I was just settling down last night, in fact I had gotten one foot under the quilt when the pager went off. Knowing my kit was in order I got dressed and rushed off to find that we had an honest-to-God mountain search – a missing male walker in his 50’s had not returned from his walk around the Carreg Lem/Fan Hir area of the Black Mountains. So we kitted up and headed up – the weather had been horrendous that day with storms and torrential rain and winds gusting up to 40mph. By the time we were walking up the hill, the rain had fortunately subsided but the winds were very, very strong.
We started here, and our search area involved the Haffes Valley up almost as far as the word “River” on that map and as much of the mountain to our eastas we could. It took us quite some time to get to here, but we did and got quickly retasked – we were to move back down our search area but this time paying particular attention to the valley itself and the riverbanks – the river itself is in quite a deep gorge and apparently one of the dog teams had picked up an indication but had been unable to make anything of it. We tracked down that valley for some time without any success and with the night wearing on, our torches running low and searchers becoming tired, we called it off. Heading back was interesting as we ran out of path on our side of the river which necessitated basically stomping through undergrowth all the way up one side of the gorge.
I understand that the search will be continuing today and I’ll give updates on this as best as I can.