Checking the SAR Line

I thought I'd do a test to see if the trend will continue. Ready? Drum roll, please...

Gee, it's been REALLY QUIET LATELY!

Ten... nine... eight...

I called the SAR phone number today, to be sure the most recent message about a call-out was the last one I heard when my pager went off at 2:30 a.m. on November 24. That mission was 10-22'd (cancelled) pretty quickly as I was en route to The 105 building. So I called to be sure my pager was working. Yep, I haven't missed anything. Still the same message from the 24th, about a lady missing near Williams.

Seven... six... five...

Before that was the plane crash in Sedona. So it's been over two weeks since we've had a call-out. Wow, I'm getting used to sleeping through the night.

Four...

Read some good search and rescue books lately, during all these quiet evenings at home (with my pager next to me on the nightstand, of course). The first was Lost In the Yellowstone: Truman Everts's Thirty Seven Days of Peril written by Truman Everts himself, who was—you guessed it—lost in Yellowstone (before it was a National Park). That was back in the late 1800s and apparently is still the longest anyone has gone missing in that area and been found alive... though not far from death in Evert's case. A thin book and a good read but a little challenging with all of the side notes, some of which are about the concurrent movements by the rest of Evert's party and others who went looking for him.

Three...

Then I read Coming Home from Devil Mountain by Eleanor Dart O'Bryon, who became separated from her fiance while climbing Picacho del Diablo in Baja, Mexico, and both were stranded without food for nearly three weeks. Another quick read, composed mostly of interlocking journals kept by Eleanor while alone on the mountain, starving, and her father, who mounted a search effort with the Sierra Madre SAR team.

TWO...

And my definite favorite of the three is Coming Back Alive: The True Story of the Most Harrowing Search and Rescue Mission Ever Attempted on Alaska's High Seas by Spike Walker. For me, it was one of those "I don't care how tired I'll be at work tomorrow, I've gotta keep reading" books. Totally distant from any experience I'll ever have, I found it fascinating.

One and a HALF...

So, no Coconino County SAR news (that I know of) to report for now. There's probably been plenty going on that just hasn't required volunteers or at least nothing that necessitated paging the whole team. Sometimes, certain team members with a lot of experience or specific skills are called directly to help with specialized missions. We usually hear about that stuff at our monthly general meetings.

One and a QUARTER...

But I'll be back as soon as I have something SAR to share.

ONE!

Hm.

Recent SAR Happenings

No call-outs since the Sedona plane crash, but some other news and events to share...

We had an Alternative Navigation class on Saturday, November 15. By "alternative navigation," I'm referring to navigation without the use of gadgets such as a compass, GPS, or altimeter. Skills we learned and practiced in the field included navigating by the sun, celestial navigation, and using terrain to our advantage with techniques like aiming off, safety baselines, funneling, catch features, pacing, and more. Let me just say, this stuff takes practice!

I took this course, taught by one of our team's navigation experts, last year and intend to take it every time it's offered. These are skills that definitely require time and repetition to master and continued use to keep sharp. I find celestial navigation fascinating, and I was so impressed by our instructor's knowledge. And a little jealous, too.

Anyhow, I wrote an article about Alternative Navigation on my SARstories blog. Click here if you're interested in taking a look.

A writer from the Arizona Daily Sun took the classroom portion of the Alt. Nav. training and, that afternoon, a photographer accompanied us for a short time in the field, so a newspaper article is in the works. I'll let you know when it appears.

In other news, several specially selected team members went out to the Little Colorado River in the area of Hopi Salt Canyon to collect some evidence located by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The evidence was potentially connected to the case of Reinhard Kirchner, a German national who went missing in early spring 2007. In April of last year, after 61 year-old Kirchner failed to meet his fiancee in Las Vegas as planned, his abandoned vehicle was found near the north rim of the Little Colorado River gorge. A large ground and air search involving multiple agencies and counties followed, but after six days of searching about 56 square miles of rugged terrain, the SAR mission was called off.

At our general meeting last night, Sergeant D said the items Fish & Game found could just be a river runner's stash. Still, investigation continues, including the potential for DNA testing on the items.

Also at last night's meeting, we were told that the pilot from the downed Piper near Sedona, 51-year-old Rockney Mark Herring, is still alive and has been stabilized. Apparently, he's also been awake. Boy, is that great news!

And with that, I'm off to the uniform shop to pick up my new, very yellow winter coat (it's one of our team colors, you see) that now has search and rescue patches on it. That way, people will know why I'm wearing a bright yellow winter coat and won't just assume I'm either color blind or unfashionable.

A Plane Crash in Sedona

Al and I stood along the fire line, staring at the smoldering wreckage.

"Is that part of a wing?" I asked.

