Good SAR News And Bad SAR News

The good news first.

Yesterday, I included a link to an article about Ken Knight, editor of Backpacking Light Magazine, who was missing after going for a multi-day trek on the Appalachian Trail. Today, he was found alive and in good health after getting lost and starting a signal fire... which got a wee bit out of hand. You can read more and see a photo of Ken as he's being taken to a hospital to be checked out, on NewsAdvance.com out of Lynchburg, Virginia.

On the sad side of the day's SAR news—this story much closer to home—one of the three young people who were carried away by the swift Colorado River current in Grand Canyon was found deceased, and the other two are still missing. Here's the latest article from the Arizona Daily Sun: One Of Three Swept Away In Colorado Found Dead.

As far as our navigation boot camp class goes, today was map and compass day. I sat in on the classroom session, helping students now and then and refreshing my own skills at the same time, but was excused from the field work since we had more than enough instructors.

Tomorrow is the GPS class, a full day for me. So, tonight I'd better get some sleep. I had a heck of a time keeping my eyes open sitting in the classroom after just five hours of sleep last night. I spend way too much time on this computer.


Zzzzzzzzz... huh? wha?

Navigation Boot Camp & SAR News

First, a quick update: At the end of my last post, just as I was typing my final sentence, my pager went off. It was a call-out for a lost hiker in the Happy Jack area, which is approximately an hour outside of Flagstaff. Turned out to be one of those load up, drive, turn around, and unload missions. Air rescue located the lost woman, and then a deputy on the ground retrieved her before our team had left town. The only real excitement that night was that we witnessed part of a meteorite event, with reports coming into dispatch from all over the area, and it's possible one or more pieces hit the ground. We even heard air rescue say they'd been blinded by one of them.

(There's more "in the news" news at the end of this post, if you don't feel like reading my ramblings.)

Anyhow, this is day one of the three-day navigation "boot camp" our team is sponsoring, with members of other agencies along with some of our own teammates in the class. I was asked to be an assistant instructor, particularly during the field sessions or if someone needs one-on-one help during any of the classroom exercises.

Today's topic is alternative navigation (navigating without a compass or GPS), and tomorrow is map and compass. Sunday's class will be GPS.

Here are a few photos from today's class, and I'll explain what they're doing:

Instructor Art from our team jumped ahead with the curriculum at the beginning of the class, to get right to determining direction from the sun. He did this because the sun was fading fast as the day clouded up.

Above, you see students measuring one hand's width, starting from the sun's current location at the outer pinky edge of the hand to find due (true) south at the end of a comfortably extended thumb. It was around 11:30 a.m. at the time, and here in Flagstaff the sun is roughly at due south at 12:30 (though the actual range is between 12:15 and 12:40pm, depending on the time of year). So, being about one hour before "due south time" and each hand width being 15 degrees, or one hour of time in the sky, they measured one hand to the west. If it had been an hour past due south time or 1:30pm, they would have measured one hand width the other way, to the east.

Once the students each determined true south, they were able to then orient their map (being sure to turn it so the bottom of the map was facing south, rather than turning the top—map north—toward the south by mistake.

Once oriented, they could then determine a direction of travel by placing a pen on the map, one end on their current location and other other pointing toward their destination. (In this case, the latter was a random location for demonstration purposes.) Facing the body in direction of the pen, they would then be able to walk while keeping the sun in the same location relative to their body, at least for a time (because the sun moves... or the earth does relative to it, that is).

Without gadgetry, one could use various other methods of alternative navigation in conjunction with the map to travel to a particular point, comparing actual terrain to the features on the map, using terrain handrails, catch features, check points, and so forth. The key would be knowing your current location and finding it on the map to begin with.

A little later in the class, Art discussed and then demonstrated how one can determine distance traveled, both by time and by pacing. In this photo above, students are counting paces over a distance of 100 feet, then repeating the process twice more and averaging their results. A single pace is either left-right-left=1 pace or right-left-right=1. In general, an adult takes 18 to 20 paces per 100 feet, or 1,000 paces per mile over "average" terrain. Go downhill and pace will lengthen. Uphill and pace will shorten. Of course, as Art explained, there are errors to these things, but those errors can be reigned in by using other techniques and information on the map.

One case where it would be helpful to have some kind of distance estimate would be when traveling across relatively flat, featureless terrain in the dark and the falling snow. In a scenario like that, it would be a good idea to have an idea of how far you've traveled in the event that the GPS you have malfunctioned. Some people prefer to use time to judge distance, but then you do have to account for any stops and know your average speed.

To keep track of distance by pacing, you can always keep ranger beads on a string or compass lanyard, moving one bead per 100 feet, or you can pick up a pebble or something similar every 100 feet.

