A missing-person case in one of America's most remote national parks ended in the best possible way this week, after two kayakers stumbled across a 70-year-old hiker who had been lost for 11 days.

Craig Berg, a recent retiree from Royal Oak, Michigan, was reported overdue on September 6 after failing to return from a multi-day hike in Isle Royale National Park, an island wilderness in Lake Superior that sits closer to Minnesota and Ontario than to Michigan's own mainland. What followed was a major search: ground teams, dogs, boats, aircraft and drones all scoured the island, but by September 11 there was still no sign of him.

Then on Saturday, two paddlers spotted Berg near Intermediate Lake, more than a mile from any established trail. They relayed his position to rescue crews, and a Coast Guard MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter hoisted him out. He was reportedly hypothermic and injured, but alert — and he recovered well under medical care in Marquette. His son Evan's reaction to the news, relayed to Detroit's Local 4, summed it up: he shouted "he's alive!" at the top of his lungs. His father, though rattled, told him he had "enough stories to fill a book."

The ordeal began when Berg, an experienced hiker who had been building up to an Appalachian Trail attempt with shorter trips like this one, fell into a marsh and lost both his wallet and his phone. A week of solo survival followed. The two kayakers who found him, according to his wife Debbie's Facebook post, were National Guard members from Saginaw and Metro Detroit — and Craig would like to buy them a beer.

The National Park Service publicly credited the patchwork of public and private teams who coordinated the effort, a reminder that rescue on an island with no roads, no vehicle access and patchy cell coverage depends heavily on luck as well as logistics.

Why should travellers care? Isle Royale is a genuinely wild place — a narrow 45-mile island where moose and wolves outnumber people for much of the year, and where help is not a phone call away. Berg's survival is a great ending, but the details of how it unfolded are a solid argument for the basics: carry your phone in a waterproof pouch rather than a pocket, stick to marked routes if you're new to off-grid hiking, and tell someone your itinerary in detail. And maybe pack a satellite messenger. Even experienced retirees training for the Appalachian Trail can lose everything in one bad step into a marsh.

The full story was first reported by Backpacker.