Here is another tidbit from the NPS Morning Report:

Chiricahua National Monument (AZ)
Lost Hiker Found After Intensive Evening Search

With National Park Service employees taking the lead, 30 searchers from four agencies and the crew of an infrared-equipped helicopter searched for four-and-a-half hours on the evening of Monday, January 3rd, before rescuing an unprepared woman from below freezing temperatures and a night out in the wilderness. The 57-year-old woman left her van for a short day hike a little before noon that day. A protection ranger conducting a trailhead sweep found her van still at the trailhead at 5:30 p.m. He looked through the van’s windows and determined that it belonged to a solo hiker who would want to be back before dark. When she did not return by dark, the park launched a search. Teams of searchers from all divisions of Chiricahua began the operation and were joined by searchers from Fort Bowie, Coronado, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office and the U.S. Border Patrol and by a SAR helicopter from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. NPS employees found the woman around 10 p.m. She was exhausted and in the early stages of hypothermia. She told her rescuers she knew she would not have survived had they taken much longer to find her.(emphasis added)

For those of you not familiar with Chiricahua National Monument, it is a fairly small area dominated by picturesque spires and rock formations southeast of Tucson. All of the trips on a very well developed trail system are day hikes. About 5,000 feet in elevation, it is typically quite cold at this time of year, often with snow.

Sounds like DPS has a specialized SAR bird - good thing to have.

I'm glad the lady made it out.

It's the short hikes that can trick you. "I'll just meander up this trail for half an hour to see if it's worthwhile." And the trail draws you onward.

If I'm going on an all-day walk, or a multi-day walk, taking the full kit is automatic.

But for a short trip, a couple of hours, there's a dangerous temptation to leave most of it in the car. "I don't need to schlep all that stuff" etc. The first law of the perverse always applies -- if you don't have it, you'll need it desperately.

In my un-scientific observation over the years, day hike produce more searches than over nights...1-3 hour hikes don't think of food, extra water, clothes. notes, flashlight, etc....

This is why its a good idea to carry a small day pack in the car, for 'short' trips.

God bless that NPS Ranger for being observant and those who made the decision to launch a search so quickly.

I'm far more prepared when I hike now than when we started doing 8-13 mile day hikes in the Shenandoah mountains a decade ago. Stories such as these are the reason why.

This woman lived and hopefully learned.

I think Doug made a good point. All too often people get caught up in the "short hike" syndrome and it is these trips that get them into trouble. I subscribe to a heavily filtered Google news alert service that reports on lost hikers, SAR rescues etc. In reading these news stories everyday, this syndrome is all too often prevalent...

"Short Hike Syndrome". I like it. Catchy, but descriptive and I think effective.

Are you just using standard Google Alerts? If so, what filters are you using? I tried it for a while but got all kinds of unrelated crud.

HJ

It's a google news alert that keys off the words hiker and hiking The filtering took a bit to nail down as the intial query would return results such "feds/banks hiking interest rate", "suppliers hiking prices" etc.

The news alert returns a fairly accurate result and cut out 95% of the chaff which makes for a quick pervue of interesting news stories to read. On the left side of the Google news page are links to sort by dates instead of the default sort by prevalence.

Ah. I was hoping you would share the details of your filtering secrets. My filtering attempts have been less successful. Can you say "chaff city?" Maybe I'll give it another try.

HJ

Not only that, but Loyal, Brave, Clean, etc.... Seriously, this was definitely heads up work.

This is also the very same National Monument where the Ranger (Paul Fugate) on duty on a slow Sunday thirty years ago this month said "I think I will go out and check the Nature Trail." This is a typical thing to do on a slow winter day - go out and pick up butts and kleenex, etc. until quitting time. Been there-done that.

Paul has not been seen since. This despite an extensive,thorough, and lengthy search. Most likely he left the immediate area of the visitor center and the nature trail and blundered into a drug deal in progress. Still a mystery to this day.

Just a short hijack to the original post. Details on Paul Fugate whom Hikemor referenced can be read here. I recall reading this last year and the name rung a bell when Hikermor mentioned his name.