Search & Rescue Kids

Using maps to find lost people

It was Day 9 of the search, and the hiker still hadn’t been found. One of the largest wildfires in California’s history was raging near the place she’d last been seen, in the remote mountain wilderness. Huge plumes of smoke blocked searching from the air. A Chinook helicopter flew through the haze to land Search-and-Rescue (SAR) teams on the ground. These brave people were the lost hiker’s best hope for rescue. Turns out she was lucky that one teenage searcher was on the team.

Kobe’s Rescue Mission

Kobe Pole, 15 years old, had already been on over a dozen rescue missions with his mountain rescue team. Like his teammates, Kobe can climb up and rappel down ropes. He can rig lines and pulleys to rescue people from cliffs. He has his own two-way radio and a handheld GPS (global positioning system) that uses satellite signals to tell him exactly where on Earth he is. He runs the team’s computers to plan and map searches. Any one of these skills could make him a star on reality TV. But he’s just doing his job, dropping in the wilderness 16 miles (26 km) from the nearest road and staying for days. All to make sure someone else survives.

His team was assigned to search a 1.25-square-mile (3.2-square-km) area, on a steep, cliffy slope. They used a grid-searching technique. Searchers line up shoulder-to-shoulder and then spread out until they’re far enough apart to cover lots of area, but close enough together to see a missing person between them. They walk in line slowly across the search area, looking under bushes, behind trees, between boulders, anywhere a person could fit, listening for shouts or whistles. At the edge of their area, they swing their line around and search back the other way. They continue back and forth until the entire area is searched. Each searcher has a GPS that records his or her path, like an electronic trail of bread crumbs.