Are They Really Missing?

That's the question I couldn't help but wonder about all day. I tried not to think about it, though, and to focus instead on what we were doing: searching. But the information we had was sketchy, and the circumstances were such that the two people we were looking for could have been anywhere.

That's what it's like with search and rescue sometimes. There's not always a call for help from a lost subject on a cellphone. There's not always an empty vehicle sitting at a trailhead.  Sometimes, a person is reported overdue and their exact destination is unknown. So, our SAR leaders go with the information they do have, and we volunteers get our assignments and search the most likely areas. Sometimes, those search areas can be very large and change as more information becomes available.

In this case, we were looking for a couple in their 70s, one of whom uses oxygen, who'd apparently gone to cut firewood but hadn't returned home the night before, so said a concerned neighbor. And being a concerned neighbor is a good thing, I'd say. Many times, concern for someone else's well-being or their home saves the day, so it's better to be safe than sorry and report those concerns. Imagine not doing so and then regretting it when things turn out badly.

So, it didn't bother me when, after hours of driving around in the Polaris Ranger, following vehicle tracks here, there, and anywhere they went within our large search area, and my teammates doing the same on ATVs and the DPS helicopter searching from above, we found out that the couple was just fine and had never been missing at all. They'd simply been... well, somewhere else.

Okay, so maybe I rolled my eyes and laughed a little at the situation as I tried to dust myself and my backpack off and pick the dirt out of my teeth. But I was happy that things had ended well. I was also relieved that some of the other scenarios that had been passing through my brain all day had not come true.

Besides, I learned some new tracking skills while we were out there. My teammate who was with me on the Polaris was with the Border Patrol for 27 years, so this experienced tracker could tell the type of vehicle at a glance, the direction of travel, and the age of the tracks by just by touching his finger to the dirt and by the color. He patiently took the time to show me what he was doing. So, thank you, Steve, for teaching me some new stuff!

Tracks! I See Tracks!

Okay, I didn't exactly shout about it. But I was pretty excited that my two little eyeballs, with the help of dust-covered glasses, a $5 flashlight, and another tracking class this past weekend, were able to pick out a partial print amongst pine needles on the dirt two-track. Yippee! (I didn't shout that either.)

It had to be them: the family of five we were looking for last night. I mean, how many other people would have been wandering around on those backwoods roads? As my teammate and I continued to follow the prints and impressions, we could see they were on top of all the tire tracks, and they were definitely fresh. So we'd track for a bit, then walk back and retrieve our ATVs and move them up, then return to tracking. Finally, we heard a faint response to my teammate's shout—a chorus of voices somewhere off in the trees.

This was one of those times when a short walk—20 minutes had been the plan, they later told us—turned into a long, chilly night. I'm sure it must have been an added frustration for the family, knowing there were flashlights and warm clothing back in their vehicle as they wandered around in the dark, trying to find their way out. They did have a cellphone, though, and luckily had reception too, so they were able to call for assistance.

So, this is yet another instance that makes me NOT feel silly about carrying my 24-hour pack with me all the time, even when I walk my dog in the woods I know so well around our house, and recommending that others do the same. A 24-hour pack doesn't have to weigh very much—mine is often around 12 pounds, including at least two liters of water—but it can literally save your life. Or at least make life more tolerable while you wait for help.

Okay, I'll stop preaching... so I can start complaining. Have I mentioned lately that I really dislike ATVs? I'm talking about driving them. I swear, they make me more nervous than rappelling off an 80-foot cliff (which makes me pretty darn nervous). Not only do I end up eating a lot of dirt and wearing a layer of dust because I'm always behind a teammate's quad because I'm such a slow driver, but I always feel like I'm going to tip over whenever the road is anything but flat. Those deeply rutted, rocky two-tracks really challenge my limited ATV skills, and I'm much too chicken to load or unload a quad from the trailer. Besides, I think being nervous can lead to problems when it comes to those heavy beasts, so better I don't try. That's how I see it. 

I'm always a little bummed when I get assigned to an ATV rather than to hike. For some reason, though, the UTV—the Polaris Ranger side-by-side—doesn't bother me. At least, not where I've driven it so far, which includes up and down the switchbacks at the Snowbowl ski area.

Anyhow, I'm off to the monthly technical rescue team meeting tonight. These meetings are followed by a day-long field training on the weekend. I'm not sure what we'll be learning and practicing this time, but I thought I heard something about passing knots in raising and lowering systems. We shall see...

