Six Orange County Sheriff Department search and rescue teams spent hours in cold and rainy conditions scouring the rugged and steep terrain along trails near Sitton Peak off Ortega Highway on May 5, trying to find a hiker who had not been seen for more than 12 hours.
They used a variety of tactics, including comparing boot prints like crime-scene investigators, and strategies for covering large amounts of space efficiently to successfully find the lost hiker, who was weakened by spending the night in the elements, but ultimately OK.
“Every single search goes the same way, we have a great plan to go out there and execute and find the person,” said Sgt. Jason McLennan, the department’s search and rescue coordinator who has worked in this field for a decade. “However, most of the time, the plan needs to be modified, changed, or expanded. There always comes a point where we’re, ‘What are we missing?’ No matter what the search, when we hear over the radio, we found the person, it’s the most successful thing of the day.”
Orange County’s search and rescue program was founded shortly after World War II and now has around 90 members. The unit is considered one of the top four in the state, McLennan said.
In a year, the teams, which train monthly, respond to about 90 rescue callouts; about one-third are similar to this scenario, officials said.
The teams were first alerted around 3 a.m. on May 5 to the missing hiker when McLennan received a call from his counterpart at the Riverside Sheriff’s Department asking for assistance.
Involved in another rescue effort in San Jacinto, the department asked if the Orange County teams could help with searching for the hiker who had been reported missing near Sitton Peak. The two agencies often collaborate through mutual aid, McLennan said.
“The entire (search and rescue) design is based off volunteers and relies on the mutual aid system of neighbors helping neighbors,” McLennan said.
By 5 a.m., McLennan had assembled his teams of two — most are volunteers who serve in other capacities in the department or are reserve deputies. All are highly trained in wilderness rescue, and some have additional specialties, including rope, cliffside rescue and medical skills, McLennan said.
Devon Kemp, a reserve captain with OCSD who was part of the rescue and helps coordinate the reservists, was among the first on the scene. From briefing the three hikers the lost man had headed out with, he learned the group started hiking the day before with a plan to do a 20-mile loop near Sitton Peak. The area is a popular hiking spot just a few miles into Riverside County along the rural Ortega Highway.
Kemp said the man began cramping up and told his friends to continue on without him.
“The three friends kept going, and the last time they saw him,” Kemp said, based on forensics, was around 6:30 p.m.
When the friends finished their hike, they waited for the fourth man, looking for him for a while. But when he didn’t show up, they called 9-1-1, Kemp said.
As officials began their search, cold and foggy conditions made the rugged terrain an even greater challenge. Aerial support wasn’t an option.
After hiking about three miles, the first group of three search teams sent out arrived at Four Corners, a spot where multiple trails merge.
“We were extrapolating that if a missing person had come back down to the trailhead, he could have gotten to that place and, being dark, he wouldn’t find the trail he needed to find and may have gotten off the trail and lost,” Kemp said.
Using photos they had taken of the three hikers’ shoes, the teams looked among the footprints, narrowing down which would probably belong to the missing hiker. Other clues the team looks for could be a tossed apple core or water bottles, clothing pieces, broken branches or an area that shows where a hiker could have exited the trail.
Teams were sent up Sitton Peak and to other nearby trails, such as Bear Ridge and Bear Valley. One team hiked 13 miles.
“We do something called containment,” said Kemp, a computer engineer who has volunteered for the search and rescue unit for 25 years. “We were able to knock some of the trails off. We contain those trails, say they’re out of bounds, and focus on other trails.”
Kemp said searches start off as “hasty searches,” which assumes the person is responsive and on the trail.
“They go up the trail pretty fast, calling his name and looking for a response back,” he said. “As the day went on, we slowed down because we didn’t find him on the main trails and assumed maybe he’s unresponsive or maybe hypothermic. We look off the side of the trail, for slide marks or a body over the side.”
McLennan said ideally, the search crews would have been aided by an airship. There was a small window where the Riverside Sheriff Department got a helicopter out from Hemet, he said, but the crews had only 10 minutes before the weather closed up again.
By this time, some of Riverside’s search and rescue team members and their coordinator showed up and worked with McLennan and Kemp, thinking through the challenges. More teams headed out.
As the Orange County department’s sixth team headed up around noon on Monday, the hiker was found.
“They saw him sitting on the side of the trail,” Kemp said.
The team did a quick medical assessment, the man was cold, dehydrated and weak from not having any food.
A second attempt to get a helicopter in proved unsuccessful, so the rescuers hiked the man out. But before that, they gave him the necessary gear, water and food from their own packs.
After a slow hike down, the man was brought out and examined again by a paramedic team from Cal Fire to see if more medical attention was needed. The hiker, who is from Los Angeles, declined through the department to be interviewed.
“Our team was in the right place at the right time,” McLennan said. “That containment was huge. As we narrowed down the search, that’s what led us to being able to find him in that area, even with him moving around.”
Both Kemp and McLennan said it’s a guess on whether the hiker might have made it out on his own.
“I turn right and it’s two miles to the roadway, I turn left and it’s 13 miles before I hit civilization,” McLennan said, thinking through the hiker’s options. “I don’t know how familiar he was with the area. It could have been a lucky guess or a bad decision.”
McLennan said there are cold cases where hikers or other missing people weren’t recovered, but they are never forgotten. He said teams will go back over situations to cast a fresh eye on what could’ve happened and sometimes even purposely train in areas where someone went missing with hopes of finding new clues.
“We found a missing hiker in a very short amount of time and he’s alive,” McLennan said about this most recent successful rescue. “That is a huge success by any metrics. The fact we were able to work so well with another agency outside our own jurisdiction tells the success of what our program and their program is.”
“It never gets old,” Kemp added, “to hear the phrase, ‘We found him!’”
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