For national park visitors, there is no bigger nightmare than wandering off the trail to catch some beautiful views or a moment of solitude and suddenly finding oneself lost without phone service to call for help.
On August 3, the sheriff’s office in Washington State’s North Cascades National Park was notified that 39-year-old Robert Schock went missing after starting a hike through Chilliwack River Trail with his dog a few days earlier. National Park Service (NPS) had found an abandoned car at one point in the trail and Schock’s dog — which they identified by the information on the collar — a few miles later that day but were not able to locate Schock himself.
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Park authorities conducted a search of the trail area between August 4 and 7 that did not provide results. Local deputies and the U.S. Border Control conducted a more extensive “detailed ground search” a few weeks later but still did not find Schock or his body.
Rescue crews undertook several missions, eventually tipped off by quiet call for help
The details had all to suggest an unsolved tragedy, but on on Sept. 2 the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office said that Schock was just found “alive and well” in the Chilliwack Basin. Rescuers were were led toward him after hearing calls for help calling from a cliff near the river.
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“The PNTA crew had already worked 10 hours, doing some of the most physically demanding work that a trail crew can be asked to do,” Jeff Kish, director of the Pacific Northwest Trail Association who was among the group of rescuers looking for Schock, wrote in a Facebook (META) post. “They were returning to their backcountry camp, exhausted, when they crossed the Chilliwack River and heard something barely discernible above the sound of the river, but out of place for their surroundings. It was not readily apparent that they had heard a person, but their intuition was to take the time to investigate, just in case.”
Kish also wrote that the “alive and well” description refers to Schock’s likelihood to survive rather than his physical and emotional state.
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‘Immobile, stuck on the exact spot for approximately two weeks’
“When our crew found Robert, he was able to communicate to them that he had been immobile, stuck in that exact spot for approximately two weeks, and based on the condition that he was found in, there was no reason for the crew to question it,” Kish elaborated.
Neither Kish nor the NPS elaborated on how Schock got lost or how he was able to survive but the former categorically denied speculation that something was “staged” or that the wilderness rescue crew did not do their job diligently enough to find Schock earlier.
“This crew was trained and tasked to build and maintain trail,” he wrote further in what is a detailed post addressing many of the speculation that arose in local communities. “They had Wilderness First Responder training to protect themselves and others from incidents in the backcountry, but what they did this weekend was above and beyond anything that I think anyone could have reasonably expected of them. They saved Robert’s life against improbable odds, and at great psychological toll.”
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