Green Ridge SAR Mission July 2018

Monday July 30th, 2018 Colorado 4x4 Rescue and Recovery was contacted by a party that hiked out 10+ miles to highway 14 in the poudre canyon, hitched a ride into town, that the other half of their party was stuck nose down in deep water along Trail 177 far into the hills of Larimer County Colorado.
Given the details about provisions running low after being stuck for a whole day, the decision was made to contact Larimer County Sheriff's Department to see if they wanted to send their Search and Rescue Team.
Given the rugged terrain and our knowledge of the area anticipated to be found, Larimer County authorized us to handle the call and reach out to them in the event more resources were needed.
CO 4x4 RNR's Search and Rescue Emergency Support team was activated and sent into the area to locate our missing persons (with 3 dogs) and if possible recover the vehicle when on-scene.
From first contact to parties located, it was approximately 7 hours with resources coming from as far away as Highlands Ranch, Colorado.
The SAR-ES team has been training for over a year for this exact thing. Wide area vehicle based searches with people extraction, or when possible, vehicle and people extraction. Our mission is NOT to replace county SAR teams or intentionally step on toes, but rather augment and enhance their capabilities for foot based searches by either finding a point of origin (abandoned vehicle) or camp site on huge networks of forest roads, so they can then begin searching a much smaller grid for the missing parties.
This was a text book SAR-ES mission. From pre-planning, mapping the routes, and knowing the terrain and which trails we can take in faster than others was critical to getting these folks out of the backcountry.
Aside from the rapid response 3 vehicle team that went in, there was additional standby teams in the event we missed our comms check in window and/or needed extra power to recover the vehicle.
From first page to final check in at home bases, a total of 12.5 hours had elapsed.
MISSION SUCCESS AND COMPLETE!

[@RyanJosephLong]

That's some serious mud!

[@ffandrewd2986]

How do you have sirens? What laws allow you to do that? It’s really cool!

[@ffandrewd2986]

Also, is that a speed tech siren?