A First Snow's Mission

It's still Sunday. I got home from the "Drunk on Devil's Head" mission at 4:30 this morning. At five-something this afternoon, we had another call-out. Between the two missions, Steve and I enjoyed a midday dog walk, during which the sun was shining and it warmed up enough that I shed my winter coat and tied it around my waist. Sometime during the afternoon, however, while we were busy painting our bathrooms (too yellow, unfortunately), the clouds moved in, the temp dropped, and white stuff began falling for the first time this season.

And now I'm in a warm SAR vehicle, while several of my teammates are hiking in the precipitation, alternating between flurries and whiteout conditions throughout the evening. Three other volunteers have driven around to the other end of this five-mile section of the 800-mile Arizona Trail, which stretches from the U.S.–Mexico border to the Utah state line. The two lost subjects, a man and woman, are stuck between Sandy's Canyon and Marshall Lake.

This is a basic unprepared hiker scenario: no maps, no lights (save for the flash of a camera, we're told), improper clothing. But they do have a cellphone that ain't dead yet. So, when they got lost and it got dark, the couple called for help.

As a result of cellphone communication with a deputy, we pretty much know where the stranded hikers are located. In fact, they can see our spotlight from here at Incident Command and even heard the deputy yell when he walked a short distance into the forest. So, as the crow flies, they aren't far from here, but there's a canyon between us and them, and they can't safely move in the dark. They're also now wet and cold.

Fifteen of us are out tonight, so more than enough SAR as long as things go smoothly and no one gets hurt or overly hypothermic. That's why I'm toasty and snug in the vehicle along with two of my teammates, while four others are getting some exercise. The leader of the ground team just called in some coordinates on the radio, and I could hear him huffing and puffing.

Time passes as my vehicle-mates and I chat about this and that. I keep one ear on radio comms and the other on the conversation in the truck. Oh good, they have voice contact. And soon, the ground team reaches the subjects. They're going to warm the two up and give them additional clothing before hiking them out.

Turns out, they're closer to the other SAR vehicle near Marshall Lake, so that's where they're headed. The rest of us drive around to rendezvous there.

We wait for a while until the ground team arrives with the rescued hikers, who appear to be in their fifties or so. They look happy and grateful. I can't hear what they're saying, but I see their smiles, their single Camelbak (water pack) and one water bottle, the camera around the man's neck, their cotton sweatshirts. While I don't personally condone hiking with cellphones to the exclusion of other essential gear, it's a good thing they were able to make that call tonight. Otherwise, severe hypothermia would most likely have caught up with them before anyone else would have.

Another happy ending.

Drunk on Devil's Head

So I think there's a bit of a pattern emerging here. I tell you how unusually quiet it's been for a while, then beep, beep, beep! Well, it's more of a song my pager emits than a series of monotonous beeps... but my point is, the thing seems to go off not long after I make that sort of comment. That's what happened the other night after I finished the "PLB's and Plenty of Z's" entry. I'd been reading in bed (Lost in the Amazon, it's called), and my book had just settled on my face when I was jolted awake by that familiar little song.

The page-out was initiated by our team captain, also a volunteer, since Sergeant D is out of town. This would be a search for a 43-year-old male who'd driven up to the top of Mt. Elden, drunk (or had gotten drunk up there, perhaps) earlier in the afternoon and hadn't been seen since. The reporting party said the man was not dressed for the cold. It was now a little after 10 p.m. on Saturday, below freezing in town at 7,000 feet and certainly colder at over 9,000.

I've never driven up Elden Lookout Rd. before, just hiked to the top via various trails. And I think I prefer the hiking. The trails are fairly strenuous but not nearly as rough on the body as bouncing up that dirt road, which is more a jumble of boulders than actual dirt. As a passenger that night, I was holding on to the "oh-sh*t" bar with both hands. Even my seat belt wasn't enough to keep my head from bumping the roof of the vehicle a time or two. And that drive took us a while. I'm thinking I may have been able to hike up there faster.

At any rate, there ended up being 13 of us searchers and rescuers on the mountain, including two deputies. When we convened at the tailgate of one of our pickups, a usual location for a team briefing, we learned some additional details:

Originally, there had been four in the party: the man who's now missing, his girlfriend, his brother, and a friend. They drove together to the top of the mountain, where they drank and they drank. Then they argued. Then, the brother and the friend took the vehicle and left the mountain. Bye-bye! Meanwhile, the now-missing man and his girlfriend continued to argue and walked southward, across an open area called Turkey Park, and apparently slid aways down the side of Devil's Head.

