74-year-old was lost in woods for 30 hours, officials said. Then he heard a rescue dog
.png "A 74-year-old man was lost in the woods of Maine for 30 hours before being rescued, state officials said.")
A man lost in the woods in Maine for over a day was located with the assistance of rescue dogs, state officials said.
The 74-year-old man, from Etna, a small town in central Maine, was hypothermic and dehydrated after spending almost 30 hours lost in the woods, the state’s Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife said in a Nov. 1 news release.
He went to check on hunting cameras in Etna on Sunday, Oct. 30, but became confused and wound up lost, according to WGME.
The Maine Warden Service and other officials carried out a rescue search with the help of Maine Search and Rescue Dogs, according to the release.
The dogs, which can be prepared to respond to a call within 15 minutes, are trained in “wilderness air scent search, tracking, water search and human remains detection,” according to the Maine Search and Rescue Dogs website.
The man “did not think he would have survived another night in the woods, but when he heard K9 Luna’s bell and felt the dog lick his face, he knew he was saved,” the department said in the release.
Upon being located, game wardens warmed him up and hydrated him, according to the release. He was then transported out of the woods in a Maine Forest Service helicopter.
More than 600,000 people go missing every year, and “tens of thousands of individuals remain missing for more than one year,” according to the Department of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System’s website.
This story was originally published November 1, 2022 at 6:53 PM with the headline "74-year-old was lost in woods for 30 hours, officials said. Then he heard a rescue dog."