The Search Is Over

For those of you who haven't been following updates on the search for missing NAU student, 20-year-old Bryce Gillies, in Grand Canyon, I wanted to let you know that, sadly, his body was found this morning in the Bonita Creek drainage on the north side of the Canyon following yesterday's discovery of some personal items, including a backpack, nearby.

You can read the breaking news story from the Arizona Daily Sun here: Body of missing backpacker found

I'd been hoping there was some way this mission would have a happy ending, listening to radio traffic daily from the Grand Canyon for any hint of what was happening, but that happy ending wasn't to be. As someone said to me today when I told them the news, "We can love the Canyon, but the Canyon is indifferent."

Young Hiker Missing In Grand Canyon

Yesterday, a news release was put out by Grand Canyon National Park regarding possibly as many as four missing hikers. Last I heard, technical rescue personnel were en route, some from Zion National Park, possibly to be inserted by helicopter into a remote and rugged area.

The news from 7/22 release begins:

Grand Canyon, Ariz. – At approximately 7:20 p.m. on Tuesday, July 21, the Grand Canyon Regional Communications Center received a report that at least one young man, and possibly as many as three, were overdue from a backpacking trip at Grand Canyon National Park.

The young men are reported to have left on a trip to the Deer Creek/Thunder River area on Saturday after reading about the trip in a magazine. According to the reporting party, the father of one of the young men, his son had stated that he would be back on Monday but did not return. Further investigation revealed that there were as many as four young men in the hiking party. All are in their early 20s, and all are believed to be students at Northern Arizona University. It was also determined that this group did not have a backcountry permit." Read more....

Update 2 p.m. on 7/23: According to more breaking news from the Arizona Daily Sun, it appears there's one hiker missing, not three or four. The friends thought to possibly be missing also have been contacted. Read more here: Overdue Canyon Hiker An NAU Student

This is the young man they're looking for, NAU student Bryce Gillies:


Anyone who believes they have seen Gillies since Saturday is encouraged to contact the National Park Service at 928-638-7805.

And More Practice

Just thought I'd share some photos my husband took while a few of my teammates and I were practicing "hot changeovers" on the ropes in the SAR building. My husband, by the way, has decided to apply to be on the team. Seeing all this tech stuff lately and constantly hearing my stories over the past couple of years has finally gotten to him.

Here, I've rigged myself up for the ascent with my rappel rack attached to my harness, ready for the changeover, and a Prusik for a self-belay. My teammate Marty then does a safety check before I go up the rope.


But we don't have to go up very far to practice the changeover.




Next, I've rigged up my rappel rack and tied it off. Now I have to transfer my weight off my ascenders and onto the rack before I can descend. Sometimes that's easier said than done. Can you see I've been sweating on this attempt?




See the reflection on this one? My husband was getting creative with our point-and-shoot.



This coming weekend, we have another field session where we'll learn how to do pick-offs. That is, how to pick someone off a cliff or wall and bring them to the ground (or back up, I suppose) without the use of a litter, in the event their injuries aren't serious or they're stranded somehow.

I'm also ordering some gear, including an actual rescue harness rather than the recreational climbing harness I've been using (which just doesn't cut it for rescue work), a commercially sewn chest harness rather than the improvised one I'd made of webbing, a couple of Prusik sets, a helmet, and some locking carabiners. It was okay to use team gear for the Academy, but we need to have some of our own equipment for the proficiency test and beyond if we want to be active members of the tech team. Which I want to be.

Losing One Of Our Own

One our our teammates lost his young life in a motor vehicle accident this past Tuesday, July 14th.

Joe Rommel, 22, joined the Coconino County Search & Rescue Team in 2005 when he was just 18 years of age and, since then, earned his Wilderness Search Tech 1, Technical Rescue Tech, Snow and Ice Rescue Tech, and EMT certifications.

Joe was also an experienced Grand Canyon guide and worked at a local outdoor store, where I'd often see him smiling and chatting with customers and friends. I'll think of Joe whenever I take out my snowshoes; he sold them to me this past winter, and we had a really nice talk while I was in the store. He definitely lived well and was a great example for us all.

Even those on the team who didn't know Joe well are feeling his loss, and we'll miss and remember him always.