Just to give you an idea of the terrain, it's basically one long mountain with three peaks: Little Elden to the east, Elden in the middle, and Devil's Head to the west. Mt. Elden, the highest of the three, and Devil's Head are mostly separated by a grassy area called Turkey Park. You can drive right up to the top of Elden or, just below Turkey Park, take the other prong of the forked road and go to Devil's Head.

Anyhow, the reporting party this evening had been the missing man's girlfriend. The details were a bit fuzzy, but I think the man had slid further down Devil's Head than his girlfriend had (at one point someone said she'd actually pushed him)—or perhaps not but was maybe drunker than she was—and he couldn't get back up, either due to injury, inebriation, or maybe both. I'm not sure about any of that, but I do know the girlfriend climbed back up to Turkey Park, then walked all the way down Elden Lookout Rd., and somehow got a ride back to town where she called 911.

Okay, so before breaking into ground teams, we gathered around a clear footprint definitely made by the man we were looking for when he and his girlfriend had started walking southbound, first on the road and then overland toward the rim. He was wearing cowboy boots.

We then divided into several groups. One team of three had arrived a bit before the rest of us and were already headed to the area the girlfriend had described as where they'd gone off the side of Devil's Head. The rest of us were assigned to scouting the interior of Turkey Park—"purposeful wandering," as our leader for the evening described it—searching the perimeter of Turkey Park along the rim and searching the radio and lookout towers at the summit of Mt. Elden. We had no idea if the subject had perhaps left the area where his girlfriend had last seen him. We had no idea if he was badly hurt or if he was suffering from severe hypothermia. Or both. Alcohol only makes matters worse, of course.

I was on the three-person team doing the purposeful wandering around the interior of Turkey Park. We spread out about, oh, 30 feet or so and searched the tall grass and clumps of short trees, calling out the subject's name as we always do and looking closely in case he was there but unresponsive.

Eventually, Team 1, who'd gone to the general area last seen, found what looked to be a slide pattern. And, soon afterward, they had voice contact from below. I was actually a little surprised how accurate the girlfriend's description had been, given her altered state at the time of the slide.

Turns out, the man was not seriously hurt. Nor was he apparently stuck, at least not by then, because he walked up to meet the SAR team. After warming him up, the rest of the ascent was quite slow as apparently the man had to, uh, stop and dispose of some "cookies" shall we say (okay, barf) every so often. At the request of Team 1, other SAR members brought Gatorade down to the dehydrated guy. Eventually, he was handed over, wobbling, to a deputy, who drove him home.

I heard the subject was lucky he hadn't slid off the edge of Devil's Chair, which is a sheer cliff. I'm not familiar with that area on an up-close-and-personal basis, but if you see it from a distance, that's what the formation looks like: a big chair. All in all, things turned out much better than some of us had anticipated. A heavy-duty hangover is nothing compared to a broken neck.

Anyhow, that's how I spent Saturday night till 4:30 Sunday morning. No Zs that night.

PLBs and Plenty of Zs

I'm still here! Didn't want you to think I'd gotten tired of SAR blogging. No, there just hasn't been a lot of action lately. At least, nothing that's panned out.

We did have a call last Monday morning, I think it was, around 9 a.m. I was in Walmart at the time (yippee!), looking for stuff for our new house, when my back pocket started beeping a tune. A 200 (search) page for a couple of overdue woodcutters on or near the Hualapai Reservation, which is about a three-hour drive from Flagstaff.

It turned out to be a good drill, basically. Several of us proceeded to load tech gear, ATVs, the Ranger UTV, cubes of water, MREs and snacks, and full gas cans, then drove for about 15 minutes before the mission was 10-22'd. The woodcutters had been located near Peach Springs. So we did an about-face, returned to the SAR building, and unloaded and put away all the gear. And that's been about it over the past couple of weeks. I've had way too many full nights of sleep. I'm thinkin' something will happen soon.

