VAIL - A snowboarder was lost and trudging through chest deep snow. He was more than 10 miles from the nearest ski lift and was out of cell phone range. Then he heard the sound of a motor: a snowmobile. Its driver, Jesse Csincsak, had a familiar face. He was a contestant on the reality show "The Bachelorette" and was the man who got the proposal at the end, but that relationship did not end up working out.
Csincsak was in a remote part of Vail Pass, a place he usually doesn't go.
If Csincsak hadn't been there in that moment, Thomas Pazerunas is sure he'd still be out in that snow.
"I had no idea where I was," Pazerunas said. "I was very lucky. I would have no way of contacting anybody. No way of knowing where I was. The nearest help would have been miles and miles away."
Twenty-four-year-old Pazerunas is from Chicago. He and some friends are on vacation in Colorado. He'd been snowboarding on Blue Sky Basin and says he didn't mean to go out of bounds. He accidently headed down the back side of the mountain.
"He was 12 miles from anything that was civilized, so think about how long it would take for you to walk on concrete 12 miles - let alone in deep snow," Csincsak said.
"I thought if I just kept going to the right where I last saw my friends, I thought I would eventually run into a chair lift and some friendly faces," Pazerunas said.
Pazerunas knows it was far more likely that he would not have been found.
"With no cell service it would have been an act of God," he said.
He says he'll snowboard in Colorado again, but he'll stay off the back trails.
