A little after 0600 on the morning of July 31st the brigade received a call to participate in a search for a pair of overdue hikers in the Windsor trail area. Four brigade members responded. Three ground-pounders gathered up their individual and team gear and headed out together. The fourth member is training to be a Field Coordinator and proceeded directly to incident base to work under one of NMSAR’s most senior incident commanders.
This call was generated by a friend of the hikers who was acting as their home point-of-contact and raised the alarm when the hikers did not check in as expected. This is a great example of practicing what we preach as the reporting party was able to describe the subjects, their intended route, and time of departure.
Upon arrival at incident base we learned that several teams from the Santa Fe area had already headed out to search along and around the hikers intended route. The brigade was asked to clear a relatively long and steep loop of trails that would have been a logical area for the hikers to be found had they taken a wrong turn on the way down.
A little after 1100 one of the teams searching along the intended route met the subjects coming down. Their hike up the day before had taken far longer than anticipated and they wisely stopped for the night before starting out again in the morning. Fortunately the weather was mild and no harm came to anyone.
For the brigade, we were about as far as possible from incident base when the call of “found” came over the radio. Thus for us the logical thing was to simply complete our mission loop and return to base. It was a nice hike and everyone returned home safely, which made it a good day all around.