Quesnel Search and Rescue assisted Prince George in the search for the youth who had gone missing in the Hixon area on Saturday. (June 6)
Bob Zimmerman is the President of Quesnel Search and Rescue and also one of the Search Managers…
“We had a mutual aid request from Prince George Search and Rescue through the Emergency Management BC. They had been out searching themselves and they needed some assistance to take over for the next day if required. That was on Saturday evening.”
Zimmerman says five Quesnel members originally went up there…
“We went up there Saturday evening to get a bit of a lay of how the operation was, and we had three trackers in with our group and those three trackers, actually at the end of the evening, found some sign of where the person had walked.”
Zimmerman says that gave them a good starting point for the following morning…
“We sent our three trackers back up there on Sunday morning and because of the direction we saw the track was in we elected, the two groups Prince George and Quesnel, elected that we would set up a separate command post with the Quesnel and Williams Lake group north of Dunkley and Prince George would continue south of Hixon.”
Zimmerman says while en route the following morning they received some good news…
“We had eleven more people we were going to send up to Prince George to help on their side and we had ATV’ers and UTV’ers that were going to check the trails north of Dunkley.  We had just departed and were headed to the area when we go the word that the youth had walked back in the house with no shoes, no socks and soaking wet.”
Zimmerman says there was an added element of challenge in this case…
“When you’re dealing with autistic of course it ads extra challenge because you have to keep your search lines closer together in case the person doesn’t want to respond to you sort of thing.”
Besides Quesnel and Williams Lake, a number of other teams were poised to help on Sunday.
Zimmerman says searchers from Mackenzie and Fort St. John were going to help Prince George on the north side.