The couple that vanished on Valentine’s Day while vacationing in Inverness was found alive this weekend stuck in thick vegetation at the bottom of a ravine in Tomales Bay State Park.
Ian Irwin and Carol Kiparsky, retirees from Palo Alto, survived by drinking from a puddle, eating ferns and holding each other at night. As the crow flies, they were less than a mile from their vacation rental, but the crews that spent seven days searching for them faced large and nearly impenetrable areas.
Their rescue is being called a miracle: They had brought no water, no food and no jackets on what was supposed to be a short walk. Ian is 72 and Carol is 77, and the temperature dipped into the 30s for several nights.
Assuming the worst, the mission had turned from a rescue to a recovery.
“Finding them alive, it just shows me to never give up hope,” said Quincy Webster, the high school senior who found the couple along with volunteer Rich Cassens and Groot, a 3-year-old search dog.
Ian and Carol’s family requested privacy until the couple is ready to tell their story, so their firsthand experience will have to wait until then. But Mr. Webster and Michael St. John, the unit commander of Marin County Search and Rescue, spoke with them after they were found, and shared the details of those conversations with the Light.
Ian and Carol intended to take a 20-minute walk to catch the sunset on Valentine’s Day, Mr. St. John said. They took a social trail to the Johnstone Trail from their rental near the end of Via De La Vista, where they had stayed multiple times before. At dusk, they turned around, but night was quick to follow, and they couldn’t see anything. They started crawling and, under a waning quarter moon, ended up lost in the brush.
For the next three days, Ian and Carol slowly moved downhill to find a creek that would lead to Tomales Bay. Ian used his body to fall into the dense brush, packing it down, then they would travel the few feet that allowed them and do it again. They covered only a few hundred yards each day. While traversing, Ian lost his glasses and hearing aids, and Carol’s shoes were absorbed by the mud.
At one point, Carol tried to set out on her own to find help, tying off pieces of a scarf along the way so she could find her way back to Ian, who has a bad ankle. But the animal trail she followed petered out, and she couldn’t break through the brush.
They said they saw the lights from houses on the ridge, but it was too steep to move closer. They also heard helicopters, but no other signs of a search effort made it to them.
Once they reached the bottom of the drainage basin, they were too exhausted to go on. They stayed there for the last four days until they were found.
While Carol and Ian were fighting for their lives, hundreds of people searched, using every tool and technology available.
A map that automatically tracks searchers’ routes with GPS showed that the trails surrounding the couple’s location were searched many times over, but the area where they were found was not. A team attempted to get into the area on the first weekend of the search but didn’t find any access points along the perimeter. They didn’t think it was humanly possible for Ian and Carol to be in there because of the thickness of the vegetation.
When search managers re-evaluated the GPS tracks before another round of ground searching on Saturday, they decided to send a K-9 unit up the ravine because missing people often end up at linear features, Mr. St. John said.
The task was given to Mr. Webster, who was in charge of radio and navigation, and Mr. Cassens, who handled Groot. “It was some of the densest brush I have ever searched in,” Mr. Webster said.
They followed animal trails when possible and looked for the thinnest vegetation when there were none. The mud was thick, almost to their knees. It took about an hour to travel 1,000 feet, Mr. Webster said.
After army-crawling under thickets and breaking through branches for hours, they finally heard voices. Rich told Groot to go to them, and even though they were just 100 feet away, it took almost 10 minutes to get there. Carol and Ian were cut, scraped and bruised on a third of their bodies, but they still had big smiles on their faces, Mr. Webster said.
He waited with them for another 30 minutes until more personnel arrived. They were put on a stretcher and an hour later, Henry 1, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office helicopter, arrived. Ian started singing.
The two were lifted out by long line and dropped off at an ambulance on Pierce Point Road a half-mile away. They were treated at Marin General Hospital for mild hypothermia and released.
That Carol and Ian made it through eight nights in the wild is a testament to human survivability, Mr. St. John said. Two factors were in their favor: the weather was unusually warm and dry for the season, and they had each other. “There’s a huge emotional component to being with someone you love in trouble, to keep pushing,” he said.