CAMPTON, Ky. — The search for a missing Ironton man came to end in the best possible way on Saturday; Scott Hern was found alive after 14 days in the rugged woods of the Daniel Boone National Forest.
“It’s a miracle,” said John May, the chief of the Wolfe County Search & Rescue team that was tasked with finding Hern after his car was found on July 13 in a parking lot on Highway 715 near the Red River Gorge, about two hours away from Ironton.
Hern had been reported missing to the Ironton Police Department on July 6 by his family after they hadn’t heard from him since the Fourth of July.
On July 13, Hern’s car was found, Wolfe County search teams immediately started looking for him in the primarily in the area of the Sal Branch waterfall and then around Bell Falls waterfalls and other areas after Hern’s family found his diary that described his searches for waterfalls in the Daniel Boone National Forest.
May said that as the search continued, hope was dwindling that he was still alive since he had been in the woods for two weeks.
“If you look at the timeline, the last time he was seen or heard of was on July 6 and his vehicle had not been moved and as the days ticked by, hope of finding him alive was fading,” May said. “Saturday was our big push, if we hadn’t found him, we would have been scaling our operations back.”
The search effort wouldn’t have ended, but it would have been fewer people looking since the search teams are made up of volunteers and they all had work and family obligations to attend to.
But Saturday, Hern was found off marked trail after several days of intensive search by scores of people and canines in the dense forest where in many places that had to crawl through the brush to search.
May said a team went beyond Bell Falls and were calling his name when they heard a cry for help.
“Scott yelled out for help, he was alert enough to do that or otherwise they wouldn’t have found him,” May said. “He was below a cliff line and he wasn’t easy to spot.”
May said that Hern was in surprisingly good shape after being out in the woods for so long.
“Besides being dehydrated and his feet being a mess, all in all, he was in good shape. He was alert, he was talking. I shook his hand before we had the helicopter hoist him out of there,” May said. “He was hurting, but he was in pretty good spirits. It was just a miracle.”
The rescue team had to cut down several trees by a nearby creek to create an area for the Kentucky State Police helicopter to lower a basket to get Hern out of there since there was no way he could walk out and it was too overgrown teams to be able to carry him out.
Hern was then transported to a hospital for a checkup.
“It was a miracle, absolutely,” May said. “People don’t live that long in the back country without food and water.”
May said that there were a lot of groups from around the region that came to help in the search for Hern.
And amongst the dogs that were brought in was a team specially trained to search for dead bodies.
“Honestly, we were not expecting to find a live person,” May said. “So, we are tickled for him and his family. We are very happy to find him alive.”
May said the family wasn’t aware of Hern’s interest in hiking to waterfalls until they read through his diary. He had purchased hiking boots and other gear including a GPS watch, which may not have been of much use since getting a signal in the forest is spotty.
“He had been visiting the gorge over the past month and a half or so visiting these waterfalls,” May said.
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