Callout for Missing Girl at Cutter Scout Reservation
MSAR was involved in managing and executing a search for a missing 11 year old female in the Cutter Scout Reservation, Boulder Creek, CA, near Big Basin. The subject had gotten in a fight with her family during a Girl Scout trip and had run away at about 1345 on Saturday 5/23. We received the page just before 1900 that evening and had people on scene along with the other units of the San Mateo Sheriff Emergency Services Bureau as the sun went down. The search was managed by us along with ESD (the ground-search team of San Mateo Sheriff) and Sheriff's deputies with assistance from Cal Fire and a CoCoSAR member who happened to be in the area camping with his family. This was the largest search in-county in recent history and was run primarily by volunteers with a full roll-out of the Incident Command System.
MSAR signed in after midnight with three members and were given an assignment of going to an area that had a high probability of traffic as two trails came joined there; also the two creeks came together near there. We were to stay there until relieved in the morning. We got our radios and tacked up the horses and we went into the foggy night. The trail was an old fire road, but overgrown. We eventually got to our assignment and radioed in and gave GPS coordinates. There was communication every 30 minutes. It was so dark that we couldn't even see each other. There were a couple of glow sticks on some gate posts that made it nice. We got off our horses and let them graze, with the fog having mist with it, the horses got moisture. Before dawn it got cold, so we started moving about the area to warm up. Our feet were wet. During this time we continued to call out to our missing person. After the 8am check, we were relieved of our position and stiffly climbed on our horses. We arrived back at the CP and debriefed, signing out at 0917 and headed home.
The search went into a second operational period on Sunday morning and the SO requested and received support from Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa and Marin counties as well as support from Cal Fire, CA Fish & Game, CHP Aviation (on standby for weather), California Explorer SAR and the Red Cross. Assignments and operational plans were prepared for Sunday and MarinSAR relieved the exhausted overhead team at about 0600 on Sunday 5/24 as over 100 searchers for the 0700 briefing arrived.
The subject was located about a half-mile north of her campsite alive but unable to walk on account of being cold. She was rewarmed in the field and over the next three hours was slowly walked back to the camp. She was reunited with her mother and brought to Stanford ED for evaluation and released.
News story and video.
