Kinda funny. Today on Twitter, when I mentioned that I'd been up most of last night on Mt. Humphreys on a SAR call-out, one of my followers responded and gave me the Twitter user name of the young man we'd fetched off the mountain. So I took a peak at his profile page and saw that our subject had been tweeting while waiting for us to arrive. Which is why his cellphone battery just about pooped out, I guess.
But if I were stuck up there at 11,000-some-odd feet in the dark, cold in my shorts and t-shirt and without a light, I'd be nervous and wish I could tweet away, too, I suppose. (Not that I've ever tweeted to my Twitter followers on my cell phone and don't even know how. Heck, I'm so old-fashioned, I don't even text!)
Anyhow, I spent most of last night on that same mountain I was up and down, and up and down ... and up ... and down the last time I posted, which was what? Saturday? This time, though, I drove up in the dark at about 11pm. Heck, I could just about do it with my eyes closed now!
On the way, one of my teammates said, "In SAR, we all have our 'thing.' And THIS is your thing." He was referring to me being the UTV driver. Hmm ... can I change "my thing" to something else?
So okay, where was I? Oh, the mission.
Well, it turned out fine. We drove "my little red car" up the ski run and parked it at the bottom of our STEEP short cut to intersect with the trail at around 11,400 feet, slipping on the scree slope with me grabbing at tree branches and trying not to tip over backwards--boy, would that have been embarrassing!--and, to our surprise, made voice contact with the young man as soon as we hit the trail. We'd thought he was beyond the saddle as far as the first false summit and then on a scree slope about 800 to 1,000 feet down. In fact, he was just a short distance off the trail, having missed a switchback in the dark and ended up on a boulder field. Well, good, much easier, relatively-speaking, than we'd expected.
After we handed over some Gatorade and extra clothing for the cold hiker, then explained that we wanted to descend, not down the trail but down our steeper but shorter route to the parked UTV and our subject quickly agreed, the three of us SAR members and one relieved hiker made our way back down the mountain.
The end. (For now.)
Arizona Daily Sun article: Hiker Rescued Off Of Humphreys Peak Early Monday
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My latest SAR Stories News post: Search & Rescue and Social Media
2 comments:
Do you have the capability to locate someone by the position of the cellphone? I always wondered how accurate that was.
Hi, Roy...
I don't know a lot about how that works, but there have been times during our searches where a subject's cell phone has been "pinged" and given us some idea of where they were when they made their last call, which sometimes was a call to a family member or friend, telling them they needed help. I believe there's also a way, if someone has their phone turned on--even if it's too low on battery juice to make a call or there isn't sufficient reception--to get a fix on their location and sometimes quite accurately. I did write a blog post called, Cell Phones And SAR on my other Search & Rescue blog, where I talk about this a bit and reference some articles, if you're interested in taking a look at that. I believe there's advanced technology that can be requested by SAR (from where/who I'm not sure ... FBI?) that can pinpoint the location of a cellphone if on or at least its location at the time of the last call if other means don't work. The reason I think so is because I overheard this being talked about during a mission early this year.
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