As this was a nighttime mission I didn’t think to take any pictures. Around 19:30 on August 1st we received the call looking for ground pounders to search for a missing female mushroom hunter near Hopewell Lake. Four members of the Brigade headed out. Three to do ground search and one to run the show at Incident Base. When we arrived at IB teams from Taos Search and Rescue, https://sar-taos.org/ and Atalaya, https://www.atalayasar.org/ were there. We often work with other SAR teams from around the state and always enjoy working with them. Taos also had brought their command post van which makes for a nice IB.
While the Taos and Santa Fe teams headed out in vehicles to search the roads we were assigned a walking mission to cover an area south of the point last seen. We were to make a loop following a road down to a spring then a trail up the other side of the area doing sound sweeps. As we started our mission we thought we heard a woman respond to our calls and we dashed off in the direction of the “voice.” Turned out it was a bird that sounded eerily like a woman calling for help. We also heard a dog barking at times but could never locate it. Ultimately, we decided it was campers in the area whose dogs were disturbed by all the noise we were making. We completed our loop conducting many, many sound sweeps ultimately finding no clues. Returning to IB we were released to head home. We later learned our subject and her dog were found near Espanola after hitching a ride along the main highway. We can conclude she wasn’t in our search area.
A couple of side notes. First, while we were at IB getting ready to head out on our assignment one of the vehicle teams returned and said they had found another group of people looking for a second lost individual! How often does that happen? A second mission was spun up for the second missing person who was found the next day safe and sound about 12 miles from Incident Base. The subject of the second mission had walked all night stopping to take short naps here and there. I’m amazed at how far some lost individuals can travel. Second, I personally find night time missions magical. The world takes on such a different character at night.