Lost on a Mountain in Maine by Donn Fendler

The gripping story of the boy lost in the Maine woods captured newspaper headlines around the country. Hundreds of people searched for Fendler, including troopers with bloodhounds from his home state of New York. But he ate berries and drank water and really didn’t have anything to eat, and he was below 70 pounds when they found him,” Ryan Fendler says. “He came across an old cabin and there was a potato sack in there and a few other things that he could use. But his twin brother, Ryan, says Donn remembered something he’d learned in the Boy Scouts: to follow a stream. He’d lost his jeans and his shoes, was covered in mosquito bites and survived a tumble down an embankment and an encounter with black bears. Like I told you, it’s your will to live,” Fendler says in the documentary “Finding Donn Fendler.”įendler describes nearly passing out from exhaustion on the day he was discovered more than 35 miles away. “There were plenty of times I wanted to give up and just say the heck with it. So instead of waiting for his father, brother and the rest of his hiking party to catch up, Fendler took off down the mountain.

Nights when Ryan and Tom slept with only a sheet on them, Dad always came in with a blanket for me,” reads a description from his book. “I was cold and shivering and I never was good at standing cold anyway. It was July 1939, foggy and raining, and young Donn was impatient. Donn Fendler’s epic journey began near the summit of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s tallest mountain.

Lost on a Mountain in Maine by Donn Fendler