NORTH SLAVE - Two stranded travellers in the North Slave region sent police and local volunteers on separate air search and rescue missions April 22 due to melting ice.

In Behchoko, RCMP were called early Thursday morning to search for 52-year-old William Mantla, who had left town on his snowmobile around 5 p.m. Wednesday to retrieve a toboggan near Tayonton Lake, about 50 kilometres north of Behchoko. Mantla said he made the mistake of driving the machine over a small portage where the ice wasn't thick enough.

"The Ski-Doo fell in the water, so I tried to take it out by myself and it was too heavy, so I just walked back to the Marian Lake village. One of my cousins, Joe, he's got a good house over there so I stayed overnight."

He arrived at the village, with wet clothes and chilled bones, around midnight. Joe wasn't home, but Mantla was able to find some blankets and keep warm before venturing back out the next day, and by that time police had already sent a helicopter to search for him. Leaving his snowmobile stuck sideways in the stream, Mantla started to walk back to Behchoko. He figures he was about halfway there, hours later, when he saw a bunch of snowmobiles riding up to him.

They took him back to his snowmobile and all helped get it back on land. To Mantla's surprise and undeniable good luck, "We pulled, and it started!" he laughed. "So I came back with my Ski-Doo and we got the sled out too. I was really surprised. I thought, 'it's not going to start.' But it did start!"

Though everything turned out fine in his experience, Mantla warned others to stay away from small streams and melting bodies of water and to always tell someone where you're going and when you'll be back.

"I want to thank all the people that did the search for me," Mantla said. "If people are going to go out in the bush, they shouldn't go alone," he advised.

That advice might have helped 72-year-old Louie Wedwin in Whati, who later that same day got stuck travelling back to town from his cabin at the north end of Lac La Martre, about 20 km away.

The police were called to search for Wedwin around 2 p.m. Thursday, reporting that Carl Clouter helped conduct an aerial search with his privately owned aircraft. He spotted Wedwin waving from the ground, where a search team picked him up unharmed. RCMP reported Wedwin's snowmobile had run out of gas while trekking through large puddles of slush across the lake.