Parents from Olds are extremely grateful for all the people who helped find their children who got lost while dirt biking north of Sundre.
Six youth: Walker Roth, Thaine Smith, David Chatt, Taya Ryan, Nathan Altenhofen and Travis Pepin — left for that excursion at about 8 a.m. on Saturday, July 14.
The plan was to check out a lake and falls near Hunter Valley.
However, they eventually got lost.
Two members of the group — Altenhofen and Pepin — left the group to get gas and help. They were eventually found by RCMP at about midnight. The other four were not found until about 9:30 a.m. Sunday, July 15, about 50 kilometres from where they'd left their dirt bikes.
The four found themselves spending the night in the bush with no food.
Tara Roth is the mother of Walker Roth, 16, of Bowden.
Roth says when she and her husband Rob came out of a movie Saturday at about 9 p.m. and still hadn't heard from Walker, she got a bad feeling.
"When I got out and we were driving home, I had said, 'something's not right here.' I said, 'it's just not like him to never — to be out of contact for that long,'" Tara says. "My daughter phoned the police at 10:30."
When they still hadn't been found, Rob, Tara's brother Scott Anderson, and her 75-year-old father-in-law Lyle Roth headed out to search.
"By the time they got all the quads loaded up and got their stuff together and started to go in on the trails it was probably about 2 a.m.," Tara says.
"They just searched all night. They'd taken in a bunch of extra gas, because we were fairly certain (the youth) were lost and ran out of gas. And it turned out both were true."
After they were found, Altenhofen and Pepin, along with one of their cousins, went back out into the bush to aid in the search.
"It was so steep out there. My husband said those boys should never have been in the area they were in. But anyway, they were," Tara says.
In fact, at one point, as Lyle was searching, his quad rolled on him.
But Tara says he was OK.
"He quads a lot out west, right? But still, to be that age and to be on such dangerous hills and stuff like that," she says. "I think everybody was pretty sore."
Tara says her brother couldn't believe how risky it was.
"He said he was worried they were going to get lost. He said he never realized when he got on that quad at 2 a.m. that they were putting our lives on the line.
"Because it wasn't like it was just straight quading in daylight hours. Like the one hill, it took them three times to get up it, it was so steep."
It was an overwhelming relief when the four youth were finally found. Tara says they were hungry and exhausted, but otherwise OK.
It was quite an experience for them.
"They drank from a mudhole," Tara says. "They did manage to make a fire through the night. They're all good with it now, now that it's turned out OK. They were in pretty good spirits.
"I mean, they do this a lot, quad. They're very outdoorsy kids. But like Walker said, you do kind of panic when you have no water.
"They didn't think we'd be looking for them. They didn't think we'd clue in that, you know, something was wrong, and didn't think that we'd realize how far out they were."
Tara was asked how she felt when she found out the teens were found safe and sound.
"I started bawling," she says.
She's astounded and very grateful for all the help they received during the search.
"Just all the support," she says. "Like a scent detection dog was out there. They'd asked for an article of Walker's clothing, so I had to go home and get an article of the clothing. He hadn't gone out yet, but he was at the search site with his (handler)."
Margo Nygard and Ted Scott Harvey helped arrange for Search and Rescue Equine from Didsbury to head out and join in the search.
Barb Jones and Brenda Werk of Sundre brought sandwiches to feed all the searchers.
Roth was also astounded by the response on Facebook.
"I mean, people say a lot of bad things about Facebook sometimes, but we had almost 500 people share the post by the time they were found. And we'd only put it on around 6 a.m."
Tara now knows how others whose kids have gone missing must feel.
"You know, you just never realize — or think — that something like that's going to happen to you, right? It's just such a sickening, hopeless feeling. You know something's wrong and something's happened."
Tara says as a result of this experience, things are going to change for Walker.
"You can get these GPS trackers to put on your bike. They're little pucks or something," she says.
"And he's going to go out with a backpack with food and water and he's going to go closer to home, and somewhere he knows, because he'd never been out there before. One of the other boys had been there before."
