| Missing Aged Park Volunteer | ||
| Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado Larimer County Search and Rescue and Rocky Mountain Trackers I was contacted by our Sergeant in charge of Search and Rescue, who was assisting Rocky Mountain National Park in a search for a missing 80-year old park volunteer in RMNP. They had searched most of the day and into the evening with no success and decided to bring trackers in to see if they could possibly locate the subject, or at least get a direction of travel before the second crew of searchers were brought in the following day. The subject had hiked to the summit of Long's Peak (a 14,000’ peak in the park) over 100 times. He was patroling Long's Peak Trail when he disappeared. A hiker last saw him on a trail that connects Long's Peak Trail to the Estes Cone Trail. This was not his expected route but the hiker exchanged names with the subject, so the sighting was deemed credible. Scott Evans and myself (David Hake) were called in at 12:00 a.m. to determine if we could pick up his tracks or sign at the Point Last Seen (PLS). By the time we had our gear together and drove to Estes Park from Ft. Collins, it was 2:15 a.m. They briefed us on the situation and we headed to the PLS. All other searchers were pulled out of the field at that time, except for trail blocks used in hope of catching the subject while hiking out. After arriving at the PLS, we began cutting for sign. We found sign going leaving the trail at the switchback just 1/4 mile north of the PLS, and began working that. Scott found the first identifiable track. It was a standard old Vibram sole pattern and matched what they thought he would be wearing. We continued to work the sign and, by the wandering tracks, observed that the subject had apparently lost the trail and was trying to locate it. Eventually the sign started heading downhill towards a drainage, as if the subject had given up on finding the trail and had started to panic. It was decided to do a bigger cut down the drainage using "attraction" and we finally got a response! After 5 minutes of no further responses, we were beginning to wonder if we were hearing things or if it had just been another team in the area. It was about 5:20 a.m. and Incident Command confirmed that no other search team was in the area, so we continued to work in the direction of the the last response. Finally, he responded again! We zoomed in on him and found him wet and hypothermic. He was missing one shoe, with various cuts and scrapes from falling down, but was alive and ok. When asked where his shoe was he said he lost his shoe further back. I back-tracked his trail a short way, and found a place were he had fallen about 50 feet from where he lay. His shoe was at the bottom of the fall, lying in the creek. He was warmed up and treated in the field by our team and the park rangers, and was evacuated out of the area by other Search and Rescue volunteers that were close by. |
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