DNR SAR

There are a lot of things that we in the press rarely get to see. One of these is the actual search for a missing person out in the field. Yesterday, i got to tag along with a Dept. of Natural Resources Search and Rescue Team while they were doing their annual training exercise, this year in Winder at Ft. Yargo State Park. (Nevermind that i had a bruised knee from taking a baseball off it)

This exercise is treated as if its actual. There's a real 13-year-old boy out in the woods leaving real clues for searchers to find. (There's a preplanned eventuality of what to do if they actually find him too quickly in the two-day event) So i got to spend 4 hours hiking over section "F", an 84 acre swath of land with Bredex, a six-year-old German Shepard and her volunteer handler Susan Andes, Park Ranger Ray Smith and DNR employees Lauretta Dean and Michael Middleton.




I had a bunch of fun but in the end; we didn't find him during our search, not until the dinner break. (He was last seen in the vicinity of a pizza) I learned a bunch, mainly about procedures, how they do things, and why we in the press really would get in the way during an actual search. The long and the short of it is that our search team found numerous beer cans, doritios bags, odd foot prints, 13 bicyclists and other hikers, energy bar wrappers and numerous other detritus that is left by people. None of it related to the missing boy. All of this in a heavily wooded area with a big creek that we crossed about 5 times.







That and Susan summed it up best. At the end of the day, its not about the searchers or the dog. Its about the missing person.
















That's Bre. She likes playing with pine cones.