I just bought a green laser flare last summer. Oh. My. God. there is a reason that when people are arrested for flashing lasers at flying aircraft it's always a Green.

I have hit a confirmed 3 mile target with the laser. Standing several feet away you see the beam from the tip of the pointer reach out. It has seriously made me consider ditching my vietnam era Firefly strobe and just carry the laser flare and my normal headlamp with strobe function, for back country use. Obviously I think a dedicated strobe on a life jacket would be required in a water environment.

Stumbling around in the dark can add significant risk for searchers, so whether or not to initiate a night search is always a difficult decision. Depends on weather, terrain, last known condition of the subject and their last known position, etc.

It becomes a question of balancing the likelihood of finding and helping the victim vs the added risk to the searchers. Sometimes we will do a compromise and send hasty teams up obvious trails etc in the dark, meanwhile assembling more resources for thorough effort at first light.

Rule number one of SAR teams is "Don't become a victim yourself!" If you do you, you're no longer part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

We did not experience injuries attributable to decreased visibility. In the warm conditions of southern Arizona, hiking a night is fairly popular, along with early starts in the cool mornings. Most of our operations, if they were true searches and not responding to an injured victim at a known locations, resolved during the hasty search phase. I don't recall any grid searches at night; that would truly be wasted effort.

Hikermore,

Yes, Arizona would be different than our situation around here. During much of the summer, it really doesn't get very dark, so the term "night search" is a bit of a misnomer. In late summer and fall it gets a bit more interesting. Thrashing through an alder thicket in the dark...in big bear country....is not always the wisest thing to be doing. In full on winter, it gets even more serious. Traveling in avalanche country in the dark can be very dangerous when you can't clearly see the terrain you are getting into. Even so, we have done some winter searches in the mountains, when we thought we could do it with an acceptable safety margin. In one case where there was a known (or so it was thought) location in the mountains, a team was sent in in the dark. Turned out they had moved, and weren't found till after daylight (found OK).

Each case is different. We had a recent ground search for a missing runner around the UAA campus. The search area was sort of half town, half thick woods, with deep snow. In Anchorage, the wilderness literally comes to the edge of town, and there are many trails leading from campus into the woods. In that case we had dog teams out at night, walking the trails. The next day we hit the area hard with ground searchers, and over flew with a helicopter. Even with that, due to the thick woods and almost a foot of new snow, the POD wasn't good. Turned out he was in the area (we still don't know exactly where). The next morning he wandered in, severly hypothermic, with frozen feet. A very sad story. See links below.

http://www.ktuu.com/videobeta/36bef123-e...-Missing-Runner

http://www.adn.com/2011/11/08/2160569/search-continues-for-uaa-student.html

http://www.adn.com/2011/11/21/2182727/doctors-amputate-frostbitten-feet.html

Interesting comparisons. Bears, while present in some of our mountain ranges, are not the problem that they can be in Alaska. One reason we respond quickly at night is that our victims are often dehydrated, or at least rather thirsty, so time tends to be critical.

Some years ago, I was on Denali during June. We had all sorts of equipment, but no need for any kind of light - perpetual daylight at that latitude and altitude.

There seemed to be a tendency for many of our searches for the typical overdue party seemed to resolve around dawn the following day. More and more we tended to send out parties that would get into the search area and hang out, perhaps even bivvying there. When the sun rose, we could easily find our victims as visibility increased and everyone started moving around.

Different techniques for different circumstances.....