The members of Boy Scout Troop #647 of Mercer Island’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church know all about being prepared. The middle schoolers have already spent many days and nights outdoors. They are confident that they know how to survive in any situation. Yet their role in a real-life survival story has brought the lesson of being prepared into sharp focus.

The story begins with a news report that is all too common in Western Washington. A hiker was reported missing in the mountains with bad weather approaching. As experience tells us, these stories often end badly.

But for a woman from Tacoma, the story turned out differently due to a network of Islanders — the members and families of Troop 647.

On Oct. 23, Natalya Manko, a community college math teacher headed to the Ingalls Lake area, 20 miles northeast of Easton on Oct. 23, for what was to have been a day hike. Manko, a fit and experienced hiker originally from Ukraine, was not dressed for anything but a somewhat mild fall afternoon. She was wearing light clothes, tennis shoes and was carrying little with her besides a sandwich. But she took a wrong turn and as evening fell, she found herself in serious trouble.

Violating every rule of the mountains, she at least had luck on her side. Before she got lost, she met Troop #647 and their leaders. The encounter likely saved her life.

The scouts were setting up camp a half mile from Ingalls Lake at about 4 p.m. that same afternoon when Manko came by. Islander Dave Jones, a parent and leader of the group, spoke with her. She was looking for the lake, he said. He spoke with her briefly and pointed out the way and reminded her that it would be getting dark soon.

No one was expecting the snow and cold temperatures that hit the area within a few hours.

That evening the Troop 647 members settled into their tents. The boys in the tent with Jones’son, Ryan Jones, 12, were watching a movie on an i-Phone, unaware that it had begun to snow. But at about 9:30 that night, their tent collapsed. They and the rest of the scouts spent much of the night clearing snow from tent roofs. “There was at least a foot of snow outside the tent in the morning,” scout Wescott Sharples, 13, said. “We had to push and dig the snow out of the way to get out.”

Jones, Sharples and scouts Michael Sedlacek and Brian Oppenheim, also 13, and students at Islander Middle School were impressed with how quickly the weather changed that Saturday night. But as they had been taught, they were prepared for anything. Oppenheim noted that they were not fazed by the weather. “We had already spent a year being well prepared,” he said. Yet, as the scouts headed back down the trail the next morning, they had trouble locating the trail because of the blanket of snow. At one point, they took a wrong turn. Quickly realizing their mistake, they carefully backtracked, then continued down without further mishap.

Yet, the woman who had been in their camp the day before was truly lost. She had already spent her first night alone and without shelter at a point several hundred feet higher than the scouts. “Just a half a mile away from us, she was freezing,” Ryan Jones said.

On Sunday, Manko’s daughter contacted authorities to report her mother was missing. A search was underway as the scouts went to school Monday morning and their leaders went to work. On Monday evening, on his way home from work, Islander Gerald Miller heard about a lost hiker on the radio. He told his wife, Anita Miller, who turned on the television and knew immediately that the woman had been near the scouts. “I keyed in on the words ‘Ingalls Lake,'” she said. Both she and her husband, whose son Isaac is also a member of troop, headed to the Monday night meeting at Emmanuel. There they spoke to Jones and other leaders about the woman. They immediately knew that it was Manko they had seen. “It was the Russian lady,” they exclaimed.

As they were talking, they realized the enormity of the situation for the hiker, Anita Miller said. “We looked at each other and said, ‘You know this is her third night out there.'”

Jones and others began calling to see how they could help. Unable to contact anyone in the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office right away, he finally contacted Manko’s daughter and was finally put in touch with rescuers.

Initially, the search area for Manko had been set at 100 square miles, Ryan Jones said. But with information from Islanders, the search was narrowed to just a couple of square miles. Rescuers in a helicopter spotted Manko’s red poncho the next morning. She was taken to a local hospital, but was in amazingly good shape.

Her key to survival may have been going without sleep. She walked and talked and even sang to herself as much as she could. The hiker said later that she was afraid she might not wake up in the frigid cold. She ate little and left her sandwich untouched.

But it was her attitude that helped most of all.

She came back to talk with the scouts at their weekly meeting at the church on Nov. 14. There she told the boys what she did to stay warm and described what she thought about during her ordeal.

“You could have heard a pin drop,” said Dave Jones.

The boys remain astonished that she survived, unable to reconcile the fact that she was so unprepared. She just wore tennis shoes while they had wool boots and socks, they marveled. “She did not have a map or a compass,” said Oppenheim, incredulous.

Thinking back to the brief sidetrack they took on their own journey back down the trail on Sunday, they know that what happened to Manko could happen to anyone. The key, they agreed, is to try not to “freak out.” And they noted, Manko did not.

Sedlacek said what moved him was a very personal thought Manko shared with the group. The hiker told the boys and their parents how horrified she was to find herself lost and how it would affect her family and friends. She told them that she wanted to write a note, but she had nothing to write with. She considered cutting herself and using the blood to write “sorry” on her shirt, but decided against it. “She said she was thinking about other people who cared for her,” Sedlacek said.

At the end of the meeting at the church, she was asked to summarize her experience and what she had learned. “Life is beautiful,” she told the boys.