Ex-Marine’s Nature Walk With Kids Leads To Lifesaving Race Against Time
When somebody updates their resumé, it's natural for them to reflect on their last job and think about how the skills they learned can apply to other situations. Across America's various military branches, the training and experience that personnel gain can become invaluable to their other pursuits in life.
However, it's also true that nobody knows when their skills will come in handy. And it's hard to illustrate that better than with the story of one former marine who had just intended to take a peaceful nature walk. Yet, it's clear that he couldn't have picked a better time or place to take that walk.
The man who answered the call
According to The Santa Fe New Mexican, John Utsey works as the Director of Technology at the Santa Fe Prep private school in New Mexico's capital. But long before he joined their staff, he was part of the United States Marine Corps for six years.
During that time, Utsey worked as both a combat engineer and communications specialist. Those may not sound like front-line roles, but they still involve going through recruit training like everybody else. And even before he heard a sign of distress, he found that this stint came in handy.
A scenic hike
On August 15, 2020, Utsey took his then-12-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son on a hike through Santa Fe National Forest. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that by the time of their chance encounter, the family had been walking for about 12 or 13 miles.
That certainly makes for a substantial enough hike, so KRQE reported that they were wrapping it up by heading back down the Windsor Trail toward the Santa Fe Baldy. At first, this return had a minor setback.
The daughter moved a little too far ahead
Utsey's daughter had been taking point in their hike so when the mood struck her, there was nothing stopping her from charging ahead. Unfortunately, this was a problem for the dad because her sprint had taken her out of his sight.
As Utsey told KRQE, "I called her name, and she didn't call back to me." This led him to try again, this time in the booming tone he would have used as a marine. If he didn't have her attention before, he had it then.
An unexpected response
Once Utsey used his marine voice, his daughter yelled back to him. And from the direction of her voice, he could tell that he didn't have to worry. As he put it, "I couldn't see her, but she had gone the right way."
At least, he didn't think he had to worry until a couple of seconds later. That's when he suddenly heard another voice call out. This one belonged to a man. And it came from strangely far off the trail. As Utsey told the CBC, "And I yelled back, you know, 'Are you OK?'"
The man was far from OK
According to The Santa Fe New Mexican, something about this situation bothered Utsey enough that he and his kids trudged off the trail and, through some brush, called for the man all the way to get a fix on his location.
Since the man was still able to respond, they followed his voice 600 yards off the trail to a position a couple of miles off from the closest trailhead. "We got to where we could see him in a clearing," Utsey said about the man he found lying on the ground.
He was in a bad way
After the family navigated the steep hillside and made contact with the man, he told them that he had been stranded and incapacitated in the forest for 14 days. And based on the way he talked and looked, Utsey did not find that hard to believe.
As the ex-marine told KRQE, "He was lying beside a creek–his legs didn't–he couldn’t stand, he couldn’t move; he was delirious. So he wasn’t making much sense." It was definitely the mark of someone who had been stranded for a while.
Utsey was worried by how the man looked
Although the lost hiker's clear state of delirium was a concern, the real danger could be seen all over his face and body. Although the man had shown a lot of strength to make it that far, that strength was clearly running out.
As Utsey further described to KRQE, once he got a good look at him, "His lips were all chapped to the point they were bleeding. His tongue was swollen; he was super gaunt and skinny. I was like, 'this guy really needs help.'"
A voice even he could hear
Speaking to The Santa Fe New Mexican, Utsey's daughter Jocelyn noted that her family was far from the only hikers walking the trail that day. However, she got the impression that they were the first voices the missing hiker had heard in days.
In particular, she was sure that nobody had said anything as loud or booming as her father did when he called down the trail for her. As she put it to the newspaper, "We're naturally loud people."
It was hard to determine the next move
Utsey explained to the CBC that considering how treacherous the terrain was and how long his family had already been hiking, they weren't confident that they could carry the man back to safety themselves. Instead, they started by checking their GPS coordinates.
Then, as The Santa Fe New Mexican reported, they gave him sports drinks, water, trail mix, and protein bars to sustain him. Utsey's son Jasper recalled the hiker saying, "Thank you, young man" when he offered his provisions. "He was very polite," the child said.
