The All-Nighter

Now that folks are in the outdoors the SAR business has really picked up. You have to have people to have missing or injured folks and the need for a search and/or rescue, although with the wildfires in the area we can also get called out for area evacuations and road control.

We spent three days towards the end of June with the dogs of Colorado Forensic Canines looking for a person associated with an abandoned car, from back in April, up in Phantom Canyon.

There were four handler/dog teams, we put a SAR person with each for navigation, communications and hopefully to guide the recovery.

The teams were from different parts of Colorado and the dogs were all types from a retriever to a doberman. These dogs were amazing in how they worked an area. Although we had some areas of interest for a more intense search when the temps cool down, we didn't find our missing person.

The dogs though had a end of mission success, when the handlers buried a rib and a number of teeth, for them to search and indicate. Its amazing! I asked how old a bone could be and still be found, they said they had just come back from a Civil War burial mission, so over a hundred years. The dogs ignore any bone that isn't human. Cool people and dogs to with which to work.

We also had a search last week in the Wet Mountains that ended succesfully, in that the person walked out from his last reported position, about 16+ miles. His last reported position had his ATV in a tree, in a ravine.

Yesterday we had an all-nighter to bring out a teenager with a broken leg in some pretty rough country. Dispatch had called for ATV's, so the thinking was, based on the mentioned trail-head, that it would be a relatively fast, ride in, package the subject, load him onto the litter trailer and bing, bang, boom we're out of there in a couple of hours.

But as we were driving the 11 miles up into the mountains, the radio traffic clarified that the trail our subject was on was not the ATV trail going to the east, from the trail-head parking area, but across the road to the west. 

Hunters don't even like going up this trail looking for elk, and they will go most anywhere they hear a bugling critter.

That changed everything and kinda took the wind out of peoples sails as we now knew it was going to be a grind in and up, and then even more so coming out with the subject, all in the dark.

Took us a couple of hours, starting at 8:45pm, to hike/climb in the couple of miles, to where he was located, and once the follow-on teams, with the litter and additional medical gear, arrived, it would take us the rest of the night to evacuate him. The trail slope averaged, a low angle rescue classification. There were only two areas, I can recall as leveling out a little, and of course many areas that took the slope angle higher, more on that later.

Marlys, Jody and I were the first team (medical) up the trail. We got to him at about 10:30pm. Jody and Marlys did the medical work, while I handled logistics and communications, which surprisingly were pretty good, something I never count on around here, even though we carry both 800mhz and VHF radios. Verizon was of course a no bars (can you hear me now, nope, normal), but the subject was with ATT and they were able to triangulate and give us a good location before we headed up.

I was looking hard for a heli LZ all the way up, but the map had indicated that was probably a losing proposition due to trees and terrain steepness. Might have been able to use a military medivac chopper out of Ft. Carson, as the new Lakota's have winches and canopy penatrators, but it would have been mid-morning to get a mission for them approved and put together, and we planned to be out by then.

The young man's dad said the trees cleared out about another mile up mountain, but that it was real steep and a talus/scree field. SO, a move UP another mile in the dark and very steep, rough terrain to a maybe baby? No way.

I busied myself over the next two hours, as equipment and additional teams arrived staging gear and people, giving medical updates to base, and staying out of Jody and Marlys way.

We got him packaged up and moving down trail at 12:45am. We ran into the last evac team (read additional muscle) just as we hit the trail. I was thinking a few hours to the trail-head. Within minutes we were to the first belay point and my ETA's started to slip. By the end of the evac the team was very good at litter belays.

We moved the litter downhill to the trail-head, with I can't tell you how many belays, I stopped counting at a dozen. The heli swooped in flying up the road between high steep ridges on both sides (it was very cool) within minutes and picked him up at 7am. He was a trooper, 12 hours with a backcountry broken leg and a "as gentle as you can make it" litter ride to the trailhead.

He had 20 people in the field. Between rope teams leap frogging down the mountain, the litter teams keeping things balanced, doing caterpillar passes over and between rocks and the endless number of belays, I could not have been more prouder of a group of folks.

We were SAR zombies once our charge was airborne, dumped gear in cars, got the equipment stowed and ready for the next call-out (which could have happened anytime), hydrated, de-briefed, filled out reports and then headed for home.