Cottonwood woman runs onto frozen lake to save man and dog who fell through

A mother of four is being hailed as a hero after she dashed onto the ice of Cottonwood Lake to save a 68-year-old man and his dog.

Catie Dahl, 34, said she looked out her window on the morning of Jan. 20, one of the coldest days of the year, and saw a truck sinking into the lake.

Dahl, who is on maternity leave after her daughter’s birth in November, said she could not stand by. She put on her husband’s boots, told her daughters to stay safe and ran the 100 or so yards from her house to the truck.

She crawled on the last stretch of thin ice toward the man. He clung to the edge of the ice with his small dog nearby. “He said, ‘Help my dog,’” Dahl recalled.

The windchill that day hit a staggering minus-30 degrees. Dahl said she could feel her nostrils freeze, and the man in the lake seemed to be going into shock.

Dahl held onto his hand and kept talking to him, giving the man reassurance. “I just grabbed him, just to give him something to hang onto until help came,” she said.

Time seemed to warp, and she lost track of how long they were out on the ice, Dahl said. But at some point, probably within 10 minutes, she could hear the sirens of fire engines nearing, and then first responders arrived.

Those first responders recognized Dahl with a life-saving award at a Cottonwood City Council meeting Feb. 4.

“It was Catie’s quick, selfless actions that prevented the loss of life that day,” Lyon County Sheriff Eric Wallen said in a statement posted to Facebook.

The man on the lake was taken to Avera Marshall Hospital. His dog was brought to a Cottonwood veterinarian for care.

“He and the dog are both back home and are doing fine,” Wallen said in an email Thursday.

The man who fell in the lake was Mike Kurtenbach of Cottonwood, and he offered his thanks as well.

“Thanks Catie Dahl for helping me and Millie on Monday when I fell into the ice,” Kurtenbach posted on Facebook.

And then: “Thank you Lakeside Companion Animal Clinic for taking care of Millie after we fell into the lake.”