PRESTON — As Kacey Hebdon sat in a makeshift snow cave underneath his incinerated snowmobile and his ears strained to hear the search-and-rescue sleds in the distance, a sinking feeling began creeping into his thoughts.

He started to wonder if he was going to make it out alive.

“I started losing hope,” he said. “I didn’t think they were actually going to find me. Hearing sleds all day and just knowing they’re out there looking and nobody can find me, I started to lose hope.”

Now, Hebdon, 20, is safe and sound back in Preston — with a few frostbitten toes the only reminders of his harrowing journey in East Idaho’s backcountry.

But after being separated from his snowmobile riding group in the Copenhagen Basin — which is located between Montpelier and Preston — Hebdon knew he was in trouble.

It was Sunday. Hebdon and his companions had set off for the trails — trails Hebdon had ridden several times before — in the morning. By the afternoon, however, a storm was setting in, and the group was working its way back toward the parking lot.

The wind was blowing, the snow was falling and visibility was poor. Hebdon directed his snowmobile over a hill across the trail, and before he knew it, he was disoriented.

And what was worse — he was by himself.

“I started thinking, ‘I’ve traveled way too far. I don’t remember any of this. I’ve gone way too far,’” Hebdon said. “And then I tried to backtrack and I ended up doing a circle for some reason. … At this point, I didn’t know where to really go.”

Hebdon got out his phone, dialed 911 and told the dispatcher that he was lost. He was told to stay put so search and rescue teams could pinpoint his location via his phone call.

He found a tree, dumped gasoline from his sled onto some collected firewood and lit a fire. As darkness fell, he heard snowmobiles. None were coming his way.

It was at that point Hebdon tried to set a tree on fire to signal to emergency responders. He leaned his snowmobile up against a tree and set it ablaze, but it didn’t work. By this time, it was around 1 a.m. Monday, and blizzard conditions forced the search to be put on hold.

Hebdon managed to dig a snowcave underneath his burned-up snowmobile. He crawled inside and fell asleep. With dropping temperatures, he did not know if he would awaken.

“Going to sleep, I’m thinking, ‘Am I going to wake up from this? Or am I going to get too cold while I’m asleep and not wake up?’” Hebdon said.

Hebdon, however, woke up many times, each time peeking out from under his coat to see if the sun had risen yet. He finally woke up for good around 8 a.m.

Though snow was still falling, Hebdon walked around his improvised campsite to get a handle on his surroundings.

Then, sometime in the afternoon, he heard more snowmobiles.

“I was like, ‘Oh those are getting close to me,’” Hebdon said. “‘I better run out there.’ So I ran out into the meadow. By then, they had already turned around and were going back the other way. I tried yelling, but I guess they didn’t hear me.”

Disheartened, Hebdon walked back to his shelter.

However, the three riders — Hebdon’s friends Justin Coleman, Buckey McKay and Dillion Drury — turned around again and continued making their way across the meadow, where they stumbled upon the footprints Hebdon had made when he tried to flag them down. Coleman, McKay and Drury followed the tracks and found Hebdon.

“I was so happy when I heard people, heard people yelling my name,” Hebdon said. “I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, people are really here.’”

Hebdon tore off the only salvageable piece of equipment on his snowmobile — its hood — and jumped on the back of McKay’s sled. The foursome made their way back to the parking lot, where an ambulance — as well as Hebdon’s family — was waiting.

“It was just a relief that I was actually going home, that I actually made it out,” Hebdon said.

Hebdon was stranded in the backcountry for 27 hours. He always figured people who got lost were being careless, reckless or weren’t experienced. He never thought he’d be in a life-or-death situation and need to be rescued.

The lesson Hebdon gleans from that? Getting stranded can happen to anyone, so always be prepared.

“It’s so crazy how fast it actually happened,” he said. “Within two minutes of losing the group, I was lost.”

It was the adventure of a lifetime for Weston’s Lindsay Christensen, and it all culminated in her winning the title of Extreme Huntress on Friday.

Christensen’s title pursuit began back in April when she applied to participate in the Extreme Huntress competition. The applicants were vetted, and 21 women — including Christensen — were selected as semifinalists.

After a month of online voting, the final competitors were whittled down to six. And in July, Christensen went to Texas to compete in variety of skill challenges and hunts.

