In follow-up to my other thread about the young Labrador teenager who died near the village of Makkovik last week, after his snowmobile got stuck:

Despite the chorus of angry voices complaining about the slowness of the military SAR response, I noted that ground searchers from the community, assisted by civilian helicopters, located his snowmobile on Tuesday afternoon - i.e. within the "first 48" hours after he was last seen alive.

Putting aside the tragic result, this strikes me as an excellent response time.

For those of you who have been actively involved in Search and Rescue, would you agree or disagree that finding the search subject's vehicle within 2 days is better than average, average, or below average?

This leads to my next question: How long would you wait to be rescued? At what point would you say "Well, they're not going to find me, so if I want to survive I'd better start walking"?

Or, in general, under what conditions would you decide it was better to leave the stranded vehicle and try making it to safety on your own?

In my experience, a very common scenario starts with notice of an overdue party, typically toward sundown on a Sunday evening. SAR responds promptly and the missing party is located after an interval that ranges from five minutes to early next morning at sunrise, which seems to be a good time for contact - searchers are in the area, everyone starts moving around, and visibility increases. If search efforts continue for another day or so, beyond 24 hours, you enter another phase of protracted searching, which all too often does not conclude with the finding of the party involved. The search perimeter expands, which is never a good thing.

The key is a prompt, aggressive response upon notification of a potential problem. The missing people are still in the area and haven't had as much time to move about, as they do later on.

Probably average times vary with the situation and the area. Most of my experience was in an urban setting, next to wild, mountainous country (Tucson, AZ), a location where it was fairly easy to establish a SAR operation. I suspect Labrador could be very different.

Forty-eight hours sounds pretty good to me; faster is always better, but many factors, like bad weather, could make that unrealistic. It is certainly not an unreasonable expectation that someone stranded in the woods would be able to sustain themselves for 48 hours, IMHO.

My experience is from before common use of cell phones. Nowadays it seems fairly common for the stranded person to be able to make contact and give their location, thus taking the search out of SAR, and shortening operation times.