21:09, July 13 Pager goes off with a message reading "3rd page, for Valle Caldera mission. Need groundpounders in the AM 0600 at IB. Call Reed if you are available..." The first two pages apparently didn't get to me. I called Reed and got the story. Apparently, there was a 23 year old male with a psych disorder that had been missing for 10 days. My ipression from this conversation was that the search had been going on for 10 days. The plan was to gather at incident base at 6:00 the following morning. I told him I would be there. No one else from the team ended up responding to the page. 06:00, July 14 Incident base was only a 15 minute drive from my apartment, so I didn't have to wake up too obscenely early. I pulled into the parking lot right behind the incident commander, Peter Dickson. Several members of MC2 dog rescue were already milling about, and Peter asked us to wait for a bit while they got the IB set up. It turns out that the SCA was having a 400+ person event at the same location later in the day, so they were trying to get IB well taped-off, etc. Because I was by myself, I was assigned as a support person for a dog team. IB gave us the more-complete story on what was happening. The subject was a paranoid schitzophrenic, was not believed to be armed, but could be hiding from us. His truck was parked nearby and had a lot of personal gear inside. He had not been seen by anyone since July 4th, but the search had not been initiated until the afternoon of the 13th. The dog handler I was working with indicated that the subject was the grandson of a prominent Laboratory scientist. We were paired up with another dog handler and support person, and were the first teams sent out into the field that day. We were given the task of checking a side canyon of Del Rio canyon and then proceeding up on top of the east ridge of Del Rio and following it from the mouth of the side canyon to the northern end, which was the PLS. The two dog teams split up and approached the side canyon from either end, meeting at the base of a reentrant that we used to get to the top of the ridge. At the ridge, we split up again to follow Del Rio canyon north and south. My team followed the ridge north, towards the PLS and through some deliverance-style trailer home/junk yard combos. At no point during our 7.5 mile hike did we see any sign of the subject and the dogs picked up no scent. We did find an abandoned trailer with a big shotgun in an unlocked pickup truck and a house with an unfriendly rotweiler. We returned to incident base at 1:00pm and debriefed that we hadn't seen anything of interest. At that point, IB was having a hard time coming up with tasks to assign to people. There didn't seem to be any sign of the subject ever having been there aside from his truck - too much time had passed and all footprints/scents were gone. I signed out at 1:45 and returned home. This was an odd search in that it started so long after the subject was last seen. The entire effort was unable to uncover much in the way of clues and as of when I left IB, we didn't know anything more than when the search was initiated. What was clear was that the area around the truck was riddled with roads, trails, and cabins - the subject could not be lost. He is either down, hiding from searchers, or is not in the area at all for whatever reason. |