The challenges included handgun shooting, AK-47 shooting, a biathlon and public speaking. Christensen won the AK-47 challenge and the public speaking challenge, and placed high in handgun shooting and the particularly grueling biathlon.

“It was 108 degrees and the heat index was crazy,” Christensen said. “We ran with full camo with our packs and gun. … About halfway through I was like, ‘I need to walk,’ but I didn’t know how far I had to go, so I just kept on going. … It was pretty cool to be able to just push through that.”

For the hunting portion of the challenge, the competitors would go out into the field accompanied by judges.

“They judged us on how well we hunted,” Christensen said. “But they didn’t have a rubric or anything. They just said we’re getting judged on everything — how you conduct yourself, how you’re doing, if you’re being safe. But they never gave us specifics. They just came up with the score for each girl.”

With the skills challenges and the hunting out of the way, the final category for scoring was online voting. Between August and December, Christensen racked up 3,293 — nearly twice the amount of votes as the runner-up.

Christensen chalks up her high vote count to the work she did back home.

“I definitely worked hard to promote it,” she said. “I did a lot of events in the community. I had booths at the fair. In the derby I had derby cars driving with my stickers on them. I did the meet-and-greet at the high school — all sorts of fun things just to try and promote it.”

On Friday at an all-women luncheon at the Dallas Safari Club in Dallas, the winner was announced. Now, Christensen will have to figure out a way to haul her 60-pound trophy back to Idaho.

“I was so overwhelmed with emotion,” she said. “There were definitely a couple other girls I thought were well-deserving of the title as well. It was a really humbling experience.”

Christensen was told by Extreme Huntress judges and producers that the Extreme Huntress title can open doors for the winner. She plans on taking that to heart to help promote, grow and introduce people to the sport.

“As far as what happens from here, it kind of is what I make of it,” Christensen said. “The door is opening. … Hopefully I can make something great.”

A total solar eclipse. It’s a celestial event that always mesmerizes and captivates onlookers, and East Idaho is one of the best places on the planet to see the next one.

On Aug. 21, 2017, the moon will be positioned directly between the Earth and the sun, casting a shadow on the Earth’s surface about 100 miles wide. At approximately 11:30 a.m., East Idahoans will be able to observe the eclipse with their own eyes.

The moon’s shadow will sweep across the country from west to east, making landfall on the Oregon coast at 11:15 a.m. MST before reaching Idaho at about 11:27 a.m. Just after 11:30 a.m. is when the eclipse is scheduled to move over East Idaho, with the centerline passing between Rexburg and Rigby and just south of Driggs.

The eclipse will continue into Wyoming, where the centerline will pass over Grand Teton National Park — just north of Jackson — at about 11:36 a.m. The eclipse will continue its path through Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and South Carolina before leaving the continental United States at approximately 12:48 p.m. MST.

After traversing the U.S. in a little over an hour and a half, the eclipse will continue over the Atlantic Ocean before ending at sunset near Africa. The moon’s shadow doesn’t touch any landmass before or after the United States, keeping its path on land exclusively within the U.S. It’s the first total eclipse in the nation since 1991, the first on the U.S. mainland since 1979 and the first to sweep the entire length of the country since 1918.

“It’s just really cool,” said Steve Shropshire, a professor of physics at Idaho State University. “It’s an opportunity to see parts of the corona (or aura of plasma that surrounds the sun) that you can’t see from the Earth because it’s washed out from the light of the sun.”

Connoisseurs of the cosmos are already making plans for the sublime solar spectacle. Those in Oregon eager to see the eclipse have already booked all of the state’s available campsites, according to the Associated Press. The same can be said for hotel rooms in Casper, Wyoming.

Shropshire says ISU will host a solar eclipse viewing event open to the public on the university’s campus in Idaho Falls. The event is in its preliminary stages, however, and Shropshire isn’t sure about specific details.

Shropshire also said a proposal has been sent to NASA to fund a joint experiment between ISU students and students from Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. The experiment will be designed to accurately measure the sun’s radius.

“These are not common events,” Shropshire said. “Usually, an eclipse happens somewhere within a couple hundred miles (of you) sometime in your lifetime. The fact it’s passing over here just north of us in Idaho Falls is pretty incredible.”