"No, that's a stabilizer," he said. "That's part of a wing over there. I think this was a Piper, but I can't tell for sure."

It was a little after 8 a.m. How different the crash site looked now that the sun was up. During the night, the wreckage had been illuminated by the light of the full moon and the orange glow of flames, making it seem almost surreal. But now, in the stark light of day, it was all too vivid and all too real.

At about 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 13, my pager had gone off. It was a 300 code for a rescue, so I was surprised to hear our captain's message that this was an airplane disaster. At the time, he didn't know if it was a private or commercial plane, how many people were involved, or the status of the victims. He did know the location, near Schnebly Hill Road in Sedona.

At least a dozen volunteers had responded to the SAR building by the time the call-out was cancelled, but that didn't mean the mission was over. As more information came in, Lieutenant Christian told us that only four of us would be needed for the night, two to station themselves at the intersection of Schnebly Hill Rd. and the rough two-track that led relatively close to the crash site and two to spend the night watching over the wreckage. Al and I were the two who'd spend the night with what was left of the plane. And the two men who hadn't survived.

And that's what was foremost in my mind as I lay on the ground nearby, inside my bivy bag with my head on my backpack. I had forgotten my ground pad, and there wasn't a clear spot anywhere to be found that was free of rocks, but my own discomfort was nothing. All I could think about were the people affected by this crash: the two men who'd died, the pilot who'd somehow crawled from the wreckage with second- and third-degree burns over half his body, and the rest of their families. It's one thing to hear about tragedies in the news—it's quite another to be so... well, up close and personal.

As it turned out, the three victims were related: two brothers, Michael and Tommy Johnson, and their cousin, Rockney Mark Herring. I saw their picture when Michael's son, Micah, held up his cellphone to show Al and me the photo the morning following the crash, when we returned to the intersection at Schnebly Hill Rd. after being relieved by two other SAR members. He and other family members were there, waiting to be taken to the scene. Seeing the pictures of the men whose remains we'd watched over during the night really had an impact on me.

Micah said that his dad, Michael from Phoenix, and his uncle Tommy of Texas hadn't seen one another in nearly 10 years. They'd been enjoying a sightseeing flight with their cousin Rockney, the pilot, when, after refueling at the Sedona Airport, their Piper PA 32-260 fixed-wing, single-engine aircraft lost power and went down in that rugged, heavily treed area about eight miles east of Sedona.

A vacationing New York firefighter camping nearby had been the first on the scene. He found the injured pilot lying next to a tree and rendered first aid until a DPS rescue helicopter was able to land and transport the patient. Arriving in the darkness a few hours after the crash, the first thing I'd seen in the firelight was what turned out to be the pilot's mangled headset on the ground next to a tree, marked with evidence tape.

When we hiked up to the crash site, a lieutenant, a deputy, and numerous Forest Service personnel were there. The Forest Service folks had cut a fire line around the wreckage and were finishing up their work for the time being. Al and I would keep tabs on the fire during the night to be sure the flames didn't kick up again or cross the fire line.

As the others prepared to leave, the deputy asked if Al and I would be comfortable up there on our own. The deputy would remain at the intersection on Schnebly Hill Rd. where he had provisions in his patrol car, and we could call him by cellphone or radio if we needed him at the site. We were also given numbers to call if there were an issue with the fire.

It was a long night, with the moon so bright I could read small print without my headlamp. Unfortunately, the only thing I did have to read was the info sheet that came with my brand new bivy bag. Which, by the way, I found out isn't quite adequate for mid-November, particularly between 2 and 4 a.m. With the rocks, the cold, the radio traffic I monitored throughout the night, and frequent fire checks, especially when the breeze picked up, there wasn't much sleep happening.

"You awake?" I heard Al ask sometime around 1:30.

"Yeeeaaahhh," I groaned.

"I'm going to take a walk around the crash site to make sure everything's okay."

From my location upwind of the fire, I watched Al disappear behind illuminated smoke. Looking at my moonlit surroundings, I was struck by how quiet it was, except for the occasional crack or pop from the embers or some shifting piece of plane or smoldering tree limb.

Al returned to his own spot amongst the rocks, and we both lay there for another six hours or so, my bivy and his space blanket crinkling intermittently as we both tried to find comfortable positions for a few minutes at a time. I was relieved when the sun came up and things would soon be happening. At some point, the National Transportation Safety Board  and Medical Examiner would arrive, then Michael and Tommy's remains would be removed from beneath the wreckage.

But before that happened, media helicopters were on the scene, flying in slow circles above our heads. I thought about how different it was here on the ground, standing only feet from what I'd normally just see on the news.

From the Arizona Daily Sun: Family Mourns Brothers Killed in Plane Crash

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.