So, that's a little of what went on in today's class, along with discussion about map reading, celestial navigation, and techniques for using terrain to one's advantage. This evening, the class will go out to the field to practice, taking turns using alt. nav. skills to move from point to point, partly in the daylight and then extending past dark.

Also, on other "in the news" notes, here are some links to articles about folks who are still missing and some who've finally been found:

Backpacking Light Editor Missing After A.T. Hike — An ongoing search in Virginia along the Appalachian Trail

Body of missing hiker found near Goblin Valley — About a woman who disappeared in the Canyonlands area of southern Utah five months ago

Canyon crews search for 3 missing in Colorado River — In Grand Canyon National Park (This just happened yesterday, and there's still no further news that I've found.)

And this is a REAL old one: A Mystery of the West is Solved — Remains of Everett Ruess found!

Guess What I Got (And Training & News Too)

Heh heh, a new toy! Yep, now I can be a pest and take pictures—video too—of all things SAR. (Added later: This was a bit before cell phones had good cameras or maybe any cameras.) I'm photographically challenged, but I'll do my best to add some pizazz to my babbles from here on out with some images, though I'm sure, at times, it won't be possible—or right—to take pictures while on missions. Here, look, I think I figured out how to point and shoot:


That's the team, getting ready for some training earlier today, on line search and probability of detection. We had a good turnout—15 of us, I believe, including four from mounted with their horses.


Here's how it worked:

Yesterday, our team captain and other volunteers set up the course. They put out a bunch of five-gallon buckets, all painted brown to blend in with the surroundings. These buckets were spread out among the ponderosa pine, which is fairly open terrain but still littered with forest debris, rocks, and stumps, the latter resembling the buckets (or, rather, vice versa).

Behold Nelson and a bucket...


Today, we split into teams of three or four and, team by team, determined our critical spacing. That means an object roughly the same size as what we'd be looking for (in this case, it was an identical brown bucket) was set on the ground, and each person walked away from it to the point where they could still see the bucket and identify it as a bucket. We then counted our paces from that point back to the bucket. The average of each team's results was the critical spacing used for that team's line.

Now, using critical spacing usually means each person is twice that measured distance from the next searcher. That way, if the object is exactly between two people, it could still be seen. Critical spacing is affected not only by the size of the object—which, of course, could be as big as an unresponsive person or as small as a bullet—the terrain, the amount of brush, the weather, and so forth. Given the conditions and size of the objects today, our team's critical spacing turned out to be 30 paces, or roughly 90 to 100 feet, which meant searchers could be 60 paces, or about 200 feet, apart.

Given the size of the search area, however, and the number of people in our lines, we spread out at half critical spacing, or 30 paces apart (except for the mounted folks, who went two at a time, 60 paces apart). We all had radios in order to communicate rather than shouting down the line. We'd say, "Team 1, stop" or "Team 1, start," stating our team number first because there were other teams in the field, to start and stop our lines moving forward at intervals.

This photo shows the distance between me and my next teammate in the line, while another teammate paces off to his spot further out.


So, okay, each time a team member spotted a bucket, they would stop the line without pointing to the sighted bucket and write down the GPS coordinates of their current location, the direction of the bucket from their location using positions on a clock, and then their approximate distance from that bucket.

Sometimes, when the line stopped, other team members would spot the same bucket. Other times, the line would start up again, only to be stopped one step later when someone else spotted that or a different bucket. So it was stop and go, stop and go. We didn't know until we finished how many buckets were in the field.

I know, this sounds awfully thrilling, doesn't it? But I enjoy searching, not to mention the company of my teammates, and this was like a treasure hunt to me. It was also good practice for staying in our grid, keeping an eye on the person to our right and maintaining our spacing. That's much more challenging in more variable terrain and denser brush than we had today, though.

After the exercise, we all gave our notes to our coordinator, who's going to do some calculations and explain the results at our next meeting. Until then, I'm not really sure what kind of POD information he'll give us, but I'll let you know when he does.

So that was today's event. That and playing with my new camera and getting some news. Members of our team, along with the adjoining Yavapai County SAR team and others, have been searching on and off for more than two and a half years for a plane that disappeared in the Sedona area. That plane, flown by William Westover, a private pilot from Phoenix, with his passenger Marcy Randolph, has been found in a canyon in the Secret Mountain Wilderness. Here's the article from the Arizona Daily Sun: Plane wreckage identified.

Oops! There goes my pager! Gotta run...

Those Wonderful Search & Rescue Dogs

This past weekend, I was fortunate to meet some members of the Maricopa County K-9 posse, also known as MarK9, and their wonderful dogs.

We do have a couple of search dogs on our own team—Cassie, our ground-tracking German shepherd, and Scout, an air-scenting brown Lab—but it's always a treat to meet others and see how they work.

