Injured hiker had to spend night at Snow Canyon State Park while K-9, helicopters searched

Washington County Search and Rescue crews say a missing hiker had to spend the night in Snow Canyon State Park over the weekend after he became separated from his wife and fell, marking the third major search and rescue in Snow Canyon in 2020.

The 57-year-old man and his wife were hiking an hour before dark on Saturday in the Petrified Dunes area, according to officials. The man allegedly took one fork in the trail while she took another, telling him to be back in a half-hour — but he never returned.

Washington County Sheriff’s Sgt. Darrell Cashin, the liaison of the SAR team, said his 13 rescuers arrived at 7 o’clock Saturday night and methodically searched several trails and canyons cross country, calling out his name.

Temperatures would drop to the low 30s overnight, so Cashin said he called a Life Flight helicopter along with a K-9 trained to pick up the man’s scent. Still, no one could find him.

“He had no food, no water, no cell phone, no light, had no way of finding his way around,” Cashin said. “He apparently likes to do a lot of scrambling over rocks and a lot of climbing, but he had no gear for that either, so we were concerned that maybe he was hurt or injured somewhere.”

After nearly four hours of searching and exhausting every resource, first responders called off their search around 11 p.m. until daylight. In the meantime, Cashin said he requested a chopper from the Utah Highway Patrol to come down from Salt Lake City, hoping to locate him with thermal infrared imaging, which would arrive in the morning.

Around 8 a.m. Sunday, just as Sgt. Cashin said he was looking for a landing zone for the helicopter, the missing hiker walked out of the Lower Galoot trailhead. He said he’d fallen, hit his head, and hurt his shoulder, so he laid down and slept until the next morning, according to deputies. His wife reportedly slept in a car in Snow Canyon all night.

“Once you go off-trail, trying to find your way around out here without any way of seeing is really dangerous,” Cashin said. “We were starting to feel like this one wasn’t going to turn out well, but luckily it did.”

Story provided by our news partners at ABC 4 News.