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Lost on the Missile Rangeby Kent C. Condie
It had been a cold night in our field vehicle. We had not come prepared to spend the night, so despite the fact the weather was good in October we were unprepared for the cold. We parked on top of one of the river terraces so we had a view of front of the mountains, and if Dave appeared we should surely be able to see him. Neither Tony nor I got much sleep that night, being concerned about Dave’s whereabouts and safety. As the sun came over the Sacramento Mountains to the east, we started the car and drove down the four-wheel drive road towards the main highway. It was then we heard the helicopter. It was a small military chopper flying low from the south, generally along the main highway leading north from White Sands Military Headquarters. As we pulled out on to the main highway, the chopper made a large circle and landed on the highway. Out climbed an Air Force officer in full dress uniform, ducking the chopper blades as he made his way toward our vehicle. As we stepped out of the car, the officer yelled, “Have you found him yet?” No, we had not found him.
After what seemed to be an endless amount of paper work, the Missile Range finally approved our project, provided we had a government security officer with us at all times. We decided that we would spend one day a week during the fall and spring in the field, since these were the only times of the year it was not too hot or too cold. Each time we entered the Missile Range, we had to meet our military escort at Stallion Site, the northern entrance to the Missile Range. Our escort, Roberto, was a Spanish-American, and he came dressed in full uniform with nice shiny black boots. We intended to spend most of the day climbing over rocks and arroyos, something that didn’t particularly appeal to Roberto. So we decided to make traverses along the front of the San Andres Mountains, mapping the Precambrian basement rocks. Roberto was very happy to let us off at one point in the morning and pick us up later in the day at a predetermined location at the end of our traverse. In fact, the government unknowingly provided us with a free field assistant!
During the latter part of the summer, we had a post-doctoral research fellow from Miami University join us in the field. He was going to collect granite samples for Rb-Sr radiometric dating to complement our field and geochemical studies. We shall call him Dave. Dave arrived in Socorro in late September in a beat-up jalopy with large dog. He had had very little field experience, but assured us he could get along fine. So to cover more territory in the field with the limited amount of time allotted to us by the Missile Range to complete the field work, we decided to break up and cover three traverses each field day, instead of one. This was no problem for Tony Budding and me, both of whom had been doing field work in the Southwest deserts for many years. However, this was Dave’s first encounter with the desert.
It was a warm, clear Friday in early October 1973, when the four of us pulled up to a large arroyo in the southern San Andres Mountains. I would take the first traverse, Tony the second, and Dave the third, each about 8 miles in length. Roberto would let each of us off at the start of our respective traverses, and then pick us each up at a specified time later in the day. Each of us had our lunch and plenty of water for the day. I met Roberto about 4 PM at our pre-determined meeting place and then we moved on to pick Tony up at about 4:30. From there, we drove back out to the highway and then south to the dirt road that would lead us to the arroyo in which we would meet Dave at 5 PM. We arrived a little early, and thus began to look at some of the rocks in the vicinity. Come 5:30 and Dave had not yet appeared. Well, perhaps he had miscalculated how long it would take him, and he was running late. Roberto called in the White Sands security office and indicated we were running late. He was not really unhappy about this, since he would be paid overtime.
By 6 PM, Dave still had not showed and we were beginning to be concerned. Both Tony and I had White Sands call our wives and let them know we were running late. By 7 PM the sun had set and it was beginning to get dark. What should we do? Perhaps we should start looking for Dave, but our chances of finding him in the dark were small. We did wander back along his traverse for a ways, calling out his name. Nothing! Roberto now called his office indicating that Dave had not showed up, and soon after the Missile Range security office officially listed him as missing.
We were soon joined by a group of military police who began to search in the immediate area where we thought he should be. Surely, if one is lost, we would expect him to move to high ground and build a fire. The Missile Range had by now contacted the Las Cruces Search and Rescue team, and they were gathering their group together and heading for White Sands. It was after midnight when search and rescue arrived. They had first aid equipment, ropes, high-powered flashlights and numerous other items for emergency rescue. They lined up and began a major sweep along the mountain front where Dave was supposed to have traversed. Tony and I stayed at the vehicle with Roberto, who had now transferred to a military jeep, and was carrying on radio conversations with the Headquarters. We could see the line of lights of the rescue team as they faded into the distance. Surely, they would find Dave.
It seems to me someone sent some sandwiches out from the Headquarters during the long night. In any case, the temperature dropped to close to freezing as it does in the desert in the fall. This gave us greater concern for Dave’s safety since he did not even have a coat with him. It was very cold even in our field vehicle, and we still had a long night ahead. The vehicles that brought the search and rescue team left and moved north during the night, and that was the last we saw of the group. We heard later they had traversed the complete distance along which Dave should have come, yet found no evidence of his whereabouts.
Needless to say, we were both glad to see the sun come up over the Sacramento Mountains and begin to warm the vehicle. Where was Dave? Was he hurt? Did he fall someplace, was he unconscious? What should we do next? We then heard a small military aircraft flying close to the mountain front, looking in all the canyons.
After a short discussion, the military officer climbed back into his helicopter and took off. The helicopter started to search the arroyos and flew close to the mountain front, as if looking for Dave in the mountains. It was about then that we saw the military jeep rapidly approaching us from the south. It squealed to a halt near our vehicle and out climbed Roberto. It was obvious from the way Roberto was responding, that nothing so exciting as this had occurred at White Sands since he came on base. He ran over to us yelling, “They’ve found him. He showed up at the guard station 20 miles south of here.” We spoke to Dave on the two-way radio. He had spent the night in the bottom of an arroyo, some distance from where anyone expected him to be. Curled up with his dog and a small fire, he was probably warmer than we were. The next morning, instead of heading to high ground where he could be seen, he continued down the arroyo to the main highway, where he was picked up by a patrol vehicle and taken to south gate. All is well that ends well. Nonetheless, I think we all learned a lesson from this experience.
Kent C. Condie Department of Earth and Environmental Science New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology Socorro, NM 87801
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It began the previous year, in 1972, when I received some funds to study the Precambrian rocks in southern New Mexico. Very little was known about these rocks at the time. I was going to focus on the granites, especially those exposed beneath the Cambrian-Ordovician unconformity in the San Andres Mountains between Socorro and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Because most of the study area was on the White Sands Missile Range, we had to obtain special permission to work in the area. Tony Budding, also on the faculty in the Geosciences Department at New Mexico Tech, was going to help with the field work and petrographic description of the rocks.
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