He Tweeted While He Waited

Kinda funny. Today on Twitter, when I mentioned that I'd been up most of last night on Mt. Humphreys on a SAR call-out, one of my followers responded and gave me the Twitter user name of the young man we'd fetched off the mountain. So I took a peak at his profile page and saw that our subject had been tweeting while waiting for us to arrive. Which is why his cellphone battery just about pooped out, I guess.

But if I were stuck up there at 11,000-some-odd feet in the dark, shivvering in my shorts and t-shirt and without a light, I'd be nervous and wish I could tweet away, too, I suppose. 

Anyhow, I spent most of last night on that same mountain I was up and down, up and down... and up... and down the last time I posted, which was what? Saturday? This time, I drove up in the dark at about 11 p.m. Heck, I could just about do it with my eyes closed now.

On the way, one of my teammates said, "In SAR, we all have our thing. And THIS is your thing." He was referring to me being the UTV driver. Hmm... can I change my thing to something else?

So okay, where was I? Oh, the mission.

Well, it turned out fine. We drove "my little red car" up the ski run and parked it at the bottom of our extremely steep shortcut to intersect with the trail at around 11,400 feet, slipping on the scree. I was grabbing at tree branches, trying not to tip over backwards—boy, would that have been embarrassing—and to our surprise, made voice contact with the young man as soon as we reached the trail. We'd thought he was beyond the saddle as far as the first false summit and then on a scree slope about 800 to 1,000 feet down. In fact, he was just a short distance off the trail, having missed a switchback in the dark and ended up on a boulder field. Well, good. The would be much easier, relatively-speaking, than we'd expected.

After we handed over some Gatorade and extra clothing to the cold hiker, then explained that we wanted to descend, not down the trail but down our steeper but shorter route to the parked UTV, and our subject quickly agreed, the three of us SAR members and one relieved hiker made our way back down the mountain.

The end. (For now.)

Arizona Daily Sun article: Hiker Rescued Off Of Humphreys Peak Early Monday

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My latest SAR Stories News post: Search & Rescue and Social Media

Up and Down the Mountain... and Up and Down... and Up and Down

 "What did he say?" I asked the paramedic sitting next to me, loudly enough to be heard above the UTV's noisy engine. With that racket and my helmet on, I couldn't hear what a teammate perched on top of the litter on the back of the Ranger had just shouted.

The Polaris Ranger UTV is the red machine pictured here:

And we were headed up this mountain (although there was no snow):

"Oh, he's just talkin' trash," the young lady from the Guardian crew replied.

Must not like my driving, I figured. I had come rather close to that last big drop. But, really, there wasn't much room on the other side.

In the end, I didn't lose anybody off the UTV, which is always a plus. I'd never driven the thing up that high on the mountain, so I was a little nervous on the first run, sitting forward on the seat, gripping the steering wheel with my sweating, gloved hands.

By my third time up and down to the spot called Midway on a grass- and rock-covered ski slope at the Arizona Snowbowl, I had the drive down quite well. By then, I knew just where to point the vehicle to minimize the bumping and grinding (of rocks on metal below) and the possibility of tipping over.

What I was doing was shuttling SAR members, Guardian medics, and equipment, including a break-apart litter, webbing and rope, to the highest point we could get to by all-terrain vehicle. I was doing this so they (and eventually I) could hike, steeply, off-trail to the saddle and possibly beyond. The patient turned out to be above treeline, though the initial information had placed him close to the bottom. Big difference there.

The hiker had strained or sprained (not broken, I don't believe) his ankle. Apparently, he'd done some hobbling, but there was no way he was going to make it from the ridge about 4 miles down to the lodge on the Humphreys Trail. So we were headed up to carry him down in the litter. It would take hours.

By then, the helicopter was in the air. To my surprise, the pilot was able to set down at the saddle once the landing zone (LZ) was cleared of hikers by... someone 🤷 and the patient was brought aboard. In a way, that was a relief to us, the ground crew, but at the same time, helicopter rescues do carry some risk. But those in charge know what they're doing and weighed the pros and cons for both the rescuers on the ground and those in the air and made the decision to go with the helicopter.

Search and rescue volunteers and paramedics continued carrying out our assignment until we were told to do otherwise. You just don't know if things will change and we'll be needed after all—not until the patient is aboard the helicopter and on the way to the other LZ near the waiting ambulance.

