Karen Klein walked 42km in 30 hours in heavy snow before being found

Eric and Karen Klein who found themselves stranded in a snowbound Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Photo / Facebook

A mother trying to save her family on holiday after their car fell into a ditch in a heavy snowfall in the Arizona wilderness walked 42km in for 30 hours, eating twigs and her own urine for sustenance.

Karen Klein, a 46-year-old biology professor at Northampton Community College in the city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was driving with her husband Eric, 47, and their son Issac, 10, from Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah to the north rim of the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, when heavy snow began falling.

The main road to the canyon's north rim is closed during winter and the Kleins using a GPS were directed to forestry service roads. As heavy snow fell on unploughed and unmaintained roads, the family decided to turn back but their car fell into a ditch and was stuck.

With no mobile phone coverage, no civilisation nearby, heavy snow falling, and with little to no food or water, Karen wearing a parka, a woollen cap and hiking boots but no snow gear, decided to set out and try and find help.

A triathlete, who believed she was best equipped for survival, she got to the nearby highway but found it had been closed due to the heavy snow. She saw a sign saying the entrance to the park was a further 23km away and decided to keep going.

She kept on walking through the night with the snow almost one metre thick, sustaining herself with pine bark twigs and drinking her own urine, The Morning Call reported. She knew she could not eat the snow as it would accelerate dehydration.

She walked for a total of 30 hours, trekking 42 kilometres, before she found a cabin at the closed park's entrance and broke in by smashing a window before collapsing.

She had pulled a groin muscle, had taken off one boot, was hallucinating and suffering from dehydration and exhaustion.

Her husband and son slept overnight in the car before managing to hike to higher ground to get mobile phone reception and call for help. They were taken to hospital and treated for frostbite.

Searchers on snowmobiles from Utah's Kane County Sheriff's Office and Arizona's Coconino County Sheriff's Office found an exhausted Karen on a bed inside the cabin later that day.

She was taken to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Utah with hyperthermia and was said to be in a stable condition on Monday (local time).

"This is a Christmas miracle," Jim Driscoll, chief deputy for the Coconino County Sheriff's Office, told the Associated Press. "Our guys are ecstatic. This is a save. We were able to get a family back together for Christmas. It could have gone very bad very, very easily."

He said the Klein's predicament was all too common.

"Google Maps shows there's a way - but it's impassable," he said, adding. "This is a problem we've had numerous times."

Driscoll also commented on how lucky Karen had been.

"So she's in really good shape. Had she not been, she wouldn't have made it," he said.

Karen's sister, Kristen Haase, said that giving up was never an option for her twin.

"She would make a decision and she would stick to it and never give up. She would do it or she would die trying.

"What kept her going, she says, is she didn't want her mother to bury her daughter. She didn't want her son to be without a mother."