Prayers were answered when two Sweet Home girls lost in the forest around Rooster Rock were found by members of the Linn County Search and Rescue Explorer Post early Sunday morning.
The girls, Sarah Rosa, 12, and Holly Richards, 11, were separated from their hiking companions at about 2 a.m. They were located sometime between 12:30 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. about a half mile from where they left the Rooster Rock trail.
Susie Burns, a Sunday School teacher at Community Chapel, took the girls hiking for the day with her nephew Conlan Stewart, 10. The girls help out in her Sunday School class.
Rooster Rock is accessed by two trails, one beginning at Trout Creek Campground and the Rooster near Fernview Campground. The group headed out at about 9:30 a.m. from the Rooster trailhead, on Highway 20 about 19 miles east of Sweet Home.
The Rooster trail is 2.6 miles long, Burns said. It’s shorter and steeper than the Trout Creek trail. The trail has a number of switchbacks as it climbs the mountain and “you can see a way to get to the trail up ahead. It’s inviting to kids to cut across to the next trail.”
The group had lunch at the top of Rooster Rock at about 11:30 a.m. and met three teenage boys riding horses.
After lunch, the group started down the trail, stopping at the junction of the two trails at about 2 p.m. Burns went on around the corner to take a restroom break. Her nephew came around the corner first, and they started to walk, but they didn’t hear the girls.
The trail is well-marked and worn, Burns said. It’s easy to follow, so she expected the girls were right behind her. She and Conland stopped and listened a couple of times then decided to wait for the girls to catch up.
“We had reason to think they might be taking a little while,” Burns said. They could have stopped for a snack or Sarah’s ankle may have been bothering her with the downhill climb.
“Conlan finally said, ‘Boy, girls really take a long time,'” Burns said. “That made me look at my watch and realize it had been half an hour.”
The two walked back up the trail a ways trying to figure out where the girls had gone. The riders were just coming down from Rooster Rock and told Burns the girls hadn’t gone back up the trail. That alarmed her, and she was afraid they may have taken the Trout Creek trail where they would find a strange parking lot.
“That was panic number one,” Burns said. She was concerned they would reach that parking lot, not find Burns’ car, which was miles away, and take a ride with someone else.
Burns and Conlan were about a mile from the Rooster trailhead, so they finished the walk. Burns left a sign at that point telling the girls to stay there if they got there. She drove to the Trout Creek trailhead, confident that was the trail they had taken. She waited a little, but they didn’t arrive. She left a sign at that trailhead as well and started traveling back and forth between them.
Hikers coming off the Rooster trail told her they hadn’t seen the girls. She didn’t talk to anyone using the Trout Creek trail to tell her if they had seen the girls.
She was able to reach her father and mother, Frank and Jo McCubbins, on her cell phone. They came up, each waiting at one of the trailheads, sometime after 5 p.m. Burns pushed as hard as she could to cover ground back up to the junction, blowing her whistle and shouting the girls’ names, between the two trailheads.
“I was really disappointed that they weren’t at that point where I had last seen them,” Burns said. She thought they might have gone back to that point.
She ran the rest of the way, downhill, to Trout Creek. As she traveled further down the trail, “for the first time, it entered my mind that they were not on the trail,” Burns said. “I did not ever think they were lost in the woods. I was totally naive to the fact that they would go into the bushes.”
They weren’t at the Trout Creek parking lot when she reached it.
“My legs went out from under me, and I just went hysterical,” Burns said. She knew there was no possible way the girls were on the trail. She doesn’t know how much time lapsed, but the next thing she felt were two arms around her, a voice praying. The voice and arms belonged to Holly’s mother, Wendy Richards.
“I should have been comforting her,” Burns said.
Meanwhile, Mr. McCubbins had called the Sheriff’s Office. By 6:30 p.m. the parking lot at Rooster was packed with emergency vehicles.
“I’m thinking, you only see this in the movies,” Burns said.
