost 17 miles away in rugged terrain on Germany Creek Road. 
 
 
 
 "Apparently he was off of a spur, off of a spur," she said. "So basically he had probably gotten out there and got confused. And when he went to turn around, at the end there's like a landing. And the front of his truck is on top of a tree." 
 
 
 
 Sturm knew how to survive in the woods, Nelson said. He’s an avid outdoorsman and a Navy veteran. He had blankets in his full-size Chevrolet truck. 
 
 Nelson said he lived off a Snicker’s bar and a bottle of water. When that was gone, he relied on his survival skills. 
 
 
 
 "He said for water, he was scraping the hood of his truck when it was icy," she said. 
 
 Nelson said her dad had been acting a little confused over the past few weeks. She said he can be “stubborn” about going to the doctor. 
 
 
 
 "If this had not happened, it would have been hard to get him to go to the doctor,” she said. 
 
 
 
 Nelson said her dad, and their entire family, is grateful so many people rallied around them during the search. 
 
 
 
 "Thank you for all your thoughts, all your prayers, all your help, all your support,” she said. 
 
 
 
 Now, Sturm needs more of those thoughts and prayers as he prepares to fight for his health. 
 
 
 
 Nelson said it’s too early to know how long her dad will be at OHSU; it’s too soon to know his prognosis or how doctors plan to treat it. The family is focusing on having a father, and grandfather, back and will deal with the future as it comes. 

 A 67-year-old Longview man was found alive in the woods Friday morning after enduring five nights of freezing temperatures with nothing to eat but a Snickers bar and a water bottle, according to authorities and the man’s family. 
 
 But the improbable turn of events came with a bitter discovery: Doctors at St. John Medical Center found late Friday that Richard Sturm has a brain tumor, which is very likely the reason he became disoriented and lost, said his family said. 
 
 Sturm had been missing since Sunday evening, when he left his daughter’s house in Castle Rock to return to his home in West Longview. Until Friday, Sturm had been hunkered down inside his disabled truck, wrapped in blankets and scraping ice off the truck’s hood for drinking water. 
 
 Throughout the week, temperatures plunged into the teens in what became the region’s most frigid cold snap in four years. Still, Sturm’s daughter Julie Nelson said she never gave up on finding her father alive. 
 
 “I know he’s out there and I know I can bring him home,” she recalled thinking. 
 
 A hunter found Sturm Friday ditched off a small logging spur several miles from the end of Germany Creek Road, high in the Willapa Hills northwest of Longview. An ambulance whisked Sturm, cold but alert, off to St. John Medical Center, where he was treated for hypothermia and dehydration. 
 
 Courtesy of Julie Nelson 
 
 Nelson learned of her father’s rescue at about 10:20 a.m. Friday and announced the rescue on Facebook: “Thank you to everyone who has been helping get the word out, doing the searches and also praying — Please help us SCREAM the GOOD NEWS!” read her Facebook post. “WE FOUND HIM! He is ALIVE! More news will be posted, but for now, we need to take care of him.” 
 
 Nelson said in an interview Friday that, in recent weeks, her father has been disoriented and confused. The confusion came and went, she said. After Sturm’s rescue, doctors at St. John performed a CT scan and discovered a brain tumor, she said. By early Friday evening, an ambulance was taking Sturm to Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, where a neurologist would examine Sturm. 
 
 Despite the diagnosis, Nelson was jubilant Friday evening, saying she had not yet fully absorbed all that had happened. She said she wishes her father had never gotten lost. But she also called the ordeal “a blessing in disguise” because it may have otherwise taken months to diagnose the tumor. 
 
 Nelson said she spent the last five frantic days doing everything she could to find her father. She called the sheriff’s office, the newspaper and the local radio station and posted alerts on Facebook. 
 
 Julie Nelson, Richard Sturm's daughter, related details of her father's five-day ordeal in the woods Friday night. 
 
 Scores of volunteers, many of them strangers, responded and began to scour the woods. Sturm, a retired paving company supervisor, is well known in the community, and his friends and family eagerly took up the search. On Tuesday morning, his family members spread a map across a dining room table, divided it into sectors and began sending out volunteer search squads. In all, about 75 people participated, Nelson said. 
 
