The brush on the wide peninsula of hilly terrain is so dense that it swallowed up a radio and GPS monitor that rescuers dropped in the ensuing days, sucked out the sound of the searchers’ plaintive calls through loudspeakers at night and absorbed any pleas for help that parabolic microphones were set up to capture.
A day earlier in Marin County, rescuers Webster and Cassens, a 51-year-old dog handler from the California Rescue Dog Association, headed to a drainage area close to a beach.
For two hours, they forged over, under and through the brush. They followed a narrow deer trail briefly before it was consumed by undergrowth, and that’s when they heard the bewildered “Hello.”
Groot dashed to the couple through a hollow in the underbrush. The couple were 200 feet away. It took nearly 10 minutes to reach them. Leaning against a log, their back to their saviors, Kiparsky and Irwin were so weak they could barely move. But their voices gained strength as they called for help.
“We asked them their names,” said Webster, still too shocked to believe what he was seeing.
“We’re Carol and Ian,” they said.
“I kept looking at them, (thinking), is this even possible?” Webster said. “They didn’t believe it either. They were on the verge of tears, overjoyed.”