[pct-l] Lost Hiker Found

[Ken Murray]

I may be confused by your narrative, if I misunderstand, sorry.

In SAR operations, there are often MANY teams sent out, each of which is given a specific area to cover.  The teams should NOT go anywhere else.  Part of the skill that SAR uses is "mantracking", which involves tracking boot/shoe tracks.  Having a bunch of people running all over the place destroys that evidence.  This can be critical in the situations where a person is off-trail.  It drives them crazy when a bunch of volunteer go in and destroy those clues.

It is easy to look at things "after the fact", and say "AHA!  If they just send hikers out in a radial pattern, they'd have found the person faster.  The problem, of course, is that they DONT know those answers prior to a person being found.  So there are processes that are designed to work the maximal percentage of time, with the shortest AVERAGE search time.  For a particular search it may work out to be not the fastest, but you can't know that in advance.

BTW, if you are trying to get the attention of a helicopter (it is UNBELIEVABLY hard to spot someone on the ground!!), the best way to do this is to light a small fire, and throw some leaves/needles on it...a lot of smoke.  Easy to spot from the air, will never be thought to be normal.




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I saw the rescue searchers on foot stop at the county line going up the
mountain. They need to recruit some PCT hiker volunteers who aren't stopped
by county lines and give them a radio.

I saw the S&R helecopter miss the hiker while it was flying up Mission
Creek - I had to point and signal and wave, eventually scrawling a message
in the sand - they 'found' him a half hour later. Again, in this case, a
hiker on the ground would have been better, faster and less expensive.