Deschutes SAR team rescues ill Pacific Crest Trail hiker
A Texas woman fell ill while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail west of Sisters on Tuesday, prompting a rescue effort that led to a helicopter flight to St. Charles Bend, Deschutes County sheriff’s deputies said.
The sheriff’s office was dispatched around 12:40 p.m. on a report of a hiker who had become unresponsive while hiking north on the PCT from the Dee Right Observatory on Highway 242 (the McKenzie Pass Highway), said Deputy Jim Whitcomb, assistant Search and Rescue coordinator.
Fellow hiker Amy Vandehey, 29, of Portland, said Michelle Releford, 49, of Garland, Texas, could not continue on the trail any longer and needed medical assistance as soon as possible, Whitcomb said.
GPS coordinates indicated Releford was about two miles north of Highway 242. But cellphone reception in the area is very poor, so Vandehey resorted to asking numerous hikers in the area to call 911 when they got phone reception.
Two SAR hasty team members were sent to the trail just west of the observatory and ran up the trail to assess the woman’s condition. Five other SAR members followed with a wheeled litter.
The hasty team arrived on scene about 2:45 p.m. and determined “Releford needed to be transported to a hospital as soon as possible for a potential life-threatening condition,” Whitcomb said in a news release.
A Life Flight helicopter was sent to the location and the closest landing zone was determined to be on Highway 242, just west of where SAR members were deployed on the trail.
Releford was brought by wheeled litter to the spot where SAR vehicles had staged, a process slowed by the narrowness of the trail through a section of lava, Whitcomb said. Releford was taken by a SAR vehicle to the Life Flight location and it then took the woman to St. Charles Bend.
