Hikermor is spot on that if you are going to get lost in the woods, it helps to do it near a big city. In Anchorage (like Tucson) some very wild country comes right to the edge of town. While Anchorage is nowhere near as big as Tucson, between the various SAR groups in the area we can generally get a fair number of people into the field in the near town area fairly quickly (though probably somewhat fewer than in Tucson).

The problem becomes much more acute when the search is located further afield. The time and distance situation then makes the initial search much more dependent on what few resources are available in the immediate area. Note that the search in question for the 5 year old was north of the Grand Canyon in Kaibab National Forest. A quick look at a map shows that Jacob Lake appears to be a long way from any major town. While I don't know any of the details of the search beyond the press release, I strongly suspect they only had very limited resources for the critical first few hours of the search.

One thing that I didn't mention in my previous post is that the vast majority of searches (something like 95%) are solved within the first 24 hours (thankfully). Only a small number go beyond that for several days. However, because big long lasting searches are not that common, there aren't that many people around who know how to efficiently run one.

I should also mention that Hikermor's old stomping ground in Arizona is one of the areas that has led in developing modern search theory and practice. Must be the warm weather down there has made Arizona a hot bed of SAR practice. Here in Alaska we have been fortunate to have several leading Arizona SAR practitioners, including David Lovelock, come up and offer training sessions for our local teams. We got some excellent training from them in how to run a large multiday search operation.