A Walk In The Woods

There is no article link to give you for this one. I guess the ending didn't make it a newsworthy story. Still, a mentally handicapped teenager did spend a cold night in the woods, and Search & Rescue, local firefighters, and members of CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) did spend all night looking for him, wandering the forest, Forest Service roads and trails, tracking, and knocking on doors in Munds Park.

He'd left the house around 5pm on Friday but didn't return home by dark. The first searchers on scene checked what was said to be his usual route to Frog Tank, but there was no sign of the boy--legally an adult but mentally much younger. And he apparently wasn't dressed well for what was becoming a very cold night.  It had, after all, been a rather warm spring day.

We'd brought ATVs with us but were told the boy would probably be afraid of searchers, so the vehicle noise certainly wouldn't help. Not to mention the muddy and very wet conditions that would have made driving difficult. In fact, even on foot, my search partner and I encountered some obstacles, at one point being stopped by a wide, fairly deep and moving creek, swollen with spring runoff. We talked to two of our teammates who'd arrived on the opposite side of the creek, compared notes about our perspective assignments and, since our next search assignment was on their side and theirs on ours, we swapped.

As my companion and I looked for prints around a stock tank and seasonal ponds and along water-filled washes, we had to climb over barbed wire fences, slog through the mud, watch our step on jagged rocks and mounds of snow, and, at one point, cross a very rickety suspension bridge. Meanwhile, we called the boy's name as nicely as we could, adding that he wasn't in trouble and we just wanted to help him. We'd stop to listen for any response, but all we heard were coyotes.

And the only tracks we found belonged to critters, big and small. Other searchers even spotted some fresh mountain lion prints. In the pitch dark, I couldn't help but wonder if we were being watched.

Another search team did, however, find human prints in the woods. And they matched prints they'd spotted around the boy's home. Incident Command had checked and described the tread on the boots of those who'd arrived first on scene to do a hasty search and ruled those out, so everyone was optimistic these were the boy's prints. But the tracks were eventually lost in rocky terrain.

At daybreak, weary searchers were replaced by a fresh crew. But it wasn't long before the boy was found as he was walking back home.