[pct-l] Lost Hiker Found

[Mike Douglass]

I have a dumb question...what is the "lost person's" $ liability in the
event of search and rescue?

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Ken Murray <kmurray at pol.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
>
> =============================
> 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.
>
>
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