Fridge the cat finds her way home after 40 days in Colorado national park

By Erin Keller
This article was originally published in The Independent

If your Fridge is running, someone just might catch it.

That’s exactly what happened after a Minnesota woman’s cat, aptly named Fridge, survived 40 days alone in the Colorado wilderness before being found and reunited with her owners hundreds of miles from home.

Nakee Bullen, a tattoo artist from Insanti, Minnesota, and her boyfriend were driving back from Los Angeles and stopped to camp near Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado as they visited several national parks along the way.

But the trip took a devastating turn when Bullen woke up early one morning to discover both of her cats had escaped from the campsite.

“I woke up at 5:30 a.m., 6 o’clock in the morning, and both of them were gone,” Bullen told CBS Minnesota.

One of the cats, Lewis, was found nearby, but 3-year-old Fridge was “nowhere to be seen,” Bullen said.

Bullen spent hours searching for her feline friend, combing campsites within a seven-mile radius, but eventually faced what she described as the hardest decision of her life: ending the search and returning home to Minnesota without her pet.

“I felt like I left a piece of me there,” Bullen said. “I was just crying because she wasn’t here with me and all I wanted was my baby.”

Back home, Bullen refused to give up hope. She regularly checked Humane Society listings and monitored social media in case someone found Fridge. The search, however, was emotionally draining.

“Every time I id it was the most heartbreaking thing, you’d see cats that look a lot like her but it wasn’t her,” Bullen recalled.

Although park rangers told Bullen the chances of finding Fridge were extremely low, someone spotted the cat and, 40 days after she vanished, brought her to Humane Colorado, where Bullen finally received the call she’d been waiting for.

Bullen said she immediately made the 16-hour drive from Minnesota back to Colorado to bring her cat home.

“She’s a fighter. She’s a certified baddie now,” Bullen laughed. “It was the most amazing feeling. It was just absolute tears of joy.”

Despite spending more than a month on her own in the wilderness, Fridge is healthy and happy after the reunion, Bullen reported.

“She’s fine, she’s healthy,” Bullen told CBS Minnesota. “She’s a little underweight, you know, but spending 40 days in the wilderness in Coloraod, I think, will do that to you.”