“We should have brought snowshoes,” I gasped as I climbed over another deadfall and plunged into the snow on the other side. “Yeah, I know,” said Mark, sheepishly. SJ had just let us out of the General, a sheriff’s office UTV, that we had thought would shuttle us, warmly and comfortably, all the way up to the top of Miner’s Creek Road. We believed we would be about 300 yards from our subject at that point, according to her GPS coordinates. A cardinal rule of search and rescue is to plan for the unexpected, and we hadn’t done that. There was a tree across the road and that was the end of our warm, comfortable ride. I was too embarrassed to tell Mark the rest of my story at the time. I wasn’t just lacking snowshoes. I was wearing lightweight trail shoes that weren’t even waterproof. We’d been post holing…
