A hiker’s nightmare becomes Search and Rescue’s midnight challenge

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

The alert went out on a rainy, windy night in the fall of 2020:

November 1, 5:41 p.m. We have an activation for a lost hiker with no communication.  Please respond to Kakiat Park parking lot for staging.

Information was spotty. The hiker had sent a picture of his location on Google Maps to a friend, along with a distressing message: I’m lost in Kakiat, and my phone’s about to die. I’m going to keep moving to prevent hypothermia.

The Google Maps picture didn’t show much — just water lines, elevations, and a dot indicating the hiker’s location. The tough job of trying to pinpoint that location belonged to Chaverim of Rockland’s Search and Rescue coordinator Moshe Jacobowitz, and he got to work downloading park terrain maps and searching for an area that matched the information on the picture.  And then he found it, sharing with his team: “The hiker’s last known location is somewhere between Raccoon Brook Hill Mountain and Cobus Mountain, not too far from the Pine Meadow Lake Trail.” The hiker was off-trail and moving. It was like looking for an ant on a pitch-black, rainy football field — but at least they had a starting point.

The amount of time that elapsed since the hiker texted allowed Jacobowitz, owner of a waste management company, to create a circumference within which the hiker would almost certainly be located, and five search and rescue teams were dispatched throughout that area.

For all the high tech equipment employed on the back end of a search, finding a person almost always comes down to a $3 whistle or vocal cords: whistle or scream, listen for a response, advance for two minutes, and repeat.

Nosson Kuznicki, a property management director for assisted living communities, and a founding member of Chaverim Search and Rescue (SAR), was there that night. “About 40 minutes in, my partner and I saw a light, far in the distance,” he recalls. “I immediately asked the command center if any other teams were nearby — maybe the light was theirs. They answered in the negative, and to confirm, I sent out our in-house whistle code — one long blast is responded to with a few short blasts in a row. The short blasts never came, but a minute later we heard one long whistle blast back. My heart started racing — someone was out there. We continued using whistles to find our way toward each other, and soon the light grew closer. We began calling his name, and then suddenly there he was, scrambling toward us. He grabbed us in a bear hug and repeated emotionally, ‘Wow, chasdei Hashem! Chasdei Hashem!’ And then he added, ‘I need to join you guys!’”

After the longest, darkest, and most terrifying two- and-a-half hours of his life, the hiker, himself a Hatzolah member, was found nearly a mile and a half from his last known location.