Dog swims to safety after paddleboarder vanishes in Colorado. Then rangers find body
High winds knocked a man off his paddleboard and into a massive reservoir in Colorado, and rangers say it took them several hours to find his body.
Witnesses reported seeing him vanish when he fell into the frigid water on the afternoon of Saturday, Aug. 24, Colorado Parks and Wildlife rangers said the next day in a news release.
A dog that had been riding the paddleboard with him managed to stay on after the man fell before eventually swimming to safety in the Rampart Reservoir’s 62-degree water, rangers said.
The Colorado Springs Fire Department immediately began searching the reservoir from a helicopter and called Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Marine Evidence Recovery Team (MERT), rangers said.
“MERT officers use a specialized CPW boat equipped with multiple sonar devices including a submersible, remote-operated vehicle (ROV) equipped with sonar, lights and a video camera,” rangers said.
The MERT team as well as rangers from Denver, Steamboat Springs and Walsenburg arrived around 7 p.m. and organized a grid search in the area where witnesses last saw the paddleboarder, rangers said.
Finally, at about 1 a.m., sonar from the specialized CPW boat found the man’s body in about 67 feet of water, rangers said. Rangers used the ROV to confirm the body and recover it, which took about an hour.
The El Paso County Coroner’s Office took the body at about 4:30 a.m. and will formally identify the man, notify his relatives and determine his cause of death, rangers said.
Colorado Springs Utilities owns the 500-acre reservoir on the U.S. Forest Service’s Pike National Forest, about five miles east of Woodland Park in far western El Paso County, officials said. It “features unique underwater rock formations behind its 230-foot-tall dam,” though officials didn’t say whether they believe the rocks contributed to his death.
Officials believe the frigid water temperature may have played a role in or caused his death.
“When someone is plunged into such cold water, the shock from cold water immersion can cause your entire body to cramp leaving you unable to swim,” said Grant Brown, CPW’s boating safety program manager who led the MERT team. “You can die in one or two minutes.”
More than 30 people have drowned in Colorado waters in 2024, officials said.
“This is a tragedy and we offer our condolences to the family and friends of the victim,” Brown said. “We’ve experienced far too many water deaths in Colorado. We urge everyone on or near the water to please wear a life jacket.”
This story was originally published August 26, 2024 at 5:02 PM with the headline "Dog swims to safety after paddleboarder vanishes in Colorado. Then rangers find body."
