A little before 1000 on July 19th the brigade was called to respond for a missing subject along the Rio Grande near Pilar. Six individuals from the Brigade formed the initial response, one as ordering manager, two filling support functions at incident base, and three ground pounders. A fourth ground pounder from the Brigade joined the team an hour or so later. Over the next few hours more SAR teams arrived to provide additional ground pounders, canines, drones, and technical rescue.
The Brigade was the first SAR team on scene, initially meeting up with NMSP and Taos County Sheriff’s investigating officers. The subject had gone swimming in the Rio with family and friends the day prior and became detached from the group on the way back to their vehicles.
The first assignment to the Brigade was to do a visual search of the river and riverbank, up and downstream from the point last seen, moving along an elevated contour above the river on the side opposite the point last seen. While no clues were found from this effort it did help incident command identify appropriate geographic containment boundaries. Upon returning to incident base the brigade was given a second assignment by the incident commander. This assignment called for a careful line search of the riverbank where the subject was last seen. This involved the Brigade members moving across an approximately 100 foot wide piece of terrain from the river to the top of the embankment above the river. In some places there were obvious trails to follow, but much of the time this involved bushwhacking through cacti, sage, tall grasses and reeds, and various other heavy undergrowth. Nonetheless, the near 100% probability of detection incident command was looking for was achieved. By this point it was relatively late in the afternoon and the ground teams had covered all areas within the geographic containment defined by incident command and we were dismissed to return home.
It should be noted that the temperature during the mission was extremely high, around 105F, necessitating care to make sure everyone stayed well hydrated. Everyone going out in to the wilderness in similar conditions would be advised to carry around a gallon of water and suitable electrolytes per person per day. The author can attest that a significant fraction of a gallon was personally consumed over the course of the mission.
We later learned the subject was found deceased. Our deepest condolences to the family.