Medical evacuation incident, Emigrant Wilderness, August 3-4, 2022

[agfhst]

My friend and I backpacked in the Emigrant Wilderness during the first week in August. Our plan for August 3 was to do a short backpack from Rosasco Lake to Pingree Lake, set up camp, and then dayhike down past Big Lake to the old Yellowhammer Camp and back.

As we were climbing up to Pingree, we met a man who said he was staying at a pack camp on Big Lake with two others who had developed Covid, at least one of which seemed to be a serious case. So he was out trying to find a ranger who could ask the pack station to send out horses to evacuate the two ill people. We concluded that he wasn't likely to run across a ranger, and our phones didn't work. So the man sent a message via Spot to family members, and I sent a message via Inreach to another friend back in New York, asking her to contact the ranger station to request that the pack station send someone in to Big Lake to do an evacuation by horse. Horse evacuation for someone who was ill sounded a little off to me, but that's what the man wanted, and I figured the ranger or whoever would make the appropriate call once they got word. The three of us then hiked together till my friend and I found a campsite on Pingree, and the man continued on toward Big Lake.

Later in the afternoon, on the way back from the Yellowhammer Camp, my friend and I had just crossed the open bench above the Golden Staircase and started heading downhill in the forest to Pingree Lake when a helicopter flew right over us, loudly announcing some kind of message. We went back out onto the bench, saw that it was a CHP rescue copter, and understood the message to be that they were there for medevac, and anyone who needed help should come out and signal. To avoid any confusion about whether my friend and i were the ones needing help, I signaled to the copter crew to go down to Big Lake, which they did. We watched from the bench as they did a number of laps around the lake, making their announcement, but no one came out. The copter went over to the Pingree Lake area for a while, went over to the Hyatt Lake area for a while, and eventually came back and did many more laps around Big Lake. Although we did see a couple of people come out of the woods around Big Lake for a minute or two to see what was going on, neither of them was the person we had met. No one came out to signal to the CHP folks that they needed assistance, or to flag the CHP folks down to at least acknowledge that they had been responsible for the message that had brought the CHP there.

Meanwhile, around this same time, my friend in New York was just picking up my message. At the ranger's direction, she called the county sheriff's office, which wanted to send out their helicopter first thing next morning. But after getting my friend's message back to me, I wrote back and reported that the CHP copter had already been there with no response, so the sheriff's office apparently canceled their mission.

As we were hiking out next morning around 9:00, we ran across someone from the pack station leading three horses, who confirmed that he was going to Big Lake for the evacuation.

I was troubled by the fact that the people at the pack camp on Big Lake didn't communicate with the CHP folks who had flown in to help them. I suppose the person we met could also have come down with Covid after he left us, and the three of them could have been too ill to respond to the helicopter, but that seems unlikely.

And I was a little surprised that the CHP people and the county sheriff's office apparently hadn't been in contact with each other. Does anyone have any insight into whether search-and-rescue actions are generally coordinated between the different agencies?