Two young girls, Carolina Carrico, 5, and her sister Leia Carrico, 8, from Benbow, California asked their mother if they could go for a walk Friday afternoon. After she told the girls they couldn’t go for a walk, she went back to cleaning her house. Then, it took a half an hour for their mother to realize they were no longer there.

Their mother contacted the local sheriff’s office at 6 p.m. after trying to contact neighbors, family and friends. After calling the sheriff’s office, the Sheriff’s Special Services deputies, Southern Humboldt Technical Rescue and CAL FIRE crews, a search was conducted around the area throughout the night. There were roughly 250 members from across the state that went out to help find these missing girls.

Luckily, the girls were found 44 hours after they left, safe and sound. They were found uninjured and “in good spirits” roughly 1.4 miles from their house. They used their gathered knowledge of basic survival skills, learned from their local 4-H club, to keep themselves safe until teams arrived to bring them home.

The team stated that there were granola bar wrappers found in the woods that matched the ones their mother had recently bought. Lt. Mike Fridley said, “the wrappers showed us a direction from where they started to where the wrappers ended.” In addition to the trail of granola bar wrappers, the team also found some of the girls’ boot prints, which helped the team pinpoint their location.

Fox News states that the girls tried to follow deer tracks for a while and ended up losing the trail. After then, they decided to stay put under a bush and they drank fresh water from Huckleberry leaves to stay hydrated. Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal told reporters that, “This is an absolute miracle. This is rugged territory, this is an extreme environment. How they were out there for 44 hours is pretty amazing.”

As much as people have stated that millennials don’t know how to take care of themselves or that they are just mindless idiots that are glued to technology, it is extremely impressive that these two girls kept themselves safe and alive for almost two days in March in Northern California. When Fridley called the girls’ mom and told them her daughters were safe and alive, he said “she melted on the phone.”

Even though the girls had learned these wilderness skills, it was still a miracle they knew what to do and how to stay safe in the cold, overnight and in the woods. More parents should prepare their children for any situation they might be put in. On weekends where there is nothing going on, sign your kids up for different classes, such as different survival technique classes, stranger danger classes or some other kind of useful class. Children absorb information like sponges absorb water. Take advantage of this stage and prepare them for anything the world might throw at them.