SaR Part --

This is my favorite time of year. It's not quite spring or winter. It's somewhere in between. It's too wet to camp, too dry to ski. People stay inside. I'm always grateful for that.
I’ve had a lot of people express concern about outdoor sports. It’s a fair question. Are we really safe out there? They want advice. How do they keep their loved ones safe? I tell them I don’t know. How do they avoid the stairs? I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s frustrating to have nothing to offer. If I knew how to keep everyone safe, I’d have solved, arguably, one of our biggest problems in this country. The only things I can stress are what anyone else does: don't go alone. Carry a GPS locator and phone. Be prepared for anything.

There's no pattern for this kind of thing, at least not one that I can see. There's commonalities, sure, but everyone's experience is different. This winter was quiet, mostly, but sometimes we're so overwhelmed it's all we can do to tread water. These are some of the things I've dealt with in the past:

* A buddy of mine up at Crater Lake remembers the disappearance of a young man there about twenty years ago, never found. This past winter, he called me to ask for advice on a new, eerily similar case. Jack B., his wife, and two children were snowshoeing on a very, VERY well marked trail. He was in the lead, the wife was behind. That's what we know. The wife said he crested a small hill, she lost sight of him for less than a second, and in that time he fell off the face of the earth. His tracks ended in the middle of the trail. There was no where for that man to go. And yet, in a literal blink of an eye, he was gone. They've been searching for him again now that the snow pack is melting a bit but I'm sure they won't find him. That area is wrong. Something about the way the wind sounds.

* About four years ago a new recruit came to our Park to do an internship with one of the senior Rangers. He was a really nice kid, his name was Darren, I think. He actually got really lucky, timing-wise. A lady had a diabetic crash and we had to help get her out of a tricky area. Darren was so hyped up about it, and he was one of those guys who you know is just gonna do great. He's friendly, he loves the job, he's everything you look for in a Ranger. But Darren had a problem with listening, because Darren was a very devout Catholic who believed that the Lord would save him from any danger. Darren didn't believe that what we'd seen was anything to be frightened of. The only parts of Darren that we found two years after he vanished during a routine trail-walk were a quarter-inch thick slice of his left thigh and the cap of his skull.

* Very early on in my career, I used to have a thing with kids who vanished. It broke me up really bad. I was always the first guy to volunteer. I couldn't stand the thought of another kid growing up alone, with that kind of burden on them, that invisible second life. And I had a very good track record. I had this kind of sense that almost always lead me in the right direction. So I started getting called out to other parks to help in search and rescue groups. One of the ones I brought back was a little girl who was skiing up at a popular resort I was familiar with. I still remember her name, actually, it was Anna. Her dad, John H., was on ski patrol, I'd met him a few times, and he was absolutely wrecked by the whole thing. It was a familiar story: he'd been watching her ski down one of the easier slopes, following along behind. He lost sight of her for just a second and poof, she was gone. I happened to be in the area during that time, so of course I went to help him out. By that point she'd only been gone maybe half the day, so I was confident we'd be able to get her back by nightfall. We split up to cover more ground and I went into an area that I know is full of really large boulders and cliff faces. Sometimes you find kids in places like that. It was unbelievably eerie that day. The sky was totally overcast but smoke from a freak fire up north had turned everything a really strange orange color. It was dead quiet, too, like the animals didn't know if they should be awake or asleep. Something about the light made the shadows look wrong, too, like they weren't in the right places. Probably a trick of the light but it was very disorienting. By pure luck, I found her tucked into a tiny little crevice at the foot of a big boulder. I got her out and it was almost like she'd been drugged. She was missing her shoes and coat but she was warm, almost hot to the touch. I got her back down to the lodge safe and they took her to be examined. There wasn't anything in her system, she hadn't been harmed. Oddly, though, she appeared to be suffering from severe dehydration. She'd lost almost three pounds. She'd only been gone a few hours; none of it made sense. It was so bizarre that everything basically got swept under the rug in favor of cheerful stories of her return. I reconnected with John a few weeks later to see how she was doing. The first night back, he said, she woke up shrieking in the middle of the night. He couldn't comfort her. She kept saying that she didn't want to go back to the orange place. He got her to sleep and by the next morning, not only did she have no memory of the dream, she had no memory of the event at all. He politely asked that I not call again, and I obliged. I do think about her a lot, though. I wonder if she remembers now.

* My boss woke me up in the middle of the night one summer and had me run out to a campground out at the edge of the park. He said a woman had called him absolutely frantic, insisting that there was some kind of large animal outside her tent. The cops were on their way but I'd get there faster. I grabbed my personal gun and headed out to see what was going on. She'd set up camp in a pretty isolated area, so I had to park the truck and walk a ways out to her. On the way there, this smell started to become first noticeable, then almost suffocating. It was something very... primal. Musky. And angry. It set my teeth on edge, and I had my gun ready. Nothing in the forest was moving, so whatever it was was predatory. We don't have bears up here, but that's not to say one couldn't have somehow wandered down from up north. As I got closer to her tent, I could see how badly this thing had torn up her camp. Her stove had been thrown up into the trees almost twenty feet. The fire had been stomped out, the coals scattered. One side of her tent was shoved in, and I could see the outline of her inside. I called out, and as I did something on the other side of the tent moved. I froze, gun cocked. In the weak light coming from her tent all I could make out was a huge bulky shape and two tiny white pinpoints where no head should have been. She started to come out of her tent and I told her to stop. The thing made a loud chuffing sound and suddenly seemed to dissolve and melt into the ground. I fired a round into the trees where it had been, but it was gone. I examined the ground and the only trace of it was slight singeing of the dirt. It's not the first time I've seen that thing, but it's the closest I've ever been, or ever want to be.

* I saw it the first time outside of my house, in the middle of summer. It was very late, and I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about a little boy who'd gone missing; we hadn't found anything except one of his Power Rangers shoes. I was at my back door, staring out over my backyard. I was exhausted, on the edge of passing out, but I felt guilty. I didn't deserve rest while that boy was out there. I was staring at nothing but when something moved at the edge of the lawn I noticed it and focused my eyes. It looked like a very tall deer. I watched it closely. It didn't move. I couldn't tell if it could see me. I bent down to grab my binoculars for a better look. When I looked up, it was pressed up against the glass. It covered over 100 feet in less than two seconds. It was all black, covered in disgusting, rotten-looking fur, and in the middle of its chest were two tiny white eyes. It was looking right at me. It wanted me to open the door. It wanted me to come closer. I broke away and ran to the bedroom and locked myself in the bathroom, where there are no windows. I heard it tapping on the glass until the sun came up. Sometimes it asked me, in my own voice, to let it in. I didn't. Not that time, anyway.