I'm a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service, I have some stories to tell

I wasn't sure where else to post these stories, so I figured I'd share them here. I've been an SAR officer for a few years now, and along the way I've seen some things that I think you guys will be interested in. <br><br>* I have a pretty good track record for finding missing people. Most of the time they just wander off the path, or slip down a small cliff, and they can't find their way back. The majority of them have heard the old 'stay where you are' thing, and they don't wander far. But I've had two cases where that didn't happen. Both bother me a lot, and I use them as motivation to search even harder on the missing persons cases I get called on. <br>The first was a little boy who was out berry-picking with his parents. He and his sister were together, and both of them went missing around the same time. Their parents lost sight of them for a few seconds, and in that time both the kids apparently wandered off. When their parents couldn't find them, they called us, and we came out to search the area. We found the daughter pretty quickly, and when we asked where her brother was, she told us that he'd been taken away by 'the bear man.' She said he gave her berries and told her to stay quiet, that he wanted to play with her brother for a while. The last she saw of her brother, he was riding on the shoulders of 'the bear man' and seemed calm. Of course, our first thought was abduction, but we never found a trace of another human being in that area. The little girl was also insistent that he wasn't a normal man, but that he was different, 'woodsy,' and that he had given her berries that she didn't recognize. We searched that area for *weeks*, it was one of the longest calls I've ever been on, but we never found a single trace of that kid. <br>The other was a young woman who was out hiking with her mom and grandpa. According to the mother, her daughter had climbed up a tree to get a better view of the forest, and she'd never come back down. They waited at the base of the tree for hours, calling her name, before they called for help. Again, we searched everywhere, and we never found a trace of her. I have no idea where she could possibly have gone, because neither her mother or grandpa saw her come down.<br><br>* A few times, I've been out on my own searching with a canine, and they've tried to lead me straight up cliffs. Not hills, not even rock faces. Straight, sheer cliffs with no possible handholds. It's always baffling, and in those cases we usually find the person on the other side of the cliff, or miles away from where the canine has led us. I'm sure there's an explanation, but it's sort of strange.<br><br>* One particularly sad case involved the recovery of a body. A nine-year-old girl fell down an embankment and got impaled on a dead tree at the base. It was a complete freak accident, but I'll never forget the sound her mother made when we told her what had happened. She saw the body bag being loaded into the ambulance, and she let out the most haunting, heart-broken wail I've ever heard. It was like her whole life was crashing down around her, and a part of her had died with her daughter. I heard from another SAR officer that she killed herself a few weeks after it happened. She couldn't live with the loss of her daughter.<br><br>* I was teamed up with another SAR officer because we'd received reports of bears in the area. We were looking for a guy who hadn't come home from a climbing trip when he was supposed to, and we ended up having to do some serious climbing to get to where we figured he'd be. We found him trapped in a small crevasse with a broken leg. It was not pleasant. He'd been there for almost two days, and his leg was very obviously infected. We were able to get him into a chopper, and I heard from one of the EMTs that the guy was absolutely inconsolable. He kept talking about how he'd been doing fine, and when he'd gotten to the top, a man had been there. He said the guy had no climbing equipment, and he was wearing a parka and ski pants. He walked up to the guy, and when the guy turned around, he said he had no face. Just smooth skin where his eyes and mouth should have been. The guy had talked to him, told him to stop climbing because a storm was coming, but the climber said he wanted to get to the bottom before it got too bad. The guy had told him he wouldn't make it, and then he'd disappeared. The climber had taken a few more steps, and that's when he'd slipped and fallen into the crevasse. I don't know whether the guy was just hallucinating from the pain and exhaustion, or if something really happened, but the story he told has stuck with me.<br><br>* I had one call come in from a husband who couldn't find his wife. The two of them were out hiking, and she'd gone off the path to pee. He waited, and when she didn't come back, he went looking for her. He couldn't find her, and he called us, convinced that she'd been abducted. We searched the area, and we found her car, but no sign of her or her husband. We figured that, for some reason, she'd left and never told him, so we put out a call for her. No one wanted to bother searching that large of an area for someone who might not even be lost. She was very experienced, and it was unlikely that she'd gotten herself lost in the woods. We searched for her husband for a while, but he was never found. <br><br>* I had another incident with a guy who was ascending alone when he saw a woman at the top of the cliff. He said she'd been taking her clothes off, and she'd looked at him and started to wave. He said he'd felt suddenly very cold and anxious, and he'd started to descend as quickly as possible. He'd heard a woman calling from above him, but he didn't look back. He didn't stop moving until he got back to his car and drove away. He said he'd been grateful that he had his climbing hook, because he'd had to move so quickly. I was confused, because he'd told us that he wasn't going to climb that day. He'd been ascending with just his harness and a small pack, and he hadn't mentioned bringing a hook until later. When we asked, he told us that he'd forgotten it in his initial report because he was in shock, but that he'd had it with him. I don't know why he'd have tried to deceive us about that, but it seemed odd. <br>We got a few calls about this woman from a few different climbers in the same area, and we eventually decided to send someone up to look. Our team didn't find any trace of a woman, or anyone who could have been with her, but they did find something odd. On the climbing wall, someone had attached a woman's boot, and it had a harness attached. It looked brand-new, and we couldn't figure out why someone would have fastened it there. <br><br>* I had a very serious accident happen on a call about eight months ago. We were looking for a pair of brothers who hadn't come home after discharging from the Army. They'd gone on a climbing/hiking trip to celebrate, and they hadn't come back after almost a week. We figured that they'd gotten lost and were trying to find their way back, and we had reports that they'd been seen in an area that was particularly tricky to navigate, so we went in that direction first. I was teamed up with an older SAR officer, and we were both experienced climbers. We got to the area and started searching around, and eventually one of the other teams found one of the brothers. He was injured pretty badly, but he was conscious, and they were able to get him out. We couldn't find any trace of his brother, and we figured that he'd either died and the body had been scavenged, or he was out looking for help. The only direction we hadn't searched was straight up, and we figured that there was no way he'd have gone that way. It was difficult climbing, and we were told that the brothers weren't that experienced with climbing. Still, we decided we'd go and look. We made it a good ways up the mountain, and we'd almost given up when we heard a loud shout. We called back, and the voice told us to stay where we were, he was going to come down. We lost sight of him almost immediately, but we waited where we were, and eventually we heard a noise above us. I looked up just in time to see a boulder fall, hitting my partner on the head and killing him instantly. I started screaming, and eventually one of the SAR teams heard me and came up. When they arrived, I was just sitting next to my partners body, screaming. They said that I wouldn't stop repeating the story of what had happened, and they told me they never saw me stop shaking for the rest of the time we were out there. They looked, but they never found the brother. <br><br>I've been back on the job for a little while, and I'm doing okay. I'm taking some therapy, and they've told me I'm making great progress. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm trying.