Teens found safe after three days missing in Ontario provincial park

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TORONTO (680 NEWS) – Two teenage girls who went missing during a camping trip in Ontario’s Algonquin Park have been found safe, police say.

Ontario Provincial Police spokesperson Bill Dickson says a canine unit found the 16-year-olds at around noon on Monday, ending a search that involved close to a hundred people scouring the western area of the provincial park.

“So they didn’t make it very far and my thought is, and I haven’t confirmed this with the investigators, but we always teach the kids – if you get lost in the woods, stop moving,” he says. “I get the feeling that was the case here, where they just said ‘If we go any farther we’re going to get more lost than we are now,’ and they just hunkered down and waited for the rescuers to come.”

Police say Marta Malek and Maya Mirota are in good shape, describing them as “alive and well.”

Dickson says the girls are being reunited with their families.

The teens, who are both from Kitchener, Ontario, were reported missing at around 10 p.m. on Friday after failing to meet up with a group as planned, but did have camping supplies with them.

“Definitely not strangers to camping, they’ve been camping before, they have some skills, they have some experience and yes. they did have some camping equipment with them,” Dickson says. “They had a tent, they had some other camping equipment, and they had some food supplies. So they weren’t in the woods empty handed.”

He adds the two did not have cellphones with them.

They had last been seen on Thursday on the Western Uplands Trail between Rainbow Lake and Susan Lake, and were found less than two kilometres away.

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