I’m a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service, I have some stories to tell (Part 3!)

TL;DR: Sorry for the wait, I got a call and had to go out on some training, we just got back. I have more stories, you guys have more questions, so let’s get it!<br><br>Let’s start with the stories, about 85% of you guys asked about the stairs, so here is what we’ve found:<br><br>I spoke to one of our veteran SAR officers, let’s call him Jim (not his real name) and asked him about it. He’s an old timer who served in Vietnam and has been an SAR officer for 22 years now, he tells it like he sees it and is a wealth of information. When I brought up the stairs he just got quiet for a moment, took a drag on his cigarette, and started talking. <br><br>“Yeah, I’ve seen those stairs. I was a new SAR officer, this was my second year and I was assigned to a veteran, she was on her last year before she retired. She was a no nonsense woman who always put the job first and told it like it was.” <br><br><br>“She was a great mentor, I trusted her judgement beyond anything. She was in a climb-in vehicle and I was in a regular vehicle when we got the report of a missing climber.”<br><br>“Now, we had reports that the guy we were looking for, a young guy, had been climbing on a pretty remote cliff face. We get all sorts of calls about guys like that, drunk and thinks he can climb something he can’t, or gets hurt and can’t call for help. We got word from a park ranger that there was a guy, matched the description of the one we were looking for, on the face, and he seemed to be in trouble.”<br><br>“Now, the guys who go and do shit like this usually don’t realize quite how long it’s going to take SAR to get out to their location. And when we got there, we had to backtrack a little bit to find their car and get a more specific location. By the time we got to where he was, or at least where we thought he was, he was already gone.”<br><br>“This is where it gets weird. There was some weird, eroded staircase looking thing… I don’t know, I can’t describe it.” He paused and looked away.<br><br>“I mean, I’ve been having bad dreams about it for years. It was this eroded, concrete staircase, it looked like it was made out of the same stuff as the cliffs, but it was symmetrical, with a bannister and everything. It was… uhhh.. it was coming out of the cliff side. Leading right to where he was.”<br><br>“I don’t know how he got up, we couldn’t find a way up and… well, I don’t know, we just couldn’t find him. I searched that cliff face, up and down, and everywhere else around it, I couldn’t find him.” Then he paused again, fed his cigarette machine another piece of tobacco, and we walked away.<br><br>I don’t know enough about SAR to know what a “climb-in vehicle” is or what he meant by backtracking to find the climbers car, so I asked him more questions about it:<br><br>What is a climb-in vehicle used for? Can you describe it?<br><br>It’s usually a smaller vehicle, that’s not as powerful and doesn’t have as much room for equipment. We use them when we have reports of lost persons in tighter areas, where a standard vehicle would have a hard time fitting through. It’s smaller size lets us get closer to the area in which the person is missing, which in turn lets us cover more ground and find them faster. Sometimes we’ll have reports in more urban areas and we’ll have to go into an alleyway, or we’ll have a report of someone missing in a parking garage, that kind of thing. <br><br><br>How did you get to where the man was climbing?<br><br>We parked a couple of miles away and had to walk in. We had a small path we could follow, but we weren’t happy about having to walk that distance. We try and stay as close as we can when someone is in danger, but in this case there was no choice. <br><br>How did you know where the guy was climbing?<br><br>We had a report from a park ranger who was in the nearby parking lot when the guy was heading in to where he was going to climb. He gave us the name of the guy and a basic description, then he told us which way the guy went when he left the parking lot. <br><br><br>Do you have any idea how the guy got up where he was? <br><br>Honestly, I have no idea. I searched that cliff face for hours, and I couldn’t find any possible way he got up. That area of the cliff was… I don’t know, I just couldn’t find a way up.