They needed backup
Although leaving the man there was a difficult decision; the Utseys had to depart so they could walk for another three miles to the trailhead. According to KRQE, this was the first place they could secure sufficient cell phone service to call 911.
Before the hour was out, Santa Fe firefighters had arrived on the scene. After Utsey gave them the hiker's coordinates, search and rescue teams headed out. Thinking that his role in the matter was complete, he and his children headed home.
A will to survive
As Utsey would later learn, the man had gotten lost on a hike on August 3 but wasn't able to find his way out due to hurting his back. This is partially why he wasn't able to get up when Utsey found him. He was also wearing layers, which is likely why he was able to survive the area's cold nights for over two weeks.
As Captain Nathan Garcia of the Santa Fe Fire Department told The Santa Fe New Mexican, "He probably slept through most of the days because it was warm enough to sleep and shivered through most of the nights." But while the man wasn't able to move very much, he made his mobility count.
A lifesaving creek
Naturally, nobody is able to survive for 14 days without water. But while the man obviously appreciated the hydration the Utseys gave him, he had found at least a limited way to secure some sustenance.
Although he wasn't in a position to explain this at the time, Garcia had a theory for how the man survived. In his words, "He probably had to roll over to drink water from the creek and then roll back to get away from the cold because he was so weak."
The search hits a snag
As Garcia told The Santa Fe New Mexican, the team searched up and down that very creek, calling for the man as they went. But he said, "We searched as best as we could and called out. We did not get any type of response. I don't know if we didn't hear him or he didn't hear us."
When they canvassed other hikers in the area, they heard that nobody else had seen or heard any trace of the lost casualty either. It was a bad sign for how their search would go from there.
It seemed hopeless
The search and rescue teams would continue looking for eight hours but found no trace of the missing hiker. Despite the coordinates and the breadth of their search, they never came across the specific hillside that the Utseys had discovered.
And so, they called the search off at 10 pm that Saturday night. As Garcia told KRQE, "It was a little bit difficult to have to call off the search and rescue efforts." However, this didn't necessarily mean the man was doomed.
Utsey couldn't believe it
Later that night, Utsey answered a phone call from the New Mexico state police asking for more details about the hiker's location. It was the last call he was expecting to get, and what it seemed to imply didn't make any sense to him.
As he told The Santa Fe New Mexican, he wondered if this meant the man had somehow healed and gathered enough strength to get out of the area under his own power. But as he said, "Then I thought, that guy was in such rough shape I can't believe he left."
Utsey had been in the man's shoes
While ruminating on the man's situation, Utsey thought back about 30 years to when he was a member of the ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) in college. During this period, he took part in a crew hike that brought him into the Colorado wilderness.
It was there he became ill with a combination of conditions that are serious enough in civilization but are life-threatening when experienced out in the wilderness. The mountainous area they were traversing was high enough to give him elevation sickness, but he also caught pneumonia.
There was a hero for him
However, that ROTC crew had an experienced chaperone. He was Major George Franklin, a retired marine officer. His response to the situation was swift and decisive and was borne from the immense luck that other people who could help happened to be in the area.
As Utsey recalled to The Santa Fe New Mexican, Franklin bolted across a valley and speedily climbed a ridge to flag down two men who were riding pack horses. He then convinced them to take Utsey to safety on horseback. In Utsey's words, "I truly believe I would not have made it out of there without Maj. George Franklin. I guess I feel I owe something back."
Back into the fray
Although he was exhausted and aching after his long hike, Utsey couldn't get the man out of his mind. As he told the CBC, he downed some ibuprofen and got ready the next morning.
He also addressed this moment on KRQE, saying, "So, I'm laying there like, this guy is still in the mountains. So, at 9 o'clock Sunday morning, I get in and put my hiking boots back on and hike back, and he was exactly where I left him."
A bizarre set of circumstances
Utsey expressed how baffled he was to the CBC that an eight-hour search hadn't managed to uncover the hiker's location. Indeed, that made it hard not to doubt himself as well, hesaid, "I half didn't expect to find him. I got back there and, you know, walked right up — and he was exactly in the same spot."
After he found the man again, he asked about the calls firefighters had made while they were combing through the area. The hiker told him that he hadn't heard anything, which led Utsey to believe he had lost consciousness during the search.
A change in tactics
As he did before, Utsey gave the man some water and food, having packed some beef jerky this time. And in another move that he had made during the previous day, the former marine told him that he would get help.