Since Cassie joined our team about a year and a half ago, I've read some about SAR dogs, and I'm really interested in what they can do and how they're trained, though I doubt if I'd ever make that big commitment to become a handler. For one, I currently have a much-loved pup of 11 years, who'd not take kindly to sharing my attention. And once Sassy is no longer with us, I think it'll be a while before my husband and I own another dog (update: that turned out not to be true). Not with my plans for future multi-month thru-hikes and our intention to travel as extensively as possible. Someday, I'm sure we'll have another dog, but whether I'd want or be able to put in the time necessary to properly train a search and rescue canine would remain to be seen.

Anyhow, during our fieldwork this weekend, I enjoyed watching how each dog alerted differently during exercises. Some would bark, one would do circles (wing-dings, I call them), and another, a Weimaraner, basically body-checked her handler. They'd get so excited when it was time to work, which was usually communicated by their handlers putting certain collars, often with bells, or working-dog vests on them.

Also fascinating to me are the various commands and signals that pass between handlers and their dogs. For instance, one handler, Terry, explained to me that there's a difference between the command they give for a live person search and a search for a cadaver, and the dogs actually understand that difference. She explained that the dogs are "proofed" for certain animal bones so they ignore those of deer, elk, and other animals that aren't human. Terry and the others were gracious in answering the many questions my teammates and I pestered them with throughout the day.

Besides the treat of watching the dogs, it was also great to meet members of another SAR team as we sometimes do during big, multi-agency missions and at conferences. I enjoy learning about how they do things—sometimes quite differently than our own team—and what kinds of searches and rescues they've been on lately. I never get tired of the stories.

That's one reason I've put together the Search & Rescue Stories website, where I collect firsthand accounts by rescuers and the rescued and keep directories of websites for SAR teams around the world. I also participate on the SAR-L Discussion List, with topics ranging from techniques, training, and management to SAR tips, gear, news stories, and more. You can find a list of additional search and rescue online forums on my website in the "Articles & More" section.

Anyhow, other than some trainings lately, a litter-carry call that I hear was mostly handled by emergency medical personnel who were notified and quickly responded to the scene, and one 10-22'd call-out for a lost hiker who showed up just as we were loading gear at the SAR building, it's been relatively quiet for the past few weeks. Next weekend is the POD (probability of detection) and line search training, and then the three-day navigation "boot camp" begins on May 1st. The warming weather makes these activities much more enjoyable.

Rock Rescue Academy

That time of year is drawing near: Rock Rescue Academy will begin in one month, and this time around, I'm going to jump in. I'm a little jittery about it, though. Will I be able to learn the skills well enough? Will I be able to keep up? There are some very experienced, fast, and strong men in the group and one other woman who certainly fits that description. Many of the skills are new to me, and I've never been particularly quick at picking up such hands-on things like knot-tying, for one. I'll need to practice—often.

So, what is the Rock Rescue Academy? Well, it's the basic training course—a series of classroom and field sessions over about a month's time—that anyone who wants to become a member of the technical rescue team (TRT) must successfully complete.

The TRT is a subset of our general SAR team, and those particular members are expected to respond as often as possible to call-outs for technical missions. The TRT responds to incidents generally beyond the capabilities of the rest of the membership, such as high angle and high alpine rescue and missions that take place in difficult terrain, which means these volunteers are sometimes exposed to additional risk. This is why the TRT meets and trains on a monthly basis, and each person on that team must prove their competence with the skills annually to maintain membership.

Last year, I don't believe there were any new recruits to the TRT. Although I'd considered it, I ultimately felt I wasn't ready—that I needed more time to practice and get comfortable with the basics of SAR before taking on more technical skills. This year, I know I'm more capable and ready to give it a try, and I hear that several other general members, also known as ground-pounders, will be joining me in the tech academy for the first time.

Those of us interested in being tech team members have already received a list of special gear we'll need. That list includes:

• Commercially sewn seat harness
  
• Commercially sewn chest harness or webbing for a chest harness
  
• 6-inch locking carabiners
  
• Climbing helmet
  
• Descender
  
• 8mm Tandem Prusik set
  
• Various lengths of Prusiks with a diameter no less than 6mm
  
• Two 1" multi-loop straps (or daisy chains) approximately 5" long
  
• Sturdy footwear (boots, not trail runners)
  
• Leather gloves
  
• Headlamp
  
• Trauma sheers or knife

Given that I own only two of those items and don't even know yet what some of the others are, I'd better get on the stick and start doing my homework... and spending money. I also need to step up my fitness training in preparation for the "3 miles in 45 minutes with a 45-pound pack" test (just in case).

Well, I'm out the door in a few minutes to meet a teammate. He and I are setting up a GPS field course for the upcoming three-day "navigation boot camp" our team is running for other agencies at the beginning of May. Perhaps this is also the time I should upgrade from my beloved 10-year-old GPS to a fancy-dancy new model. Oy, more money heading out the door, too.