We found him trapped in a small crevasse with a broken leg. We were looking for a guy who hadn’t come home from a climbing trip when he was supposed to, and we ended up having to do some serious climbing to get to where we figured he’d be. I was teamed up with another SAR officer because we’d received reports of bears in the area.She couldn’t live with the loss of her daughter. I heard from another SAR officer that she killed herself a few weeks after it happened. It was like her whole life was crashing down around her, and a part of her had died with her daughter. She saw the body bag being loaded into the ambulance, and she let out the most haunting, heart-broken wail I’ve ever heard. It was a complete freak accident, but I’ll never forget the sound her mother made when we told her what had happened. A nine-year-old girl fell down an embankment and got impaled on a dead tree at the base. One particularly sad case involved the recovery of a body.I’m sure there’s an explanation, but it’s sort of strange. It’s always baffling, and in those cases we usually find the person on the other side of the cliff, or miles away from where the canine has led us. Straight, sheer cliffs with no possible handholds. A few times, I’ve been out on my own searching with a canine, and they’ve tried to lead me straight up cliffs.I have no idea where she could possibly have gone, because neither her mother or grandpa saw her come down. Again, we searched everywhere, and we never found a trace of her. They waited at the base of the tree for hours, calling her name, before they called for help. According to the mother, her daughter had climbed up a tree to get a better view of the forest, and she’d never come back down. The other was a young woman who was out hiking with her mom and grandpa. The little girl was also insistent that he wasn’t a normal man, but that he was tall and covered in hair, 'like a bear’, and that he had a 'weird face.’ We searched that area for weeks, it was one of the longest calls I’ve ever been on, but we never found a single trace of that kid. Of course, our first thought was abduction, but we never found a trace of another human being in that area. The last she saw of her brother, he was riding on the shoulders of 'the bear man’ and seemed calm. We found the daughter pretty quickly, and when we asked where her brother was, she told us that he’d been taken away by 'the bear man.’ She said he gave her berries and told her to stay quiet, that he wanted to play with her brother for a while. When their parents couldn’t find them, they called us, and we came out to search the area. Their parents lost sight of them for a few seconds, and in that time both the kids apparently wandered off. He and his sister were together, and both of them went missing around the same time. The first was a little boy who was out berry-picking with his parents. Both bother me a lot, and I use them as motivation to search even harder on the missing persons cases I get called on. But I’ve had two cases where that didn’t happen. The majority of them have heard the old ‘stay where you are’ thing, and they don’t wander far. Most of the time they just wander off the path, or slip down a small cliff, and they can’t find their way back. I have a pretty good track record for finding missing people.I’ve been an SAR officer for a few years now, and along the way I’ve seen some things that I think you guys will be interested in. I wasn’t sure where else to post these stories, so I figured I’d share them here. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 (Final) I’m A Search And Rescue Officer For The US Forest Service, I Have Some Stories To Tell