Fourth-year College student Katie Bolcar is used to leading search and rescue groups through the woods. She hikes ahead alone, the burly middle-aged loggers in the group forging after her with walking sticks. Bolcar decides it is difficult leading a group of older men, telling them what to do and where to go. She worries that some of the men are splitting from the group to try to usurp the lead from their comparatively younger guide. But she knows there is still one goal binding the group together - finding a missing little girl.
Bolcar is a member of the Blue Ridge Mountain Rescue Group, an organization on Grounds that trains students to aid in wilderness search and rescue operations in the Mid-Atlantic region. The group falls under the jurisdiction of the Appalachian Search and Rescue Conference and is the largest in the area, with over 125 active members.
Since the beginning of the school year, the BRMRG has helped conduct 17 searches for people, most of whom were found alive.
In Nelson County, Feb. 20, the group received a call at its dispatch station at approximately 7:30 a.m. The call alerted them to eight-year-old Jackie Holden's disappearance. Within a few hours, members arrived at a heavily wooded area at the foot of Ball Mountain, where Holden had been missing from her home for about 12 hours.
One of the first members to arrive at the site in Nelson County was Justin Reich, a first-year Graduate Arts and Sciences student. Reich is an incident commander, which is the highest rank one can receive in the BRMRG.
"There were a ton of people there already when we arrived. I'd say [there was] about 50 to 75 volunteers," Reich said.
He said his first job on the scene was to help coordinate the search. He worked with emergency technicians and volunteers to map out a strategy.
"They gave us this kind of bus to work in that was rigged as an office where we could get things together," he explained.
Reich then divided what he referred to as "hasty tasks," or group search tasks, among volunteers.
After dispatching the volunteers, Reich compiled background information on the little girl to help the search operation.
"We found out she had never wandered away before and that she had four dogs with her that were likely to stay close and not run off," he said.
Reich spent about 14 hours of his 20-hour shift conducting this background research before heading out to track footprints in the woods. He went home to rest only after being awake for more than 30 hours.
Reich said the most surprising element of the search was the scale of the operation. The entire rescue mission included four to five dog groups, all the local fire departments, the police, the Red Cross and Civil Air Patrol.
"These people from a local power company even got let out of work for the day to help with the search," Reich said.
Bolcar's role in the search also spanned several days. It included work in the field and at the BRMRG dispatch station in the basement of Faculty Housing Apartments.
"I live with the person who got the alert on her pager, so I knew right away," Bolcar said.
Bolcar worked as a dispatcher for most of the Sunday before arriving at the search that evening.
"I led a group of local volunteers, who were amazing. We searched in a drainage site that night," she recalled.
Bolcar did not return to the search until Tuesday.
"I led a group of these guys. They were all from a logging company about an hour away from the site. Their boss had heard about the missing girl and told all his workers to take off work, so they could come help out," she said.
Bolcar led her group through an area where there was a lot of new-forest growth and brambles, making the trek difficult.
But Bolcar smiled when recalling her experience with the group. She said the men were difficult to deal with at first because of the age difference, although they surprised her in the end.
"Most of the guys had walking sticks. At the end of the search, one of the guys carved my name in a walking stick and gave it to me," Bolcar said.
She said she was touched that the group came to respect her leadership and judgment.
Bolcar added that the worst part of the search came at the end, when rescuers found Holden dead after two days of searching. According to the medical examiner's report, Holden froze to death. She had been wearing only a thin shirt in below-freezing temperatures.
"The county was really shaken up. People kept asking themselves why it should happen to her. But I felt that we helped bring a lot of closure to the situation," Reich said.
But the search did not come full circle for first-year College student Lia Clattenburg, another BRMRG member who happened to arrive at the site for the first time only a few minutes after the crew found the body. Rather than helping with the search, Clattenburg spent six hours packing up the search equipment and debriefing volunteers.
"When I got home I couldn't sleep because I still wasn't happy, even though I went out to help," she said.
Though the conclusion to the search was not a happy one, Clattenburg and the rest of the group remain optimistic and enthusiastic about their jobs.
"I was fraught with anxiety the whole time," Clattenburg said. "Before you go out, it's easy not to go. But once you're involved in helping someone in a way you didn't know you could, you can't pull yourself away," she said.
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