Scouts learn to stay put

RONAN — Cub Scouts from Pack 56 of Ronan and Charlo learned valuable lessons in wilderness survival from Project Kid Care founder Tara Carvey and members of the Lake County Search and Rescue team at their October monthly meeting last Wednesday night in Ronan.

Project Kid Care was originally a finger printing identification program founded in 2005 when eight-year-old Shasta Groney and her 9-year-old brother, Dillon, were kidnapped in Couer d’Alene, Idaho. Carvey said this tragic story hit especially close to home because the Groney children were members of her own extended family.

“That hit national news and I felt like ‘what can I do?’” she said. “I realized there was nothing set up here in our local area. We started out finger printing the kids, getting their current heights and weights, getting their photos in front of a blue background in case they ever needed to do computerized age progression, looking for face structure, hair color, eye color. We’ve gone to pre schools and done it at all different kinds of events, like Wal-Mart’s Safety Days and the baby fair. Now we even do DNA samples.”

When she founded Project Kid Care, Carvey said she ended up with a little bit more money than she needed and she wanted to donate a portion to the local search and rescue. Five years ago, there were only five active members of Lake County’s search and rescue division, a number that has increased tenfold in recent years.

“We linked to search and rescue because we wanted to start doing preventative care for if a child gets lost,” Carvey said. “Preventative care is important too, teaching people what to do — educating people and starting with our youth.”

Carvey and members of the Lake County Search and Rescue team expanded the program to incorporate teachings from the national “Hug a Tree” program, whose motto is to hug a tree once you know you are lost. One of the greatest fears a person of any age can have is being alone, the project’s website says. Hugging a tree or other stationary object calms the child down and prevents panic. By staying put, the child can be tracked by search and rescue officials, found more quickly and can’t be injured in a fall.

Christie Rhine, now secretary for LCSAR, took that idea one step further and designed a program to teach even three and four-year-old kids what to do if they become lost, especially in the outdoors.

Carvey, a Cub Scout master, realized early on that one of the best outlets for her program’s teaching would be the scouts.

“A big portion of Cub Scouts is doing outdoor stuff,” she said. “Here we are taking kids out into the wilderness, so we thought that felt like a natural group to go to.”

Even with careful leaders, children can be easily distracted and sometimes wander off trail without realizing it. Oftentimes, children who are lost don’t know that if they sit down and stay put, most likely, someone will find them. Some are afraid of strangers and people in uniform and don’t respond to yells. Some have actually hidden from searchers they knew were looking for them because they feared getting in trouble, Rhine said.

“You’re not going to get in trouble,” she said to the scouts. “We might look big and scary, but we want to find you and your moms and dads want to find you.”

Before the presentation, search and rescue members footprinted each scout on a piece of aluminum paper. Then, LCSAR trackers matched each child’s shoe to the aluminum paper print. This simple five-minute exercise can cut down the time of a search for a lost child by several hours because trained trackers can separate that one footprint from all the others in the area and quickly determine the direction of travel.

Each scout went home with his own wilderness survival kit provided by search and rescue. Kits contained a plastic bag, glow stick, food, water, rope and whistle.

“We wanted to find stuff that you already have in your house to use as a survival kit,” Carvey said. “You don’t have to go to the store and buy these expensive survival kits, Boy Scouts are thrifty.”

By making a hole in the side of a kitchen trash bag and putting it on over the head, a child can stay warm and dry in an emergency. Scouts were taught to put the bags over their heads safely, keeping the plastic away from their mouths and therefore avoiding the risk of suffocation. Finally, Carvey distributed a whistle to each scout to wear around their wrists with a written pledge to be safe.

“Whistle packets are a huge safety thing that we’ve tied into that program,” Carvey said.

A whistle is louder than a child’s yell and requires less energy to use. The whistle never gets tired and it never loses its voice, Rhine said to the scouts.

“Christie and I were both shocked at how that particular group was so receptive to what we were teaching,” Carvey said. “Their questions were really smart and that’s pretty cool. It’s good to imbed some of those skills into them at that age.”

According to scouts Landers Smith and Julian Schippers, this was valuable information, as they’ve both been lost before, they said.

“I got lost in K-Mart,” scout Malachi Harris said.