A hiker’s nightmare becomes Search and Rescue’s midnight challenge
November 1, 5:41 p.m. We have an activation for a lost hiker with no communication. Please respond to Kakiat Park parking lot for staging.
Information was spotty. The hiker had sent a picture of his location on Google Maps to a friend, along with a distressing message: I’m lost in Kakiat, and my phone’s about to die. I’m going to keep moving to prevent hypothermia.
The Google Maps picture didn’t show much — just water lines, elevations, and a dot indicating the hiker’s location. The tough job of trying to pinpoint that location belonged to Chaverim of Rockland’s Search and Rescue coordinator Moshe Jacobowitz, and he got to work downloading park terrain maps and searching for an area that matched the information on the picture. And then he found it, sharing with his team: “The hiker’s last known location is somewhere between Raccoon Brook Hill Mountain and Cobus Mountain, not too far from the Pine Meadow Lake Trail.” The hiker was off-trail and moving. It was like looking for an ant on a pitch-black, rainy football field — but at least they had a starting point.
The amount of time that elapsed since the hiker texted allowed Jacobowitz, owner of a waste management company, to create a circumference within which the hiker would almost certainly be located, and five search and rescue teams were dispatched throughout that area.
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