LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A badly injured California hiker stranded on a remote trail was located by a quick-thinking dispatch trainee using Facebook after a 911 distress call got cut off, authorities said Wednesday.
Ryan Pritchard, 41, was hiking Sunday afternoon with his sons Jake, 11, and Devon, 18, in the rugged Putah Creek State Wildlife Area near Lake Barryessa, about 30 miles east of his Sacramento home, when he slipped on a loose rock and fell 150 feet down a cliff and landed in a tree.

Since Devon had already gone ahead to their car to return gear, little brother Jake went down the cliff, got his father’s cell phone and called 911, reaching the California Highway Patrol dispatcher. But the call was disconnected before he could give an accurate location and efforts to call again failed.

"Because it was in our jurisdiction, they relayed it to us,” said Deputy Daryl Snedeker, spokesman for the Solano County Sheriff’s Department. “Our dispatchers took the information and began to work together to try to determine where the subject was.”

The cell phone coordinates got them no closer than a cell tower in the city of Vacaville, some 30 miles from where the hikers were. Then a dispatch trainee, Breanna Martinez, got an idea.

“She’s a younger person, so the social media was the first thing that came to her mind,” said Snedeker. “She went to Google, as everyone does these days, and Googled the guy’s name.”

Google took Martinez to Ryan Pritchard’s LinkedIn page, which then led her to his Facebook page.

“I scrolled down and the very first post was a picture of his two sons and behind him was the lake — Lake Berryessa,” Martinez told CBS Sacramento. “And it just said, ‘Hiking the Blue Ridge Trail today.’”

That was all the information the dispatchers needed. A CHP rescue helicopter crew found the trail, plucked Ryan from the tree and got him to UC Davis Medical Center all before darkness, said Snedeker.

Ryan was being treated for several fractured bones, a head injury and a broken jaw, his family told CBS Sacramento.

“I am really impressed by this. I’m so proud of them, taking the initiative and solving the problem,” said the dispatchers’ boss, Solano County Sheriff Tom Ferrara. “And if you have to come up with a new way of doing it, that’s just outstanding.”

I'd rather leave a hiking plan with a trusted relative and carry my PLB (there's seldom any cell phone reception where I hike), but this was certainly an imaginative way to find the guy!

I am not a Facebook person and never will be, but I seem to be in a small minority.

Got to give the 911 team a thumbs up for their work on this. They did great. I hope he recovers, and I hope his kids do too. This is traumatic stuff for all of them.

This seems to be another in a long string of "Falling of a cliff" accidents we've heard of lately. We've had several here in the fairly recent past too. I don't know if I've just heard of more of them or they're increasing in number but there's been too many.

I know several of them were of the "Hey, look at me!" type of shenanigans that caused them. Others were of the "I'm an extreme adventurer" type. I'm not sure what happened here, but it does leave me wondering.

We all like the big views but how can you not be aware of the dangers and risks of getting into loose and slippery rocks and ground on those steep edges? I mean, I don't know for sure but, it's a stretcher for me to believe he was on a trail when this happened.

The thing that needles me is this guy had his kids with him, and when I took mine out I was constantly pointing out these kinds of risks and reeling them in away from them, and I've done this with adults too when I've led them to spots here. But I, and every kid I knew growing up, were told not to mess around places like that, and we were all reeled in fast and hard by the grownups around us when we ignored those warnings.

Did practically an entire generation forget these lessons?

They sure keep me wondering...

Did practically an entire generation forget these lessons?

When I googled it, I found this: "according to new numbers just released from the U.S. Census Bureau, 80.7 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas as of the 2010 Census". So, the answer is probably 'yes, this knowledge is being lost because it is not being used often enough to retain it'.

That's crazy and unbelievable quick thinking. Props to the 911 dispatcher.

For regular denizens of social media, it makes eminent sense to file a trip plan on FB. I use it occasionally, but you'd definitely miss the regular users if they failed to post immediately on return, if not sooner. It was quick thinking and a job well done. Having carried several injured people out- one girl that broke her ankle on a trail in the Sierra, another that had fractured a leg, falling on an ice patch on the AT in Pennsylvania, I won't rush to judgement that the father was doing something foolish. Accidents happen in the outdoors, not always caused by foolish behavior. I've slipped on lots of loose rocks and scree. Some of the loose gravel over rock that's common on trails in the Grand Canyon could send you to your death quite quickly. My wife slipped on one and had the presence of mind to sit down and not try to windmill or run it out. I'm very glad to hear of a good ending for that family.

Indeed, that's certainly true. I didn't judge though, I shared some observations based on my own experiences.

It's also certainly true that accidents happen often as a result of foolishness and ignorance. I think I've heard of about three of these "Falling off a cliff" accidents in the past month. One was a guy down in Mexico, that was only about a week or so ago.

Now, ignorance is what I was mostly referring to, and I mean it literally, as in a lack of knowledge or information. If you do not know about something, you do not worry about it.

Consider what aimless said: "this knowledge is being lost because it is not being used often enough to retain it". That's really the point.

The other side of this point is information has never been more accessible so ignorance as an excuse has never been so thin.

For grins I googled "people falling in the grand canyon". That led me too this page. Here's a quote: