So, there was the call-out on Sunday at about 8:30a.m. I was dressed for Jazzercise and quickly changed into my nylon, convertible pants and the SAR tee I prefer to wear in the summer instead of my long-sleeved uniform shirt. I switched from aerobics sneakers to hiking shoes just before heading out the door. But there was no hiking to be done this time, just lots of driving. And for a change, I was behind the wheel instead of co-piloting.
We were searching for two men who'd rolled a jeep the day before and, with at least one of them injured (a possible broken arm), they'd called a family member and given some sketchy information about their location before the cellphone had gone kaput. The son of one of the men had spent the night driving unpaved roads, many of them not on the map in a very sparsely populated area around Ashfork, Arizona, consisting mostly of ranch land. But he had no luck finding the men or their overturned vehicle.
Enter SAR.
Given the ambiguous information we received, our search area started out rather large. A subsequent cellphone ping from the last call gave us a vector (if that's the right term—or wedge, I guess), narrowing the search area some. With DPS Ranger, the helicopter, in the air, those of us on the ground relocated and spread out as the information changed.
Ultimately, one of our field teams came across the men, hobbling along near a cattle tank. Ranger landed and administered some initial medical care, then the victims chose to ride in a private family vehicle to the hospital rather than accept transport by ambulance (which wouldn't be free, of course).
For me, driving for hours is much more tiring than hiking for hours, so I was glad to get out of the vehicle and shake off the sleepies back at the SAR building later that day, as we waited for word about a second possible mission. But that one was resolved before we went into the field again.
The next day, as I was doing some work on the computer and listening to the Sheriff's scanner online before heading out for more tech practice (I'm getting the hang of some of this stuff, by George), I overheard the initial stages of some SAR activity and knew there was a good chance of another call-out.
Ranger was in the air with one of our SAR coordinators, looking for six overdue hikers in West Fork Canyon. I called a teammate who was supposed to meet me for tech team practice and gave him a heads-up. We proceeded with our plan and went to the building to work on anchors, belay, and pick-off set-ups and all that good stuff, only to be called minutes later about the mission. So, we headed right over to the coordinator's office, a short walk from the SAR building to the main law enforcement complex, for a briefing.
For a while there, it looked like four of us would be inserted by helicopter into the canyon. They'd spotted three people believed to be from the party of six, and they'd been waving their arms at Ranger. But whether they were in distress or not was unknown. What was known was that they were already a day overdue, one of the women was three months pregnant, and one of the men was allergic to bees and had no Epipen with him, so said the reporting party, a couple who had left the group the day before and hiked out the way they'd gone in.
As I understand it, the group's original plan was to thru-hike the canyon from bottom to top, so they'd done a shuttle and left vehicles at both ends. But the other six didn't show up at the top, and the two hikers who'd come out early became concerned.
While we were in our coordinator's office, he put the reporting party on speaker phone so we could all hear the information firsthand. Then we headed back to the SAR building to get our gear ready and then head over to the airport to meet Ranger.
Then a plan was carried out that changed our mission from a possible all-nighter to an early morning hike. A radio was lowered from the helicopter to the three people in the canyon, along with instructions on how to use it. Ranger was then able to talk to the hikers and find out the situation, including the fact that they were tired but generally fine. Three of the six had gone ahead to hike out with their four dogs, while the other half of the group, including the pregnant woman and the man allergic to bees, stayed behind, too exhausted and not fast enough to make the rest of the distance that night.
So three of us SAR folks volunteered to meet at 4 a.m. and hike in at first light to locate the three remaining hikers, make sure they were still okay, and hike out with them. Then we resumed tech practice for the rest of the evening.
My alarm went off far too soon at 3 a.m., but I never mind an early morning walk up West Fork. It's really neat to be in there at dawn, when the birds start singing along with the sound of the creek, and the red canyon walls are illuminated by the rising sun.
Oh, sorry, I started to slip into waxing poetic-mode there.
So anyhow... as we hiked, we periodically tried to contact the hikers on the radio, unsure if they'd left it on all night or if they were still asleep or had started walking toward us. At one point, when we'd gone about five miles up canyon, we started to wonder if we'd missed them somehow and passed one another. It would have been unlikely but possible. We got no response to our repeated, loud whistle blasts, either.
Just as we began hiking back to recheck the parking lot where their car had been when we'd started out, I heard static on my radio. I called again: "West Fork, party of three, this is search and rescue. Do you copy?" After more static, I heard a reply. At 7:15, they were just waking up and getting ready to hike out. And they were still all fine.
In a short time, the three of them and the three of us were together, and after a brief conversation about what had happened—they'd taken a wrong turn and gone up Casner Cabin Draw instead of continuing in West Fork—we turned back toward the parking lot. The weary and appreciative hikers were happy to be on trail again after all their bush-whacking, wading, and swimming.
So, all ended well, and by noon, still in my SAR clothes, I was asleep on the couch with my cellphone on the coffee table, just in case something else SAR came up.
