“I found him! He’s under the tree!” I walk up to the pile of human in wet camo, crumpled at the base of a spiky old spruce.
“Hey Tim, hey Tim, can you hear me?” Nothing.
“He’s unresponsive.” I lean in close and listen. “But breathing,” I say to my team, members of the Kachemak Bay Search and Rescue, or KBAYSAR, who are assembling around the victim. “Heart rate is slow. His skin feels cold. Looks like a broken right arm, maybe a broken leg as well. Definitely potential spinal cord injury. Call Dispatch, get the medical team in here. We need a back board.”
According to the Lost Person Questionnaire we received this morning, Tim Horton is a 44-year-old male who was last seen at 6 a.m. on Oct. 1. His wife, Emma Horton, called the troopers who called the Kachemak Bay Search and Rescue team when he was 24 hours overdue.
It is now 3 p.m. on Oct. 4, and we’ve finally found him. It is raining, foggy and muddy up here around the back side of Ohlson Mountain. We’ve been searching since 10 a.m., systematically expanding outward in a grid from his point last seen, with small parties following leads. We found his camp in disarray, approximately a half mile from where we eventually found Tim himself.
Search teams observed his rain gear left behind, a boot stuck in the mud, his backpack on the trail and plenty of bear sign. It appears that Tim was chased out of camp and climbed a tree for safety. But then he fell from the tree, was knocked unconscious and has since become hypothermic. And now here we are.
“Tim, hey Tim if you can hear me, we’re going to get you out of here. We’re going to get you home. Emma is waiting for you. Hang on, buddy. You’ve got this,” I tell him.
The KBAYSAR team is a group of local volunteers who have a myriad of outdoor skills: medical, rescue, tracking, K9 handling. We are improvising a litter with a tarp and ski poles now to lift Tim over the deadfall near where he fell to carry him back out to the trail, where we’re meeting up with our medical team who have a wheeled litter and a rigid sled. We beam him onto the sled, put an improvised C-collar on his neck, check his airway, breathing and circulation, then we wheel him back to Dispatch at our makeshift command station on the muddy road.
Kasey Aderhold, the KBAYSAR Incident Commander, tells us that the fog has made it impossible for the helicopter to land here today, so as we discuss alternative ways to get Tim to the hospital. We lift him off the litter, fold him in half and put him in the back of someone’s car, because this is a mock rescue. Tim is a CPR dummy. By searching, locating and bringing him back to Incident Command, we’ve completed our training for the day. The team high-fives as we debrief the scenario.
The KBAYSAR team is a sub-committee of the Friends of Kachemak Bay State Park. Alison O’Hara, a board member of the Friends of KBSP and owner of True North Kayak Adventures, formed the KBAYSAR team in 2025 after a woman went missing across the bay the summer before.
“We didn’t have a search and rescue team in place, so it took three days to find her,” said O’Hara. “And I just thought we could do a lot better than that.”
Enthusiasm for the team was immediately apparent and now, not long since its conception, KBAYSAR boasts five team leads, 21 fully-trained volunteers and about 60 additional volunteers.
Team lead Kasey Aderhold, acting as incident commander for the scenario involving Tim (the dummy), interfaced with Colette Ireland, another team lead who set up the scenario and played the part of Emma Horton, giving details and clues to the search teams. Under the Incident Command pop-up tent, deep in the Twin Rivers Wilderness Area on Ohlson Mountain, Aderhold juggled radios and cell phones, relaying information from Ireland to the search teams and noting times and information gathered from the search.
“You kinda need to know a little bit about a lot. Medical, wilderness, survival training, mapping, radio communications, working with canine search units, crime scenes, cold weather safety, bear safety, incident command systems…” The list goes on for an incident commander, according to Aderhold. But to be a volunteer for KBAYSAR, you just need enthusiasm and some wilderness experience.
In February of this year, Kachemak Emergency Services hosted a four-day Search and Rescue Academy for KBAYSAR, thanks to a partnership with MatSAR from the Matanuska Valley.
“They came down with their K9 teams and led the training for us, with some cooperation from the troopers as well,” said Aderhold. “We covered a little bit of everything you need to know for search and rescue.”
The 21 people certified through the SAR Academy are now the muscle of the KBAYSAR team with its five team leads (O’Hara, Aderhold, Ireland, Andy Haas and Amy Holman) as its vital organs. The other 60-ish volunteers are part of a WhatsApp Group that receives notifications for call-outs to search, but more often receives invitations to informal trainings, often held in the evenings around a round of beers.
This August a call-out to search launched for a hunter who had been missing for 24 hours across the bay. The hunter’s wife called the troopers, who called down the list of the KBAYSAR team until they reached Kayla Fox Rivers, one of the academy-trained team members.
“The troopers were looking for help with the hasty search,” said Rivers. “We were just about to mobilize when we got the call that some other hikers had run into him, and they called his wife for him. He had lost his inReach.”
That’s the best-case scenario for a volunteer search and rescue team: the lost person has been found and is fine. But we all know that things don’t usually go best-case in the Alaska wilderness. Something as simple as a sprained ankle can become deadly if a person is alone or doesn’t have a way to communicate, doesn’t have proper gear for changing weather, or is lost and isn’t able to navigate back to a known location.
For this reason, always carry a survival kit when venturing into the Alaskan wilderness, including (at lminimum): a communication device, a knife, firestarter, water purification, shelter, rain gear, warm layers, a whistle, navigation tools and extra food.
It is equally important to maintain situational awareness and stay sober when traveling in the backcountry. Know your route and know where you are by checking your map and correlating it to the surrounding terrain.
And whenever you plan to travel into the wilderness, always leave your itinerary with a trusted person back home. Let them know where you’re going and when you plan to return or check in. That way, if they don’t hear from you, they can begin the search and rescue process.
If you find yourself lost or disoriented in the wilderness, STOP (Stop, Think, Observe and Plan), rather than continuing to wander out of panic. It is much easier for a search team to find a stationary person than one who is unknowingly walking away from them. Blow your whistle three times in a row to indicate distress and repeat your whistling for as long as possible. Build a fire if you can and stay warm and dry. It is much easier to stay warm than to get warm, so put those extra layers and rain gear on early, before you get cold.
If you realize that someone is overdue from their backcountry travels, and you suspect they may be lost or injured, call the Alaska State Troopers by dialing 911. The troopers may then contact KBAYSAR and mobilize our volunteer force to go find your friend.
“We cannot start searching until someone has called 911 and identified it as an emergency,” said Aderhold.
The KBAYSAR team is currently standing by, with rescue packs at the ready. We may not have saved any lives when we “rescued” Tim (the dummy) Horton from his hypothetical state of injury and hypothermia on Ohlson Mountain Road, but mobilizing to practice the steps of an efficient search and rescue makes our team all the more prepared to handle a real backcountry emergency.
If you’d like to join KBAYSAR, follow the link on the Friends of Kachemak Bay State Park’s website. We welcome anyone with rescue skills and enthusiasm for wilderness and for saving lives.
Got leads for other outdoor stories? You can contact the author through her website: libbybbushell.com.
Libby B Bushell is a local author and wildlife guide. She spends summers in Katmai with the bears, and winters (the austral summer) in Antarctica with the emperor penguins. She is the founder of HoWL and is passionate about helping people get outside. It’s better out there!
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