However, Utsey's plan was a little different this time. As The Santa Fe New Mexican reported, he specifically told the man that he would be back this help. Since he clearly knew where the hiker was, there was no chance that rescuers would be able to miss him this time around.
A longer wait than expected
After traveling to the trailhead he had reached before, Utsey called 911 again just before noon. However, he would soon discover that the response wouldn't be as swift as it had been the previous day.
Instead, Utsey found himself waiting about four hours before any crews arrived. But once they did, he led two separate groups of them back to where he reunited with the man. Thankfully, this meant that professional help had finally reached the man after at least 15 days of peril.
Some much-needed warmth
Although the man was in rough shape in many ways, one of the most immediate concerns was how cold he was. In a Facebook post in the aftermath of the rescue, Santa Fe firefighters described his body temperature as "dangerously low."
The man had told Utsey that he couldn't sleep at night during his experience due to the bitter cold, which was likely a factor for why he wasn't able to hear the search and rescue team during the previous day. Naturally, rescuers built a fire for him.
How cold was it while he was out there?
Although it was summer at the time, that doesn't make as much of a difference as it may seem among the kind of topography that the hiker was stranded in. Although NBC News noted that the daily high temperatures reached 89 degrees Fahrenheit in Santa Fe at the time, it was a very different story on that mountainous trail.
For that spot in the mountains, winter-like temperatures of about 30 degrees aren't unusual at night. As Assistant Chief Brian Moya of the Santa Fe Fire Department told the outlet, "Where he was, about 12,000 feet, 10,000 feet, so he was way above. So it gets really cold up there, even in the summertime."
The man's story had been rougher than Utsey thought
Based on the details of the Santa Fe Fire Department's post, the search and rescue teams were able to get more details about what happened to the man after they gave him some more food and water to keep his strength up.
He had already been living with chronic back pain by the time things started to go wrong for him. So when he injured his back after getting lost, it was excruciating enough to incapacitate him completely. Worse yet, it turned out he had gotten lost in the first place because somebody stole his gear.
A team effort
Once the fire department rescue teams had established contact, they were joined by personnel from other organizations they would credit in their Facebook post. According to The Santa Fe New Mexican, these included the New Mexico State Police, Santa Fe Search And Rescue, Los Alamos Search And Rescue, and Atalaya Search and Rescue.
Of course, none of them would have been in a position to do anything if Utsey hadn't returned and showed them his exact location. Garcia confirmed this, saying, "If Mr. Utsey had not found him, we might never have known he was there."
Finally brought to safety
After the rescue teams had cared for him and warmed him up, they worked together to bring him up from his treacherous position and carried him out of the forest entirely. Of course, since it wasn't easy to reach this place at the best of times, that took some doing.
Considering how long the lost hiker had already been lying there, by the time it was possible to mount a rescue, it was miraculous that he was able to hold on. According to the CBC, the whole rescue process since Utsey called 911 the second time took about nine hours.
Some impressive fortitude
When Garcia thought back on how resilient the man had been even to survive long enough to hear Utsey's call, he told KRQE, "He had the will to survive for sure."
After all, not only did the man go for well over a week without any food whatsoever, but the only thing he had with him by that point was his filtering water bottle. That's how he was able to drink from the creek without falling in or making himself sicker.
Just an unfortunate set of circumstances
Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the man's situation is that none of it occurred through any fault of his own. He wasn't unprepared, inexperienced, or reckless. He was simply unlucky.
According to KRQE, firefighters said the man was an experienced hiker. But that can only mean so much when his equipment gets stolen, his back gets injured, and he becomes so turned around that he ends up 600 yards off the trail in a spot that even rescuers searching for eight hours can't find.
How long could he have held out?
Considering how much time each aspect of the man's rescue took, both Utsey and Garcia were forced to consider how easily the circumstances could have aligned to make them both too late. Although the man's luck before his discovery was awful, it improved dramatically just in time.
If Utsey hadn't been within earshot when he had called for his daughter, and especially if he hadn't headed back the next day, the hiker's story would've ended much differently. As Utsey told KRQE, "I'm not sure he had more than a day or two left."
