At 2119 on the evening of Wednesday, November 15th, the brigade SAR team leader sent out a request for team members to participate in a search for an overdue day hiker in the Penasco area. This was clearly a potentially dangerous situation for the subject as the local temperature was expected to drop to 25F during the night and hypothermia was a real possibility. Two experienced members of the brigade responded as ground pounders, departing at approximately 2200. A third Brigade member was the Incident Commander and a fourth was the Ordering Manager for the mission.
Upon arrival at incident base at around 2340 we were briefed that the subject had had gone for a hike on a well marked loop trail Wednesday afternoon. His family reported him missing when he did not return as expected. Initial NMSP investigation confirmed that his vehicle was still parked at the trailhead. The brigade and Taos SAR were first teams to arrive at incident base but were quickly followed by teams from Mountain Canine Corps, Atalaya, and Santa Fe SAR, Search and Rescue Taos and Pajarito K9’s. A total of five teams were formed for the search.
A few minutes were spent on an initial brief by the incident commander and a discussion of subject characteristics with a family member. The brigade team was initially tasked to clear the trail the subject was presumed to have hiked, one that the family had checked part of without success. We started out right around midnight, performing our normal trail clearing routine looking for clues and regularly calling the subject’s name. Evidence of passage that likely came from the subject was found but no indication of the subject himself. Upon returning to the trailhead the brigade was tasked to clear two other trails within the perimeter of the original loop trail. No clues were found on either of those two trails. After completion of this assignment the brigade was tasked with clearing two additional, shorter loop trails. Again, no clues were found.
By this time it was after 0500 and we had cleared a total of about 6 miles of trail, with another couple of miles getting from place to place. Teams had already started to depart and incident command was making plans for a second operational period. We departed at around 0530.
Before the second operational period even really got going the subject walked out to incident base under his own power, arriving about an hour after first light. This is not an atypical scenario – if you’re lost at night finding a reasonably warm place to hole up and wait for daylight to get your bearings is a reasonable strategy.
While we obviously did not end up doing anything that directly helped the subject in this case having a good outcome, regardless of how it comes about, is what we always hope for. We are always willing to go out and do whatever we can to reunite subjects with their families. In any case, it was also a very pleasant night for hiking though due to some overcast the stars were not a brilliant as they often are in New Mexico.