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 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 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 man had no climbing equipment, and he was wearing a parka and ski pants. He walked up to the guy, and asked if he needed any help, and the guy had said no, he was just enjoying the view. Then he said the guy had disappeared, and he'd gotten confused, and fallen. I don't know if that really happened, or if the guy was just trying to avoid admitting that he'd fucked up. <br>I should mention that we found the man about 3000 feet up a sheer face, and the only ways up were the two climbing paths. <br><br>* I had one call come in from a husband who couldn't find his wife. They were out on a walk, and she'd been complaining of problems with her heel. She wanted to go back, and he didn't, and they'd had a little fight. She'd gone back towards the car, and he'd continued on the hike, planning to meet her back at the parking lot. When he got there, she wasn't around. He waited for a few hours, and called us, sure that she'd just storm off and get lost. We searched the area, and we couldn't find her. We went back to the husband and told him we'd have to come back in the morning, and he almost lost it. He was convinced that she'd been kidnapped, and he was right. We came back in the morning, and we found her car, but she wasn't around. We searched the area again, and eventually, we found her car keys about half a mile from the parking lot, lying on the ground. We followed the trail from there, and we found her car, buried in a ditch a couple miles down the road. It had obviously been driven there, and we found her handbag and phone and Wallet inside it. We searched the area, and we found her about a mile from the car. She'd been beaten to death, and her body was decomposing pretty badly. We never caught whoever did it, and it was the first time I'd seen a dead body. It was...incredibly shocking, and it sort of Dawned on me how beautiful the person inside that bag had been. Up to that point, I'd seen a lot of sad things as an SAR officer, but that was the first time I really realized how sad it is when someone dies like that. <br><br>* A lot of people go missing in the forests. A LOT of people. And most of the time, we find them, or we find their bodies, or they come out on their own. But sometimes...sometimes people just walk into the forest, and they never come out. And I know there are a lot of explanations for that, but I have the utmost faith in my ability to find people, and I don't know what to make of those cases.