CARRABASSETT VALLEY, Maine -- A 17-year-old skier who tried to take a backcountry shortcut survived two nights in the wild by building a shelter, drinking from a stream and walking toward the sound of snowmobiles during the day, officials said Tuesday.

A snowmobiler who was not part of an official search party found Nicholas Joy, of Medford, Mass., at about 9 a.m. Tuesday west of Sugarloaf Mountain, the Maine Warden Service said. Joy was taken to Franklin Memorial Hospital in Farmington.

"I said, ‘A lot of people are looking for you,"' snowmobiler Joseph Paul recalled telling the 17-year-old when they met up. "He said, ‘I bet. I've been out here for two nights."'

Paul, a 44-year-old volunteer fire captain from Warwick, Mass., said Joy told him he knew how to stay alive from watching a survival show on TV. The 17-year-old told his rescuer he drank from a stream and used hemlock branches in a shelter he built. Joy told his rescuer he got lost after cutting through the woods to try to save time after a backcountry ski trail ended. He'd had nothing to eat since he got lost, and it was a rare occasion in which he didn't have his cellphone with him, the skier told his rescuer.

The weather conditions Sunday night and Monday night were bad enough that the search had to be suspended, and Joy survived by building a mound of snow that he fashioned into a shelter that he could crawl into, said Lt. Kevin Adam, the search coordinator.

One or

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two skiers get lost and are reported missing at Sugarloaf most winters, with skiers sometimes spending a night in the outdoors before being found.