SAR City

I'm back. And, hopefully, I'm now a better tracker after an another 16 hours of instruction, this time at the SAR City conference in Barstow, California, where there were more than 50 classes offered on a wide range of topics and skills. This annual conference is organized and hosted by the all-volunteer Barstow Desert Rescue Squad in San Bernadino County.

I thought the three-day event was well worth the trip, and as always, I really enjoyed meeting people from other teams, especially the folks from Dolores, Colorado, K9 Search & Rescue, who came over to introduce themselves soon after I arrived as I sat alone by my tent. So, thank you Shawn, Chuck, Randy, Vicki #1, Vicki #2, and Kimberly (and Jack!) for hanging out with me over the weekend. It was great to meet you and learn about your team. And it was nice meeting you too, Orange County guys. That's a spiffy Hummer you've got there.

As for that tracking class—which was excellent in many ways, and the lead instructor, retired sergeant and SAR coordinator Darryl Heller was top-notch—it's always interesting to learn the same skills from different people. I pick up new techniques and "tricks" and get at least a somewhat different perspective, which I think is really valuable. 

That said, it's a challenge not to say "yes, but.." when an instructor tells you that what you learned from someone else is wrong ("No, you never do that" was the reply to a question I asked about a method of measuring stride that I'd been taught at the Heber, Arizona conference), or if that instructor has a very different way of doing something than you're used to.

Not that I'm the greatest tracker after just two years in SAR and five tracking classes, but it can also be difficult to swallow your pride when someone talks to you like you have no experience at all. In my case, during one of the field sessions, I was used as an example of what NOT to do, even though it's something my own team does when tracking, and I've learned it from others as well. I must admit, that really bugged me... even after the field instructor came up to me after class to say it had been he who'd encouraged the other students in my group to do something that obliterated part of the track and that I hadn't actually done anything wrong. Well, phooey, I wish the other students knew that.

Other than that, though... I thought the class was great and would highly recommend it to anyone in SAR. And while that class took up the entire conference, I heard lots of good things about many of the other classes, too, some of which lasted an hour or two or four and others that spanned the whole weekend.

If you'd like to read more about the conference and see my photos—I wish I'd taken more, but I was usually too busy with the class or yacking to remember to take pictures—I did a write-up about it here: SAR City: A Search and Rescue Conference in Barstow, California.

A Search and Rescue Weekend

When I walked in the door early Sunday morning, my husband told me I smelled like smoke, but my nose didn't agree. Maybe I just got used to it overnight, as I sat at the road block for about 12 hours, the wind gusting, rocking the vehicle and several times toppling the barricades.

Search and rescue had been called upon on Saturday to staff the road blocks in Williams, Arizona, to keep folks out of an area of town that SAR had helped evacuate the night before when a prescribed burn got out of hand and became a wildfire. As of today (Monday), that fire still threatens homes.

See: Williams Still in Danger from the Arizona Daily Sun.

In the photo above, taken late afternoon on Saturday, you can see the smoke ahead-left, as my teammates and I approach Williams, where we relieved the crew that had been there overnight.

On Sunday morning, after our group returned from Williams, I had just enough time to grab a shower, change clothes, and go to the tracking class for the Basic SAR Academy. I probably could have skipped the morning classroom session and just gone to the field exercise later, when I was scheduled as an assistant instructor, but I wasn't all that tired (yet) so I decided to sit in on the classroom part, too.

Here, the whole group is briefed before the field session....

Then I took my group of three new trackers to their first print. They documented it as they'd been taught and then got started following the track.

It rained off and on, and the wind continued to gust, making the tracking extra challenging. Despite losing the track now and then, however, the group managed to pick it up again and follow it to the end.

Nice job, guys!

So, Saturday was the GPS class beginning at 8 a.m. in the classroom, and then we went out to practice in the forest in the afternoon. Below, academy members and my co-instructor (front) were entering the next waypoint into their GPSes, which they then had to convert from latitude-longitude to UTM, and plot the coordinate on their maps before navigating to that point...

It was at that time, around 3 p.m. Saturday, when there was a call-out for a lost 15-year-old, so I left my group with the other instructor and quickly hiked back to the road, where another teammate scooped me up and we headed to the SAR building.

