U.S. Coast Guard rescuers lifted a blind man and his service dog up from the Rogue River National Recreation Trail and onto a helicopter this week after he was overcome by heat and spent at least one night waiting for help, officials said.
The 55-year-old man, whose name hasn’t been released, was hiking with a friend in Josephine County on Saturday when he started showing signs of heat exhaustion, according to the Coast Guard. The man couldn’t walk anymore and there was no cell service in the area, so the friend left him at a campsite with a tent and some food and water and went to get help, reaching authorities by phone Sunday.
Coast Guard Commander Jay Kircher received a call around 5 p.m. Sunday from the state’s search-and-rescue coordinator asking for a helicopter to pluck a stranded man off of the trail. As they discussed options and tried to make a plan they learned that the friend wasn’t completely sure about the man’s location.
Instead of flying out right away, they coordinated with the Josephine County Sheriff’s Office and the Oregon Department of Emergency Management to have a deputy and a Bureau of Land Management ranger walk the trail the following morning, find the man and then relay his precise location to the Coast Guard via a satellite phone, Kircher told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
The deputy and the ranger found the man around 9 a.m. Monday, and they sent the Coast Guard their coordinates. A four-man unit departed from North Bend around 10 a.m. and got there less than half-an-hour later, Kircher said.
The flight mechanic dropped Petty Officer 1st Class Jesse Jacobsen and a rescue basket down about 30 yards to the man, then, after the man and his dog were secured in the basket, lifted the man to the helicopter. The man had recovered sufficiently from the prior day’s heat exhaustion that he didn’t need to go directly to a hospital, Kircher said, so the crew dropped the man off at the Grants Pass Airport.
For Kircher, perhaps the most memorable moment involved watching the man’s dog being pulled into the helicopter.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I just saw this dog’s head just swing by,” Kircher said. “It was kind of a fun sight. Something that I’ve never experienced.”
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