Greenville Leader

A team of military professionals and trained civilians worked together to extract an injured hiker near Raven Cliff Falls in Caesars Head State Park.

On Aug. 20, members of the South Carolina Army National Guard and civilians with the South Carolina Helicopter Aquatic Rescue Team (SC-HART) were called to rescue the hiker.

The Defense Visual Information Distribution Service reported that Cedar Mountain Fire Rescue received the 9 p.m. distress call Aug. 19, but due to hazardous weather, darkness and the difficult terrain, rescue operations were postponed until early the following morning.

“The winds were coming off the mountain tops creating turbulence and there was also some morning fog to deal with,” U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 4 Frank Wallace, South Carolina National Guard pilot for SC-HART, said in a statement. “The terrain had a lot of trees covering the slope, and there was what looked like a sheer drop-off near the rescue site. We surveyed the area from the air and came up with a plan to put the (medics) on the ground safely. The only way we really knew exactly where they were was when we saw an orange rope they had put up in a tree, and they started shaking the tree.”

It took the SC-HART team about 45 minutes to complete the rescue onsite, and by 10 a.m., the injured hiker and two accompanying companions were airlifted from the location.

Wallace said that the rescue was in really difficult terrain and that it would have been difficult to find them if the grid coordinates they gave us weren’t so accurate.

This is the second rescue SC-HART was involved in this month. On Aug. 1, SC-HART also rescued two injured kayakers from the Chattooga River.