That mission was quickly concluded when some tracks were discovered and then the DPS helicopter spotted the girl, and we returned to the SAR building just before 5:00. Ten minutes later, I was off to Williams. So it had been all day Saturday in GPS class, then to the mission for the lost girl, then to Williams for the overnight road block, then to the tracking class on Sunday. And today, Monday, is a continuing evidence search. Whew! But I did get a good night's sleep last night, so I'm ready to search.

Oh, and I practiced rappelling last week, too, with a couple of my tech rescue teammates. As usual, I was nervous going over the edge the first time through, but when I hiked back up and went for a second and third descent, my nerves calmed (also as usual). We were using a conditional self-belay on a second line, which meant I didn't have a free hand to brace myself against the rock, like I usually had before. So, that was a little different for me.

Here, you can see the brake rack in my right hand, while I tend the Prusik with my left. It was about a 30-foot cliff. Maybe not a lot... but enough.

 

Random Stuff: Some SAR, Some Sorta

So, we haven't had what I'd consider a major SAR mission in a little while (though we've had some calls that were canceled before we got to the scene), but the team has been busy, especially with the annual Basic SAR Academy going on. It's a pretty large class—around 30 students this year—so quite a few of us existing members have been helping to teach.

Today was compass day, with the morning in the classroom and the afternoon in the field, where students plotted coordinates, obtained bearings and distances, and then navigated to a number of points using their compasses and by pacing and comparing the terrain to their topo maps.

I think most of the class is getting the hang of these navigation skills. They've already been through the personal safety and map classes. Next up is basic GPS and then tracking, followed by ATV training and, finally, a day-long field exercise: a mock search and rescue mission. Once all of that is complete, the new recruits will be added to the call-out list and able to respond to the real thing.

And what else can I share?

Well, this past Wednesday morning, a friend of mine on the team called around 11:00 and asked, "Are you on your way?"

"Huh?" I said. "On my way to what?"

"The call-out," she replied. "For the lost hiker off 180."

I didn't get any call. No phone call, no email. Strange.

So I hung up, dialed the SAR line and said, "This is Deb. I did not get a call, and I did not get an email, but I happened to get a call from Liz about the mission, and I am responding." Then I quickly changed from my PJs (it had been a lazy morning) into my SAR stuff and was out the door and at the building in about 15 minutes. I pulled up at the same moment as Liz. Strange, I thought, no one else was there yet, and it had taken her at least half an hour to drive across town.

That's when Liz double-checked the text message and realized the date of the call had been September 19th. But her phone had just rung. Odd. So we were four days too late. (That mission, by the way, happened while we were at the SAR conference in Heber. Apparently, it wasn't a big deal. I heard the subject was lost along a Forest Service road but easily found by my teammates who responded.) So I called the SAR line back and said something like, "Uh... this is Deb again. Cancel that last message. There was a little goof with the text."

Well, at least it had gotten me out of my pajamas.

Oh—and I have no idea why I'm sharing this, but—about that Grand Canyon search earlier this month, I think I mentioned that I was a wee bit nervous along parts of the Tonto Trail where there was significant exposure to a very long way down. Well, to be honest, instead of "wee bit nervous," make that (insert expletive) scared! I mean, the trail was about a foot wide for long stretches with no way to put any distance between myself and the sheer drop. No vegetation or rocks as visual barriers, either. And the trail was that hard-pack stuff with loose gravel on top—you know, the kind of surface where you'll be walking along and suddenly, without warning, your foot will slip out from under you, and the other foot and then the rest of you will immediately follow? Yeah, that kind of stuff.

So, I have to admit that I rather feebly called out to my search-mate who was ahead of me. He kindly retraced his steps to where I was frozen and let me walk right behind him with one hand on his pack as I stared at his feet. We took not much more than baby steps for what seemed like a really long way. Meanwhile, he played memory games with me to try to take my mind off of... well, death. My wonderful partner promised he wouldn't tell anyone and even said, "Hey, I'll tell you something embarrassing about me so you'll know I won't tell anybody about this." Ah well, I still won't tell his story... partly because I can't remember it!

The funny thing is, I was concentrating so hard on the memory game in order to keep going and get past that scary stuff that I remember it weeks later. It was the "I'm going camping" game. See, the first person says, "I'm going camping, and I'm going to take a..." then names something beginning with the letter A. Then the next person says, "I'm going camping, and I'm going to take..." and then repeats the A thing and adds a B thing. Then the first person says the "I'm going camping" part, repeats the A thing and B thing and adds a C thing. And so on and so forth. Got that?

