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By Nicholas M. Horrock
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Last Tuesday, with the unusual spring warmth spreading over the Shenandoah National Park, a Rockville Md., school brought 80 youngsters from the third to ninth grade to Old Rag Mountain for a hike.
Old Rag is one of the highest peaks in the Blue Ridge mountains at 3,291 feet and a popular hike winter, spring, fall and summer.
The school divided the children into four groups of 20 youngsters, each with teachers, and hiked to the top for lunch. About 2:30 p.m., the group started down to the Nethers’ parking area where they’d left the school buses, but when they got there, they found they had only 79 children.
The teachers scrambled back up part of the trail, but could not find the 11-year-old missing boy. The school sent one bus back and from that bus a teacher called the Park Rangers on a cell phone. This delayed the report because the teacher couldn’t get cell coverage until the bus was near Warrenton, about 5:20 p.m.
As Deputy Park Ranger Clayton F. Jordan said in an interview Wednesday, it was “a major search.”
Lucky for the youngster, the Shenandoah National Park rangers working with a network of Virginia coordinated volunteers and local communities has, Jordan claims, some of the best search and rescue capabilities in the country. And though the young boy didn’t know it,
See RESCUES, Page A7
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