“Facebook has its perks, that’s for sure,” Curry said. “A friend tagged my girlfriend and I in a post.”

The storm started around 5 p.m. on Feb. 23 and continued on into the next day. During the night, Curry said TJ Henderson’s sister “was looking for help for him. One of my friends tagged Bailey and I in it, and it’s a good thing that she was working overnight at the hospital, because it was 3:30 in the morning. I was plenty asleep by then.”

Henderson, as reported earlier by The Messenger, was on his way back from a funeral when he was caught in the heavy blowing snow. He stopped and helped some people in the truck behind him after they went off into the ditch, but shortly after that his own truck went in the ditch.

As he and the two he had picked up waited there in the cold, friends made connections online, until Bailey Donnelly woke Curry up.

-Submitted photo
After being stuck out in a blizzard, snow filled up the engine in TJ Henderson's pickup. Henderson said the truck may be totaled, as if it had gone through a flood. He said he spent part of the night Saturday stranded in the truck, before he was rescued and towed to Harcourt by a man in a tractor.

Curry recently moved to Harcourt, and Henderson was stuck just up the road.

“He says ‘We’re stuck less than three miles north on 169, but it’s nasty. I don’t see anything making it up here. There’s a couple of plow trucks that went by us, and they didn’t make it very much further.’

“I said, ‘do you need anything? Do you want me to come get you guys?’ He said, ‘I really appreciate it, but I don’t think you’d make it.’ I said, ‘I can always at least attempt to come see.’ He said, ‘no sense risking yourself, it’s so bad out.'”

Curry said he calls his own Chevrolet pickup truck Rolling Thunder, since it’s such a large, loud diesel.

“I said all right, I fired up Rolling Thunder. He said, ‘You probably won’t be able to turn around if you do make it. You’re nuts.'”

Things were really bad when Curry got onto the road.

“It was hell,” he said. “It was rough.

“I’d hardly got around the corner by the John Deere place when I smashed into at least a five foot tall drift. I didn’t even see it.”

Curry also went by an Iowa Department of Transportation plow stuck in the ditch, he said, and asked that driver if he needed anything.

But eventually he did find Henderson’s white truck, just a few hundred yards away from where the first red pickup had gone in the ditch.

Henderson told The Messenger he and his companions were choking on fumes in the truck when Curry made it out there to get him.

When he got there, Curry said, he found the tailpipe kept getting covered up, and Henderson had to keep clearing it out.

Henderson’s iPhone provided a location, he said, and helped Curry know where to go.

As worrying as the weather was, Curry was more worried thinking about his friend stuck out in it.

“I’ve known him since we were in middle school,” Curry said. “I didn’t want to read their names in the obituaries the next day.”

Curry reached Henderson at about 3:30 a.m., after he’d been stuck since around 10 p.m. Saturday night.

Curry took the other three to his home in Harcourt.

A farmer with a tractor came by later and towed Henderson’s truck all the way to Harcourt at no cost, Curry said.

Henderson tried to start his truck up, but when he got back to Harcourt and saw how full of snow the engine was, he understood why it wouldn’t go.

“We had no idea it was that bad,” Curry said.

Henderson was afraid the engine might have been ruined, but on Monday he said after three days of thawing and a few new parts, the truck seems to run like normal.

Curry said his girlfriend had been following the Attig and Hobbs weather page on Facebook, where people were posting about the snow and where they were stuck. Numerous individuals stayed up following the page, trying to help each other out in the bad weather.