Once that was accomplished, our incident commander got on the radio and told the paramedic I'd shuttled to Midway, already on her way up to the saddle with a few of my teammates, to return to the drop-off point for pickup. Then he told me to turn around and go get her. I was already close to the bottom where I'd been headed to shuttle more personnel.

So, back up I went, picked up the paramedic, and had her back down at the lower LZ just as the patient was being carried from the helicopter to the waiting ambulance the paramedic had originally come from. That meant the ambulance didn't have to wait for her. What timing! (I'm good.)

Then I went BACK up the mountain again to retrieve my teammates, who'd been told to hold their position a bit longer, I guess. (It was hard to hear the radio traffic over that UTV noise and through the helmet, and I had no one to translate for me while I was driving alone.)

"Watch that big drop on the right," my SAR-mate advised on the way back down. He was the one I didn't hear on the first trip up. I considered giving him a few (more) gray hairs but decided to give him a break. 😊

Technical Rescue: Practice, Practice, Practice!

It's like learning a foreign language. At first, it's work, even a struggle. And if you don't keep reviewing over and over again, you can pretty much lose most everything you've gained within days. Then, eventually, you realize you don't have to work at it quite so hard anymore—that you just get it and things make sense. And before you know it, you're fluent. That's basically what I hope will happen with these technical rescue skills I'm trying to master.

Master. Ha! That's difficult to imagine right now. But I'm trying as hard as I can to get the hang of these skills and to commit them to memory, both in my mind and my body. I want my legs and arms and hands and whatever other parts might be involved to execute the knots and the moves and set up the systems like it's all second nature. That's going to take time. And a lot of it.

I went away for two weeks recently on that trip to Colorado, and when I got back and started to think about Rock Rescue Academy again, I was amazed to find how much I'd already forgotten. I was pretty ticked off at myself, actually. And frustrated.

Then I went to a practice session one evening, where we learned something new—the "hot changeover" from ascending to rappelling—and I was even more frazzled. At least, on my first attempt. I was on the rope, sweating and swearing for about half an hour, hanging about 10 feet off the ground in the SAR building, trying to get things figured out. At one point, a teammate even climbed up a ladder to give me some assistance.

After a break, though, practicing with the Rescue 8 rappel device and the release mechanism on the ascenders while on the ground, then lengthening my self-belaying Prusik which was way too short the first time, I went up for another try. 

That time went much better and much faster while a teammate talked me through the whole process, so I'll have to practice, practice, practice that too if I'm ever to do it on my own... while hanging off a cliff. Which will probably be soon, during our next official practice.

In the meantime, I've been getting together with new tech team members and an experienced member at the SAR building to go over skills. This last time, I figured I'd take photos of the set-ups, which would hopefully help me remember how everything goes.

Here are some of those pictures:

This first one is a rescue rack loaded and tied off, ready for lowering.



Here, we're doing a "hot changeover" from a lowering system to a raising system, which is done while the load (i.e., the attendant, patient, and equipment) is on the rope, mid-face. The green webbing with a Prusik is temporarily holding the weight of the load as we attach pulleys and other equipment for a raise with a 3-to-1 mechanical advantage. (Ooh, don't I sound like I know what I'm talking about?)


Next is a tandem Prusik belay with a load-releasing hitch (green rope). The tandem Prusik belay consists of a long Prusik (blue) and a short Prusik (red) attached to the belay line (the yellow rope).


And this is a Meunter hitch, used with the load-releasing set-up. This hitch comes into play if the force of the load is transferred onto the belay line and the Prusiks (in the tandem Prusik belay) become locked. This might happen in the event of a fall or if the belayer doesn't move quickly enough to keep up with the main line, maintaining slack on the belay.

Without the load-releasing hitch, you'd basically be screwed or have to come up some other way (which there probably is, I just don't know... or don't know if I know it yet) to get those Prusiks unlocked. Under force, they're said to "melt" on the rope.


So, those are the sorts of photos I took to help me go through the steps of setting up anchors, lowering and raising systems, and belays in my head as I lie awake at night, wondering if—or, rather, when—I'll get the hang of all this. That is, if my teammates have the patience to put up with me long enough.

Overdue Hikers, Party Of Eight

At noon on Monday, my phone rang. It was our team captain, calling to say thank you for my help on the mission early that same morning and to tell me I did a good job. He said, "Eight is a big group to bring out, and you (meaning, the three of us who responded) went right in there and got the job done. The family was very appreciative."

