At the age of 24, I first began learning to hunt. My first season was in Kansas and then we moved to Kentucky. While in Kentucky I hunted mostly from a tree stand or ground blind. I moved back to Kansas and continued to do the same. When we moved out to Idaho in 2012, I had to learn a new way of hunting. While you can use tree stands and ground blinds in Idaho, they aren’t the most practical based on the amount of vast ground that needs to be covered to find animal movement. Packing a blind or a tree stand isn’t advisable with steep slopes and decaying granite rock paths.
Luckily I had a lot of help from friends on places to go and ways to find big game. Often though I would hunt by myself or split up from a group. Now I have always been sort of a packrat and probably the years of being at Galls, Incorporated had me a little sensitive to being prepared. You might think I was in the Boy Scouts of America or some such. Honestly, I rejected the idea of Scouts mainly because my two brothers were in it and being the middle boy I sort of forged my own path.
Fast forward to hiking and hunting in the Rocky Mountains while working for a company started by a Navy Seal and owned by a large Defense Contractor I had means or access to gear and equipment. Along with my various associations with peers in the industry, I literally had a mini-sporting goods store in my garage. I acquired a Badlands Ox pack for packing out wild game as well as carrying gear. The original Ox has an aluminum frame system and weighed nearly 14lbs empty. I would pack it with an MRE, First Aid Kit, 100’ of 550 cord, Zero Tolerance 0100 Fixed Blade Knife, Radio, GPS, Range Finder, Game Bags, Knives, Flashlights, Tinder (usually steel wool), Extra Batteries, 3L Camelbak bladder, Emergency Water Filter and the list goes on. The goal was that if something happened while I was hunting alone, if conscious, I would have the ability to survive. As time went on and I began to hunt more regularly with someone, I have begun to carry less and less gear but still have some of the “essentials”. My back has thanked me and my ability to scale a mountain has improved without the added weight. But not before I began to be known as the “Kitchen Sink”. I wish I could defend being called this but if the shoe fits, wear it.
This practice also extended to the vehicle I primarily drive. Our truck typically has a first aid kit, gunshot trauma kit, jumper cables, one insulated packable puffer jacket, one packable raincoat, two flashlights, a hi-vis traffic vest, a personal hammock and an emergency down packable blanket. All of this is tucked under the backseat.
This past Sunday, January 19th, my wife, daughter and I went up to Steamboat Gulch again for a little bit of sledding. We arrived at the gulch around 15:30 in the afternoon and had just less than two hours left to sled before they closed at 17:15. We paid our park fee and headed up from the parking area to the sled hills. By about 16:45, my wife and I were laying back in the snow staring up into the sky sort of taking it all in as our daughter was playing with a newfound friend. As we lay there, a sound started coming out from the woods back near the parking area. At first, it was crying which went on for a few minutes. My wife lifted her head a bit looking over at me and asked, “What is that?” Initially, I said I didn’t know. Then, as it kept going on, I said it was a kid crying. She responded by saying she knew that but from where. It was at this point the crying changed to yelling. I sat up and looked back at the parking area. I didn’t see too many people alarmed or running around frantically which was very odd. I told my wife I would head back to the truck with the sleds and check it out.
As I started walking back to the truck the yelling turned to someone screaming. Still, no one in the area seemed to respond. Most of the people there were getting their things around and began leaving the park. As I got closer to our truck, I saw two men approach the workers who had previously taken our money. They point to where the noise was coming from. One of the workers jumped on his ATV and headed toward the snowmobile trail. I dropped the sleds into the back of the truck and walked over to the snowbank. I climbed over the bank to see the guy on the ATV stop by a post supporting steel cables. The screaming continued and it appeared he was just below where the noise was coming from. I hailed him trying to ask if he needed help and he called back that someone was stuck up there. Within seconds a group of five snow bikes came down the trail toward the ATV. They stopped and the ATV driver started pointing around as the voice continued to scream. The snow bike riders drove past the ATV and went up and around a bend on another trail to try and spot the person stuck. The ATV driver did the same.
I hiked back over the berm to the truck and met my wife and daughter. I told them we were going to park near the trailhead and help to find this person. As we parked, another truck came up and parked near us. In that truck were a husband, wife and three daughters. They had an ATV trailer hitched to the back of their truck. He introduced himself as Eric and we agreed to work together to try and find this person. Eric’s wife relayed the message that earlier a Sheriff Deputy had stopped their daughter asking if she had seen a missing person who had apparently been gone for over two hours. All of us wondered if the person calling out was her. As we gathered our things, the voice stopped. I grabbed my first aid kit, an emergency blanket, and a flashlight. Eric and I circled around to the original trailhead and went a bit further past where the other ATV driver had stopped. The other ATV driver, stopped in the same spot, waded through knee high snow and jumped over the wire ropes. In a matter of a minute, he called out that he had found tracks.
Eric and I rushed back to that spot on his ATV and jumped off. Eric’s daughters were right there with us. We saw where the other driver had gone and realized he was hung up in waist-high snowdrifts following the tracks. I saw where the tracks headed above him, found a line and started pushing through drifts. As I got up above the other driver under some pines the snow thinned out and I was able to make it to the top quickly. Eric was only a few steps behind me. As I came to the top, there she was huddle next to a tall pine. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, leopard print leggings and had taken off her mid-thigh fashion boots and socks. Her bare feet were exposed and she was somewhat unresponsive. We feared hypothermia had begun to set in.
Eric took off his jacket and we wrapped the down blanket around her. Eric’s daughters made it up next with some heat packs that they placed on her core. They also lent their jackets in an effort to keep her warm. When they did this, we laid her down and rocking her back and forth got the blanket under her. The first ATV driver was on the phone with 911 reporting we had found Saber, the missing person. Eventually, drivers of the snow bikes came up and we decided to move her off the mountain as the light was getting low and the temperature was dropping. Using the blanket, six of us lifted her up and carried her off the mountain. Eric and his family ended up putting her in their truck and drove her with the Sheriff’s Officers to the airstrip for a Life Flight pick up. That was the last we saw of Saber.
This Wednesday the Sheriff’s Deputy who took a picture of my ID, drove from Idaho City to our home. I was out of town on business. As he dropped the blanket off, he told my wife it made all the difference in getting Saber off the mountain that night. Saber is going to be alright.
One of my favorite bands, Toad The Wet Sprocket, had a song titled Little Man, Big Man that asks the question, what is the measure of our worth. We don’t consider what we did to be anything special. There were no less than 10 people who took time to search for someone they didn’t know so there is plenty of credit to go around.
We are grateful for the others who helped out. I personally am feeling blessed and thankful that I am a “kitchen sink” kind of guy. From now on, I don’t think I will mind being called that.
- L. Yarbrough, Bucks & Beers
