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Night chills mountain getaway Central Point couple spent 11 hours fending off cold with warm rocks By Dani Dodge RUCH -- One Central Point couple spent a romantic night by the fire Thursday -- but it wasn't exactly the get-away of their dreams. The doctor and his wife were lost. Their car was broken down. The cell phone nearly dead. They had no food or water, or blankets for that matter. "Usually with a campfire you have cards to play with and food to munch," said Michele "Mickey" Hartkop, 49. "But we were looking at this beautiful campfire and thinking `No marshmallows."' The Jackson County search and rescue team found Hartkop and her husband, Tom Hartkop, 51, a family practice doctor, shortly after midnight Friday. The resourceful couple was stranded for 11 hours in near-freezing temperatures on a rarely used logging road about seven miles south of McKee Bridge. It was a strange end to a day that started out pleasantly. The couple had Thursday off (Mickey works in a lab at Rogue Valley Medical Center) and after a hearty breakfast decided to take a drive in their 1990 Oldsmobile. They wanted to end up at the McKee Bridge Restaurant for lunch. "We do this all the time," Hartkop said. "We go out and cruise weird roads we've never been to." But at one point, they took a wrong turn and started up a recently widened logging road in the Yale Creek area. They stopped the car and went for a short walk. When they got back in the car, it wouldn't start. Their cell phone was out of range, so they hiked a mile and scrambled up a small butte. They called for a tow truck. Four hours later, no tow truck. They hiked back up. Called again. The tow truck couldn't find them. They hiked up again, and called 911 with the dying cell phone. As darkness descended, they decided to prepare for a long night. Neither Hartkop smokes, but Mickey often picks up matches at motels. They were able to start a fire. Tom Hartkop tried to use the batteries in his drill in the cell phone, but that didn't work. The frigid air seeped through their jeans and light sweaters. So they tore the carpet out of the car trunk to use as a blanket. They thought about telling stories, but Tom, a former medical examiner in Michigan, couldn't get out of his head the time he investigated the death of a man whose car broke down. The man wrote in a journal for four days until he froze to death. Then, out of the dark, a rabbit streaked across their makeshift camp. The rabbit didn't scare them. But what was chasing it? They hustled into the cold, cold car, leaving only occasionally to fill leather work gloves with fire-warmed rocks. "We put them on our tummies to keep warm," Mickey Hartkop said. Just after midnight, they heard a car coming up the road. Eleven search and rescue volunteers had been searching for the couple since 7 p.m. "We just went to the area and started driving all the roads," said Sgt. Ken Curtis, the program manager for the Jackson County search and rescue team. The rescuers handed the hungry, thirsty adventurers Snickers bars and bottled iced tea. It was definitely a night the Hartkops will tell their grandchildren about some day. "Other than maybe raising children," Hartkop said, "this is probably the biggest adventure of our lives." Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA