The historic Durango sightseeing steam train became the little engine that could Monday.

The passenger train was on a mission when it went huffing and puffing down a winding San Juan Mountain narrow gauge track to save a hiker with a broken leg who was lying in pain — cold and hungry on the banks of the Animas River.

The woman had fallen off a cliff Sunday, dragged herself over rocky ground for a good distance, and found herself near the Animas river as the sun rose Monday morning in an area around five miles south of Silverton, an isolated mountain town only accessible by the Million Dollar Highway (Highway 550) and, of course, the historic Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.

Nick Breeden, the train’s engineer, and his new wife, Kylah, a locomotive fireman and EMT, were racing to get to the woman who was in shock after being lost in the mountains for a cold, scary night.

It was up to the first-responder couple, who are newlyweds and rarely work on the same shift, to stabilize the hiker until a chopper could bring the Silverton Search and Rescue crew into the rugged area. Though authorities confirmed the 20-year-old woman is from Aztec, New Mexico, her identification has not be released. She was eventually treated at Montrose Regional Hospital.

Her father, Anthony Montoya, told the Denver Gazette his daughter knew that it was the last full weekend for the Narrow Gauge Railroad before winter set in. So when she got disoriented, her aim was to find a route that led her to the train tracks.

“No telling what she went through that night,” Montoya said. “She’s a bright young lady. She kept positive. That’s how she made it out.”

The timing couldn’t have been better for the stranded hiker, who had no food or water, and was only dressed in a tank top and sweats when she got lost Sunday evening. She was woefully unprepared for a mountain sleepover with only a cellphone in an area with no cell service.

It took a village to rescue her.

The passenger

The sighting happened Monday at around 11 a.m. as the sightseeing train was ending its first run of the day on the Durango-Silverton path. Just as the locomotive was approaching its Silverton destination, an alert passenger on the trip spied something that didn’t look right. The passenger saw what looked like a person stranded on the banks of the Animas River. The big train continued to its Silverton destination, leaving an emergency service car to help the woman.

“We always have the diesel workforce train for emergencies,” DeAnne Gallegos, public information officer for San Juan County Office of Emergency Management, said.  “I just call it a workhorse.”

The locomotive engineer and firefighter couple

As the first Durango-Silverton train finished its trip to Silverton, the Breedens were already on their way in the second train coming up the track.

When they reached the remote area, Kylah swam across the freezing, clear-green waters of the Animas and waited with the hiker for six hours, using her EMT skills to keep her stable.

That afternoon, wet, cold and exhausted, Kylah heard the buzz of the chopper carrying the Silverton/San Juan Search and Rescue Team as it circled the sliver of a river bank.

It took Silverton’s fresh emergency medical crew to get the injured woman on a stretcher. The area was so remote, the chopper couldn’t land, so it waited as rescue team secured the woman in a rescue “cocoon” hooked to ropes which were rigged over the river.

From there, she was placed in waiting pop rail car — which is a small passenger rail vehicle.

“We still had trains on the tracks while this operation was going on, which is why they couldn’t fish her out of the area right away,” Gallegos said. “It literally took helicopters, trains and automobiles.”

“It took everything I had in me to crawl.”

From there, the woman was transported on a stretcher to the waiting helicopter, which airlifted her to Montrose.

Montoya said she will be taken to a hospital in New Mexico for surgery. He added that she “landed on her right side” and that her leg is broken, as well as a hip injury. When they first spoke, she told him “..it took everything I had in me to crawl to where I was able to be seen.”

The hiker and her family

The New Mexican hiker wanted to take a day hike, so Sunday she parked her van at the popular Colorado Trail head and took off. Alone. Without telling anyone where she was going.

Some time during her walk, she veered off of the path to explore, and fell off of a mountainside as she was taking photos with her phone, said Gallegos, who stressed that while hiking in mountains like these, it’s necessary to have a phone that works off of a satellite.

The hiker’s frantic parents notified the San Juan County Sheriff’s office and the Colorado State Patrol Sunday their daughter was missing somewhere along the Colorado Trail.

Responders, aware of temperatures which had dipped into the freezing range overnight, started looking for her but were unsuccessful until Monday morning.

A cold night into Monday, Undersheriff Steve Lawrence found the woman’s car still parked at the Colorado Trail parking lot. At about the same time, the train passenger spotted the woman at the end of the three-hour tourist train ride.

Montoya said the thought of losing his daughter made for a very rough 24 hours.

“When I saw the sheriff, the first thing I asked was: ‘Is she alive?’ “

On the Durango Herald Facebook page, the young woman’s aunt, Yesena Brieno wrote that her niece may have had supernatural help in the dark and freezing forrest that night.

“We believe my dad who passed a year ago was with her, protecting his grand daughter from wild animals and showed her the way to the tracks,” wrote Brieno. “She has a long road of healing.”