2/22/2025 - Mock Mission
The mission consisted of multiple people lost in the woods while snowshoeing. One of them was a snowshoer who was well prepared. Incident command had no contact with anybody in the party. Their vehicle was found in a parking lot. We had pings from their cellphone. The weather was overcast with warm temperatures (30-35 degrees). The snow was well consolidated and had not changed for several days. At base, we were put onto multiple teams. I was put into a grid-search team. We were assigned our grid. We travelled out to our search grid via snowmobile. Prior to beginning our search, our team lead determined two things: 1) Because the snow was consolidated from many days ago, the snowshoers tracks would be easily visible. 2) The likelihood is very high that if they had entered our grid, it would be from one of two grid sides: One side was against a snowmobile trail. The other side bordered another search grid. ...