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 all would 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 tall and covered in hair, 'like a bear', and that he had a 'weird face.' 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 fateful convergence of two people in the forest. We got a report from a young man that he'd been hiking down an isolated trail when he saw a woman leap from a cliff and land on the rocks below. When we sent teams up to search for her, we never found a body, and the young man was so distraught that he gave us only vague directions to where he'd seen this happen. We searched the area for weeks, and we never found a trace of a body, or even a person who had been injured in that way. <br>What we did find was a report of a missing woman from a nearby town, who had gone out hiking the same day that the man had seen someone jump. We spoke to her family, and they didn't seem particularly distraught, and they almost seemed to expect that she wouldn't be coming back. We asked the man to describe the woman to us, and when he did, the family burst into tears and told us that that sounded like their daughter. They even showed us a picture of her, which the man identified as close as he could remember. <br>The search for her body was one of the most horrific things I've been on, because we * knew* she was dead. We just had to find her body, and the last thing we wanted to do was fail. But we didn't just fail, we never even found a trace of her. It was as if she'd never existed at all. I can't imagine how terrible it must be for the family, who will never be able to bury their daughter or find closure. The man who saw her jump was so distraught that he had to take time off of work and wasn't able to go back to his job. I heard he went to a psychiatrist and is on anti-depressants now.<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 his car at the parking lot for the path, so we knew he was up there. <br>We found a lot of his gear at the base camp, but there was no sign of him, so we went higher and found his empty tent. At that point, we figured that he'd gone further up the mountain than we'd thought, or maybe even gone down another path that we couldn't see, so we decided to call for more help. <br>We made our way back down to the base camp to set up the radio and call for more people, and on the way, we saw a bear. I've seen a lot of bears in my time as an SAR officer, and I can tell when a bear is behaving strangely. This one was sitting on a rock, and it looked like it had its arms around something. We drew our firearms and approached slowly, thinking that if the guy was injured, we'd have to try and get him down the mountain as quickly as we could. <br>When we got closer, we saw that the bear had its arms around a backpack, and there was aRewards: 1, Verifications: 0, Value: 19455person's head sticking out of the bag. We didn't bother to try and figure out who it was. We shot the bear immediately, not wanting it to do any more damage, and when it was gone, we rolled the bag out and looked inside. <br><br>It was the guy we were looking for. His head was torn open and there was tissue missing. We figured at the time that the bear had done it, and we were surprised that it had decided to carry the body around in a bag. We got someone with a stretcher to come up and get the remains, and of course we had to call the family and tell them what had happened. <br>The really strange thing about this story is that when we were looking through the guy's stuff, we found a backpack with the stuff in it that was the same make and color as the one the bear was carrying. We figured that he'd just bought another one, but it was strange that they were the same. It wasn't until the body came back from the autopsy that we realized why the bear had the bag in the first place. <br><br>The guy's head had been torn open, but it wasn't torn apart. It was more like his skull had been cracked open, and some of his brain had been scooped out. The coroner determined that this had happened *before* death, and there were burn marks on the inside of his skull. The conclusion was basically that he'd been tortured with some sort of electrical implement, and that his brain had been scooped out while he was still alive. <br>We never found out who did it. The only trace of anything strange was that we found the guy's tent had been cut open from the inside, and there was a small bloody footprint on the rock near where we found him. It was too smeared to determine who it came from, but we figured that, again, it was a bear. <br><br>Oh, and the last thing. When we were looking through the guy's stuff, we found a diary that he kept with him. There are usually some personal things that we have to leave behind, but in this case we were looking for anything that might indicate where he was going, or what might have happened to him. <br>One of the last entries, written the day before he went missing, said, "They're coming for me. I can hear them on the wind. I'm going to go higher on the mountain tomorrow, and if they come, I might have to jump." <br><br>We searched the area and we never found any trace of where he'd been, or who might have been with him on the mountain that day.