On Tuesday the 26th of January, around 6:45 pm, LAAFB got the call once again to field a team for a search and rescue mission. The Incident Commander wanted a small team—2 winter-capable vehicles with 2 team members in each—to deploy quickly to a location approximately 5 miles up “31-mile road” from Española. Incidentally, this was the same road on which our last mission occurred. A gentleman had gone missing from his vehicle and it was initially thought he might be near his vehicle and need help finding his way back.
As our four team members traveled to the abandoned vehicle’s location, more details arrived. State troopers and Rio Arriba’s ATV team were on-scene without any sign of the subject. Classic Air, a commercial helicopter company based in Los Alamos, had been called in to assist with the search. Then a secondary location derived from a cell phone ping was relayed by the IC. This secondary location was 1.3 miles north-northeast of the vehicle.
Upon arrival, Classic Air was busy doing an aerial search and announced a sighting close to the vehicle. Brief investigation proved this to be a false alarm, and our team prepared to move out. Coordinating with Rio Arriba’s ATV team, LAAFB made a direct and hasty search from the vehicle to the secondary cell phone ping over rough terrain. This ping had come from near the bottom of an arroyo with a topography only accessible on foot. Once at the ping, we’d search for clues while making our way west down the arroyo towards Española. Meanwhile, the Rio Arriba ATV team would drive to the east (bottom) end of the arroyo near the highway and proceed west up the arroyo on the ATV towards us. Classic Air would continue their area search until their fuel ran low.
Time was of the essence as temperatures were below freezing and it was unknown what clothing and equipment the subject had in their possession, but we believed the subject to be unequipped for the cold and hypothermia was our chief concern. With that in mind, our team quickly traversed the 1.3 miles to the location of the cell phone ping and found a significant number of tracks we were convinced were made by our subject. Following the tracks, we first went up the arroyo/canyon and then down towards Española. After a mile or so of tracking, a stand-down call came over the radio as the subject had made his way down to the highway north of Española and had been collected by the Rio Arriba team, 3-4 miles east of our current location. The subject had suffered some injuries and at some point had lost his shoes, but felt well enough to decline a hospital visit and return home with his family.
With this good news, it only remained for our team to extract themselves from the arroyo. Looking at the map, we planned an alternate route heading south skirting some mesas to return to 31-mile road approximately 2 miles east of our vehicles. Once we arrived at 31-mile road we met up with a state trooper who generously gave us a lift back to our own vehicles.
We would like to point out that Classic Air, a commercial company, donates considerable time and expensive helicopter resources towards SAR operations and should be commended for their contributions. A majority of searches—like this one—culminate with no client that can be billed, and I have been told by one of the pilots that company policy is for the first hour of a SAR operation to be free even when a paying client is found and extracted. We would like to publicly thank Classic Air—the company and their pilots—for their service.