 “Social media was huge, huge,” she said. “We have a very strong community here. Everybody stepped up.” 
 
 She monitored Sturm’s bank account and even took out a credit report to see if he had any accounts the family didn’t know about. On Thursday, Nelson and her family rented a plane and pilot and recruited another volunteer pilot in a second aircraft to fly over the area, but the tree canopy prevented them from spotting Sturm’s pickup. 
 
 Deputies and others searched for Sturm, but given the number of days and the cold weather, authorities started to fear the worst, said Cowlitz County Sheriff Mark Nelson — no relation to Julie Nelson. Deputies heard a report that Sturm had turned toward Castle Rock from the Four Corners area, so most of the search Friday morning had concentrated on the east side of Interstate 5, he said. 
 
 Sturm had left his daughter’s house in Castle Rock Sunday evening. As Nelson had suspected, Sturm intended to use Delameter Road, Woodside Drive and Coal Creek to return to his home. But he decided to visit this cousin in the Germany Creek area to show him a newly mounted deer’s head. He turned off on a logging road, got lost and eventually ditched his trucked down an embankment. 
 
 The pickup’s battery died, and Sturm did not have any heat for most of the ordeal. Sturm, an experienced hunter, donned three sweatshirts and a jacket, wrapped himself in several blankets that were kept in the truck, and stayed put. 
 
 “It was probably a very wise thing with the weather being what it was,” Sheriff Nelson said. “Staying in the vehicle keeps you out of the wind and keeps you dry.” 
 
 The hunter who found Sturm had been searching for him Friday morning on a logging road that Nelson described as “a spur of a spur.” She said the family and other volunteer searchers had scoured the same area, but Sturm’s truck was too far off the road to be seen. 
 
 In October, Sturm and his family began using an iPhone app called Life360 that allows family members to track each other’s locations using satellite signals, Julie Nelson said. But it did little good. On the night he vanished, Sturm had left his phone at Nelson’s house. 
 
 She waited about an hour for him to call to let her know he was home safe, then drove to his house to check on him. He wasn’t home. Nelson called his friends and other family members, but nobody had heard from him. 
 
 By Friday, her birthday, Nelson said she could no longer bear her father’s absence. Her family has a Friday tradition of buying pizzas and gathering at Sturm’s house for drinks, she said. 
 
 Nelson said she screamed with joy when she got a call explaining her father had been found alive. She immediately drove out to Germany Creek Road to meet her dad. A Cowlitz 2 Fire & Rescue crew was bringing Sturm down to State Route 4, where he was to be loaded into an ambulance. Nelson said she became so emotional on the way to the rendezvous that she had to jerk her car to the road’s shoulder and stop. 
 
 “I am elated. No. I’m ecstatic. I cannot express the gratitude we have for everyone that helped,” she said during a phone interview while riding to the hospital in her father’s ambulance. “The whole community was involved in this.” 
 
 Nelson said her father is lucid and understands his diagnosis and everything that lead up to it. 
 
 Asked what he told her about his ordeal, she said, “He said he did a lot of praying. He did a lot of thinking.” 
 
 “He’s really quiet since he came out of the woods,” she said. “He’s in good spirits, but he’s not real talkative. ... Can you imagine being alone for five days?”
– You would think that the "saved" part would come into play just once in the story of a Longview, Wash., man who survived for five days in below-zero temps in his truck after getting lost on a logging road and sliding into an embankment. Dick Sturm managed to do so with just a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and his smarts, reports KATU. As the Daily News adds, the 67-year-old Navy veteran wrapped himself in blankets he kept in his truck, and wore three sweatshirts in addition to his jacket; he got more water by scraping ice off his car's exterior with a credit card. He went missing after leaving his daughter's home on Dec. 7, and was finally found by a hunter. But the story doesn't end there. Daughter Julie Nelson was concerned about her father's recent propensity for getting lost and confused, and so she asked doctors—who her "stubborn" father would have otherwise resisted seeing, she says—to do more than a cursory check of her dad's health, reports KGW. What they found, via CT scan: a brain tumor that Nelson believes would have gone unnoticed if not for the accident. "We wouldn’t have been able to convince him to go to the hospital on his own," she explains, calling it "a blessing in disguise." (Click for another tale of cold-weather survival, in which a small dog emerges a hero.)