The December 4th evening through the morning of the 5th mission was pretty typical. By typical I mean we receive the call between 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., drive to incident base, hike in the woods for a while, the subject either finds their way out or another team finds the subject, we return to base and drive home in the early morning hours.
Specifically – at 7:44 p.m. our team leader sends out a text asking for a mission near Glorieta for a 72 year old male pinion nut hunter who got separated from his family earlier in the day. Arriving at incident base a couple of hours later we learn our assignment is to go to the point last seen and start line searching the trees nearby. We caravan in our vehicles all the way to the point last seen. Since there are eight of us we decide, with permission from incident base, to split up into two teams. One team will drive a 4×4 up an old road leading north from the point last seen and the rest of us will start searching the area west and north. Shortly after leaving the 4×4 team reports hearing a male voice. The ground team hurries to the location and confirms we do hear a male voice and head off west in the general direction of the voice. Hearing no more responses we eventually arrive at a small cliff and a drop off into a canyon. Another SAR team is down in the canyon bottom and we exchange yells. Our guess is the voice we heard was the SAR team in the canyon bottom doing sound sweep as, spoiler alert, the subject was not there. We reform our line and start searching north using the cliff as our western boundary.
Eventually we get the, “all teams return to base” call on the radio having found nothing. On our way back to base we are instructed to meet up with a vehicle carrying family members who were also searching and assist them and another family group in another vehicle return to base. Apparently one of the vehicles had run out of gas. Another SAR team pumps gas from their vehicle to the stranded family and once we are all together we caravan back to incident base. Turns out the subject and walked until he came across a major road and hitched a ride to his home in Espanola where he called the rest of his family. A lesson to all of us – the subject didn’t have his phone with him when he was picked up and even though the person giving him a ride had a phone our subject didn’t remember the numbers for family. Think about it – who needs to remember numbers anymore when they are stored in our phone. The lesson, therefore, is maybe we should memorize a few critical numbers.