They had never seen this before
Garcia was even less optimistic about the man's chances if he had been left to lie any longer. And his more grim prediction came from cold, hard experience. Indeed, even the success they had came across as a complete anomaly to him.
Given the length of time he had been incapacitated, Garcia would have had plenty of reason to dread the situation before he had even arrived on the scene. As he said to KRQE, "Never had we found somebody who had been out for that long."
Every moment counted
With that in mind, it was difficult for Garcia even to guess how much longer he could have lasted. After all, that harrowing statement makes it clear that, judging by his experiences, the man shouldn't have been able to last as long as he did.
For that reason, all he could add to that statement was, "The human body can do some amazing things sometimes, but I don't think he had very much left in him. He seemed kind of at the end when we did actually encounter him."
On his way to recovery
After the man was rescued, he was brought to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in Santa Fe. By the time reports came out about the situation, he was already in the process of recovering.
Aside from the detail that the lost hiker was over 50, no identifying information about him was released. Authorities did not identify him, and hospital spokesman Arturo Delgado told The Santa Fe New Mexican that it's their policy not to give out information about their patients.
Some proud children
Jasper told The Santa Fe New Mexican that he's proud of Utsey's heroic actions. And considering how he pictured this story's reception among his peers, he was clearly amazed at what he witnessed during that tense Saturday afternoon.
By that, he meant that since school started for him soon after the incident occurred, he figured he had quite the story to tell all of his classmates on his first day back. But as he expressed to the newspaper, "Yeah, they'll never believe it."
They should be proud of themselves too
But while Utsey's handling of the situation was certainly admirable, that's not to say that his children don't have their own reasons to look back on the situation with their heads held high. While other children may have stood back, they involved themselves in helping the man as well.
As KRQE reported, they had already undergone a significant hike by that point but followed their father down the steep hillside because they also wanted to help find the hiker in need. And they were just as generous with their supplies as he had been.
A humble response
Although both the Santa Fe Fire Department and Utsey's kids praised him for his heroism, the ex-marine hasn't been one to talk up his achievements. Instead, he's just marveled at how close of a call that was and how well his intuition guided him.
Above all else, Utsey told the CBC that he was grateful that he had made the decision to return to the scene rather than assume that the first search and rescue team had missed the man's location for a happier reason.
A lingering question
After the Santa Fe Fire Department addressed the incident in their post, there was one aspect of this story that was the subject of some confusion. Some commenters wondered how the first team could have missed the hiker after eight hours of searching.
Although that might normally sound like the kind of armchair analysis that has irritated people on the internet since its inception, the fact the fire department had received his coordinates from Utsey seemed to throw these commenters off.
It made sense to Utsey
However, Utsey is not one of these people. No matter how popular the trail was, how many people were there on Saturday, or how diligently rescuers looked for him, he understood how the hiker he had saved was able to elude everyone's sight.
As he saw it, even GPS coordinates are only going to be so useful in an area as vast and uneven as where the crews were searching. As he told the CBC, "I heard one of the firefighters describe it as a needle in a haystack. And it really, really is. I mean, it's really rough country."
It's unclear if they ever met again
According to the CBC, Utsey hadn't been in contact with the man while he was in the hospital. And if they had ever reunited after he was released, that information isn't publicly known either.
This story was so emotionally resonant and full of mind-boggling coincidences that it attracted widespread media coverage soon after it happened. However, since those reports largely considered the matter settled by the time the man was hospitalized, there haven't been any follow-ups in the years since.
Nobody involved will forget this one
But even if the man never sees Utsey or his family again, they'll likely remember each other forever after experiencing this tense chapter in their lives together. For him, they'll be the dedicated family that went out of their way to ensure his safety.
Naturally, that's especially true in Utsey's case. After all, who would have expected his direct involvement again after he had already summoned emergency services? And for the Utseys, he'll be the resilient, well-mannered man who never abandoned hope for survival, even in the most demoralizing of circumstances.
There's no such thing as worthless knowledge
Considering that Utsey was a communications specialist during his time in the Marines, it's not exactly hard to imagine how many transferable skills he's been able to apply to his role as Santa Fe Prep's Director of Technology.
However, that doesn't make it any easier to predict when skills that have nothing to do with a person's job will become a valuable part of their lives. If Utsey's encounter illustrates anything, it's how suddenly those skills can make all the difference in the world under the right circumstances.