The deputy in charge was sensitive enough to know that the family needed to be doing something in the search, Burns said, and he gave everyone a job to do. Burns and the mothers searched sections of the trail. Soon the area was covered with people blowing whistles and shouting the girls’ names. Passersby stopped also stopped to see what was going on and to help.
The search continued until dark. Explorers were sent up the trail to spend the night. They were to blow whistles and shout for the girls throughout the night.
After talking with the rescuers, Burns and the family piled into a van to wait. They started praying. Within five minutes, Burns husband threw open the van door and said the searchers had heard something. They prayed more, that it wasn’t just an animal. Soon the door opened again with the announcement that the girls had been found, about 1:30 a.m.
“They were a half mile from one of the boys sleeping,” Burns said. He was hollering, and the girls heard him.
When the group had stopped, Sarah said, she pulled out a Gatorade bottle that had been leaking. She dropped it, and it rolled down the hillside away from the path. She and Holly went after the bottle. They decided to look for walking sticks because they were going downhill.
By this time, they were getting away from the trail and thought they spotted the trail below them, Holly said. “We thought that Susie would be, like, way ahead of us and she wasn’t going to stop.”
Thinking they needed to catch up, they started down the apparent shortcut rather than climbing uphill behind Burns. They found only a clearing and were much farther from the trail.
They continued on hoping to recapture the trail, crossing a couple of streams. They followed one creek until they could go no further through the brush and slippery banks. They kept hiking until they found a flat spot.
“We were really tired,” Sarah said, so they decided to sleep for a little while then try to find their way back. “Holly, an hour later, convinced me to look for the trail.”
“Now they know they’re lost,” Burns said. “They’re crying. They’re pretty scared.”
They tried to follow their tracks back, but “we didn’t remember exactly the route we took,” Sarah said. Their stomachs were hurting, Sarah’s especially, either because she was homesick or dehydrated. They stopped, and Holley ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Sarah need to sleep and “finally convinced Holly to lay down.”
That was about 8:30 p.m., Holly said. “I was trying to lay down. It looked like she was sleeping, but she was laying down with her eyes shut.”
Holly began worrying they wouldn’t get out.
“She’s like, ‘We need to go back,'” Sarah said. Holly told her she would go back and bring help after she found the trail. Sarah finally got her calmed down and convinced her to try to rest some more.
“I was trying to sleep, but I kept hearing voices in my head,” Holly said. She kept thinking she was hearing people calling her name. Eventually, the two cuddled up in Sarah’s sweatshirt with Holly’s coat over her legs.
They were half asleep until about midnight.
“We heard something,” Holly said. “I thought it was like a person yelling for help.”
When they realized it was someone calling their names, they hurried out of the tangled sweatshirt and started calling back. After guiding the rescue workers to them, they began the long hike back out of the woods.
They were excited, thinking that God had helped the rescuers find them.
“When we got down there, everybody was down there,” Sarah said.
They were announced to the rescue camp as “some happy, hungry campers up here with good attitudes,” Holly said.
At one point, “we thought maybe it’d be kind of cool to be missing,” Holly said.
That thought soon faded as they realized they really were missing, and the two “were scared,” Sarah said. They passed time with jokes and hiking.
The two have been friends, but “not close like we are now,” Sarah said. They were stuck with each other for the day and that left an impression on them.
The two have enjoyed the attention that’s come with their getting lost, but “even though you might be a TV star, don’t try to get lost,” Holly said.
The two learned one important lesson, “Don’t go off the trails.”
Sarah and Holly attend the sixth grade at Hawthorne Elementary School.
Burns said she won’t be taking anyone on hikes without making sure they know to stay on the trails or stay put if they do get lost. In any case, anyone with her will be carrying a whistle too.
Assisting in the search were the U.S. Forest Service and other volunteers. Arrangements were also being made to bring additional search teams in at first light Sunday.
The area is extremely steep with heavy timber, making a search difficult, Sheriff Dave Burright said.