Well, that sure was nice to hear. The part-time coordinator in charge of the mission also had let us know how much he appreciated our help. All in all, it was an easy mission with a good outcome, so I really hadn't expected the extra thank yous. Regardless if anyone says it, though, I know what we do as volunteers is definitely not taken for granted by the Sheriff's Department, and I'm as glad as ever to be part of the team.

Anyhow, on Sunday afternoon I had returned from a four-day trip to La Quinta, California, where I'd gone for a Jazzercise event. (No, we don't wear leg-warmers like they did back in the day. 😏) I'd worked out for three hours on Friday and six on Saturday, and all that exercise, the 110-degree heat, and the six-hour drive home had me feeling pretty beat. So, I was really tired when my pager went off just after midnight on Monday, after only two hours of sleep.

But I was fully awake when I got to the SAR building, where I met up with a teammate and waited for a third, who had been called directly. The two of us who'd initially responded to the page would have been comfortable going up the West Fork Trail alone—we were both familiar with it and knew it was pretty easy hiking for the first few miles—but our Captain wanted a third person to go along. As he explained, with three, if one of us had to stay behind with the subjects in case of a medical issue (one of the kids was asthmatic) or an injury, the other two could hike out together to get additional help. Radio communication from the canyon would likely not be possible and a cell phone wouldn't work out there, so it made sense that three of us go in.

The situation involved a family group including five juveniles, the youngest being 11, who'd set out to thru-hike West Fork, which is about 14 miles long. The route involves wading and some unavoidable swimming. They'd started out with 12 people (contrary to the newspaper report, which states there had been 10), two of whom had turned back about two miles in. Two of the faster hikers had gone ahead as agreed and hiked out by around six pm. But the eight others didn't appear at the lower trailhead, where their rides were waiting, before dark. The mother of three of the kids agonized about calling SAR, she said, but finally made the decision to do it.

As my two teammates and I were en route to the staging area at the lower end of West Fork, a helicopter spotted a campfire in the canyon, about two miles from our location. With the coordinates of the light source programmed into my GPS, the three of us headed up the trail in the dark, crossing the creek (West Fork) no less than five times, calling the names of a few of the subjects and sniffing the air for any hint of campfire smoke.

As we hiked, I ran through possible scenarios in my head. Many missions have not gone as I'd expected, either one way or the other—better or worse—so I wondered if this one would be as straightforward as I'd been thinking on the drive to the staging area. Could the child with asthma have had a serious problem? Was one of them hurt? Had they gotten separated?

There was no response to our frequent calls or whistles. Not until we got within yards of the coordinates, when I finally heard a shout. Within moments, I saw several people—adults and kids—standing on a rise on the opposite side of the creek. As we made our way over to them, I called, "Are you all together? Are all of you okay?" And they answered that, yes, they were all fine and accounted for. So I guess this was going to be as straightforward as I'd guessed.

After the three of us SAR members offered extra clothing, drinks, and snacks, accepted by only a couple of the kids, we turned around and slowly hiked back out with me in the lead, one in the middle of the group, and the other taking up the rear.

Turns out, the group had simply been slower and taken longer than expected, apparently because of the younger kids. They'd also gotten "a bit lost" at one point, they said. Then they just ran out of time and decided to stop until daybreak. They'd seen the helicopter fly over and figured it wasn't a coincidence, so they knew someone would probably come along.

Just before we'd found them, just after first light when we'd been able to turn off our headlamps, the group had put out their campfire and gotten ready to hike the rest of the way out. They said they'd had water filters with them and space blankets for everyone, so they were all in pretty decent shape other than one scraped leg and a couple of chilly kids, whose clothing hadn't completely dried.

Once we'd deposited the eight of them back at the trailhead with their waiting family and friends, the three of us headed back to the SAR building. Not long after, I was in Jazzercise class again and, later Monday evening, at tech team practice where I really started to feel the lack of sleep. My brain was sluggish, and I was having trouble getting the hang of what we were being taught (how to change from ascending to rappelling while on the rope). So when I got home at 10 p.m., I decided to turn my pager off for the night. I wouldn't be of much help to the team or anyone else until I'd gotten some good sleep.

You can read the Arizona Daily Sun article, Search Team Aids Overdue Hikers, Stranded Climbers, about this and other recent SAR calls.