Oh, and we did have another cancelled call-out on the afternoon of Saturday, October 25, just as we were finishing up a rather frustrating personal locator beacon, or PLB, training. (I'll get back to that in a sec.) It sounded like a pretty dire call at that. A girl—not sure if it was an adult or child—had been attacked by bees about four miles up the West Fork of Oak Creek, and she was having an anaphylactic reaction. It was going to be a tough litter-carry, possibly involving some wading in places where the creek fills the canyon. And word through the grapevine was that first responders (not sure if that meant medics, deputies, or civilians) were already "working a code." So we were thinking this might end up being one very rugged body recovery by the sound of things.

On my way across town to the SAR building, though, the mission was cancelled. At the time, I thought perhaps the girl had been short-hauled since her condition was apparently very serious. But I later found out she'd been given epinephrine and walked out on her own. Glad to hear that.

So, back to the PLB training. To read specifics about this and other types of devices used to transmit distress signals, you can visit the Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking, or SARSAT, website. As for me, I refer to the thing that emits the distress signal as a "gadget," and the device responders use to track down the gadget (and hopefully the person/s needing help) as a "gizmo." Gadget and gizmo... got it?

So, first we had a classroom session. We learned about the different types of beacons—PLBs used for land-based applications, ELTs for aviation use, and EPIRBS for maritime use—and the basics of how they work. Seemed pretty straightforward at that point.

Then, we went out behind the Sheriff's office, where Sergeant D turned on the training PLB gadget, and we walked a couple hundred yards across the parking lot where we used the gizmo to locate the gadget. Of course, we could see the gadget from where we were standing with the gizmo. Straight line, no obstacles, flat terrain. I understood how it worked and figured, hey, this is easy!

And then it was time to take the gadget and gizmo into the field. We relocated to Fort Tuthill, where the plan was to take turns going off into the woods with the gadget with about a 10-minute head start, and then the rest of the group would use the gizmo to locate the source of the distress signal.

Well, the first time out, things went fine. Trees, yeah, but pretty flat. Now, the gizmo, by the way, makes a continuous, rather annoying sound—a constant, high-pitched, whiny beep—which the responders have to listen to the whole time they're searching. This first trial didn't take us that long so none of us mentioned anything about stomping on the whiny thing. Second time around, though: different story.

We were all over the place, with me using the gizmo for the first hour. At least, it seemed that long. But the thing couldn't seem to make up its gizmo mind. I was getting conflicting signals, first this way and now that. We were now in hilly terrain with lots of rocks and other obstacles, and I guess the signal was bouncing all over the place.

Eventually, I held the gizmo out to Sergeant D and asked (trying not to sound desperate), "Do you wanna try?" thinking at that point, I must be doing something wrong. I'm not sure what our leader was thinking, but he wasn't saying much as the rest of us followed him follow the gizmo.

A few members of our team, who'd been using the low-tech method of detecting a PLB signal with a radio set to a certain frequency and a body shield (if you really want an explanation, feel free to let me know in the blog comments, and I'll give it my best try), had disappeared. I hadn't noticed they'd walked off, leaving just me and another lady following Sergeant D. I looked around and didn't see them anywhere.

Eventually, Sergeant D radioed the others, and we learned they'd found the guy with the gadget a long time ago. What? The gizmo had failed us while the low-tech method had worked? When I saw where the guy with the gadget had been the whole time, I realized we'd passed pretty close to his location early on in the search. Ugh.

So, then Sergeant D took the low-tech method out of the equation, grabbed the gadget, wished the rest of us luck, and took off to hide. Basically, the gizmo took us in a huge circle, leading us to think Sergeant D was on the move with the thing the whole time. So, a moving distress signal, right? We even thought, based on the signals we were getting, that he'd gone back to the vehicles. But, when we got there, not only was there no sign of Sergeant D, but the gizmo was registering no signal at all. Nada. Dead.

Frustrated, we called Sergeant D on the radio, and he gave us coordinates. We used our GPSes to go to those coordinates, thinking we were looking for him and/or the gadget, but we soon realized he'd gotten us fairly close but not right to the spot. He continued to give us hints; we continued to try to follow the directions the gizmo seemed to be leading us in, but we wandered all over the place with no luck. Finally, thankfully, Sergeant D called the whole thing off. We'd apparently walked right by him more than once.

Was it the hills and obstacles interfering, making the signal bounce all over the place? Or was it us, the searchers using the gizmo, who were the problem? What I do know is that I was hearing that whiny beep in my dreams for several nights thereafter.