04:01 Pager goes off with a message reading "We have been asked to assist in a search for an overdue hiker in Pecos. Supposed to return Sunday evening. If interested, call Rich at ......." The page was actually sent three times, and on the first one the voice recognition software translated "Rich" as "wrench" and the message was cut off. But between the three pages I got the information I needed. I called Rich and he gave me the details. The plan was for me to drive down to Santa Fe and meet Rich at his house. He would then drive us over to Bill's place and the three of us would proceed to incident base which was in the parking lot of the Terrero General Store, north of Pecos. The weather was predicted to be warm and sunny all day and it hadn't been too cold the previous night, so we had high hopes for a successful rescue. 07:30 We arrived at incident base to find Phil and Steve [who always seem to be the incident commanders for all of our searches] trying to jump Steve's Xterra. Apparently he had been running the IC radio off of his battery for hours and it died. They explained the situation to us in detail. An 18 year old male had been backcountry fishing since Thursday and was due back Sunday evening. When he didn't return by midnight, his mother had called the police. The search had been going since about 3:00am and there were several teams already in the field. They had the trails in the area really well covered, including sending in at least one team from the other side of the mountains on the Windsor trail. We were given a central trail with a reasonably high probability of being used by the subject and asked to follow that trail all the way up to Spirit lake, one of his possible fishing destinations. 07:50 The trailhead for our mission was several miles up the road near the town of Cowles. We saw one of the dog teams' trucks in the parking lot of a nearby trail. We packed for a relatively fast-and-light ascent to Spirit Lake and were on the trail quickly. 07:52 My GPS indicated that we had gone 0.15 miles when we ran into two backpackers descending the trail. When told that we were looking for a overdue backpacker, they knew him by name and told us that he was up at Stewart Lake and was fine. They had camped with him the previous night and had dinner with him. Apparently he had decided to stay an extra night. He attempted to call his mother on his cell phone but couldn't get reception. After some communication with incident base, the two nearest teams to Stewart Lake were directed to proceed there immediately and the other five teams (including ours) were ordered to abort the mission and return to incident base. 08:00 Back at the car, we had logged approximately 0.3 miles and 10 minutes on task. Shortest search I've ever been on. We returned to incident base and signed out. The two teams heading towards the subject were still en route, but presumably they found him there alive and well. 10:30 I returned home after a brief breakfast in Santa Fe. The moral of this story is definitely this: If you might stay in the backcountry longer than originally planned and have sufficient supplies to do so safely, make sure the people who are waiting for you back in civilization know that this might happen. In the end, this wasn't a "jackass search" [a search for someone who isn't there], but it was very close in that the subject needed no assistance whatsoever. |