Well, I was so focused on that game, I still remember, "I'm going camping, and I'm going to take an alligator, a beach ball, a cat, a dog, an emu, a feather, Goofy, a helicopter, an igloo, a jelly bean, a kaleidoscope, a lounge chair, and a mudslide." That particular (expletive) scary section ended before we got to the N thing. But I'll probably remember that A-M list a year from now, too.

About a half-hour later at the start of the next scary stretch, we played a different game. But I'll spare you all of that information.

So why am I bothering to tell you this? Well, for one, I also wanted to share what a nice thing my search-mate said to me later that day—one of the nicest things anyone other than my husband has said to me in a long time. It went something like this: "I'm really impressed with you, Deb. You're terrified about something, and yet you do it anyway. That takes real guts."

I mean, how cool is that? Here I was, a new tech team member, an experienced long-distance backpacker, and active SAR volunteer with lots of mission hours under my belt now, and I was scared out of my noggin on parts of that trail. I felt ridiculous. And yet, my teammate (also a Grand Canyon ranger) turned it into a compliment. So, T.B., if you're reading this... THANK YOU! I'll never forget that, either.

Back From the Arizona State SAR Conference

Every 18 months, search and rescue volunteer and paid professionals from around the state of Arizona, and some from other states, get together to learn from one another and improve their skills. At this year's conference, my second since joining SAR, classes included:

• Basic Map & Compass
• Basic GPS
• PLB/ELT Direction Finding
• Tracking, an 8-hour course (I took this one. Learned a lot.)
• Wilderness Survival
• Basic ATV and Basic UTV
• Advanced ATV Search Tactics
• Air Operations, Ground and Air Unit Coordination
• Alzheimer's Disease Considerations for SAR (This class was great!)
• Swiftwater Rescue Awareness
• Vehicle Track Awareness (another one I took this year)

... and more. There were also classes and field work for those in mounted and K-9 SAR.

At the conference, I had a chance to meet SAR volunteers and coordinators from many Arizona counties, Civil Air Patrol, the Department of Public Safety, and from SAR teams in California and Mississippi, including one deputy who is just starting up a new team. Experience levels ranged from new volunteers just going through a Basic SAR Academy to seasoned veterans who've been involved with hundreds or even thousands of missions.

Based on my experiences at the Arizona SAR Conference, I'd recommend that anyone involved with search and rescue look for a conference to attend at least once. Even if you're very experienced, it never hurts to learn how other teams operate and how they teach the skills. It's also really nice to meet people from teams and organizations you may interact with during a multi-agency mission. If I ever have the opportunity, I'd like to attend a conference in another state and the national conference at some point, too.

If you're looking for a conference, one website to check is SARAZ.org's Conferences/ Training section. This is an Arizona-based website, but listings include events in other states, including the International Tech Rescue Symposium in Pueblo, Colorado, and the annual Georgia SAR Conference.

******

As far as recent missions go, there were a couple shortly before the conference, one of which was a tech team call involving a hiker in West Clear Creek canyon who'd injured his knee. But we ended up being turned around en route to the scene because the helicopter was able to land in the canyon and pick up the patient.

The next mission involved a lost hiker in Sedona, who reported his predicament by cellphone. This turned out to be a joint mission with the adjacent county, with each member from our team paired with a member of the other. I wasn't able to respond to that late-night call-out because of a commitment I had to my mom early the next morning and because I was really tired, but a teammate filled me on the details. He also told me what a pleasure it was to work with the Yavapai County team and that it was a "textbook" SAR mission. I was sorry to have to miss it.

While more than a dozen of my teammates and I were at the Arizona State SAR Conference, there were a few more requests for Coco SAR, one involving a patient carry-out (possibly a technical rescue) when a vehicle went off the highway and two other calls for lost hikers. But our team is large enough and deep enough to handle call-outs even while many of us are out of town and unavailable. I can find out what happened on these missions at the next general meeting, when our coordinator will review the call-outs from the preceding month.

So, now I'm home and ready to get back out there. I'm also looking forward to helping with the Basic Academy's map and compass class this weekend. I actually really like going over these skills, over and over again, and helping others learn them, too, because it keeps me from getting rusty, which is really easy for me to do.

And speaking of practicing, a few of us newbie tech team members are getting together this week to run through some of what we were recently tested on. We all passed the test, but we don't want to forget what we've learned before we move on to new skills.

Have I mentioned lately that I really like SAR? I get frustrated when I screw up or don't do my best, but I sure am happy when I do something right or get better.