Kamas, Utah – An 11-year-old boy who vanished from a Boy Scout camp was found alive and in good condition Tuesday after spending four days lost in the rugged Utah wilderness.
Sheriff Dave Edmunds said Brennan Hawkins was “a little dehydrated, a little weak, but other than that, he was in very good health.”
Volunteer Forrest Nunley, a 43-year-old house painter from Salt Lake City, said he found Brennan “standing in the middle of the trail. He was all muddy and wet.”
Nunley asked the boy his name and he responded, “Brennan.”
The boy had seen some volunteer searchers on horseback, but “he didn’t want to come out. He was too scared. He was a little delirious. I sat him down and gave him a little food,” Nunley said.
Nunley, who skipped work Tuesday to join the search, gave the boy a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich and a bottle of water. He then ran up the hill to find cellphone reception and called 911.
Within minutes, four horsemen, who had passed Brennan without seeing him, circled back and stayed with the boy while Nunley drove down the mountain for help.
Emergency medical technicians arrived a short time later, and Wes Estep of the Trenton Fire Department radioed back with these directions:
“It will be easy to find us. There’s five four-wheelers, half a dozen horses and a whole bunch of smiles.”
The boy apparently walked due west of the Boy Scout camp, which is about 35 miles south of Evanston, Wyo., and traversed a steep ridge.
Kay Godfrey, a spokeswoman for the Boy Scouts’ Great Salt Lake Council, pronounced the boy’s rescue a “modern-day miracle.”
After downing bottles of water and eating all the granola bars carried by a group of volunteer searchers, the boy asked to play a video game on one rescuer’s cellphone, sheriff said.
Brennan’s vitals indicated he was in good physical condition, although he looked gaunt, his face was dirty and his lips were chapped.
He also had scrapes on his legs, and medical technicians put a splint on his left ankle as a precaution. They also removed his shirt, which was soaked, gave him an orange sweatshirt and then wrapped him in a camouflage blanket. A cowboy offered him a black baseball cap.
Brennan lay on the ground as rescuers chatted with him and posed with him for photographs. He declined to discuss his ordeal and at one point said, “I want to talk to my mom.”
Thousands of searchers – many of them volunteers – had scoured the area for the boy, using long poles to probe a swollen river.
The youngster from the Salt Lake City suburb of Bountiful was found just before noon near Lily Lake, about 5 miles from the camp in the Uinta Mountains where he was last seen Friday. He was reunited with his parents and their four other children.
Brennan carried no food or water, and his family had said he did not have a good sense of direction. But the sheriff said the nights had been warm, with temperatures falling only into the 50s. The area is about 100 miles northeast of Salt Lake City.
It was not immediately clear how he survived or whether he tried to find his way back to camp. “He didn’t talk much at all. He just wanted something to eat,” the sheriff said.
Edmunds said investigators will wait until the boy has had time to recover before questioning him.
After about an hour, the rescuers carried him to the bottom of a hill, loaded him into a six- wheel all-terrain vehicle and drove him to a clearing about a mile away where he was met by more sheriff’s and medical personnel as well as his parents and at least three siblings.
He was taken to a Salt Lake City hospital and was expected to stay overnight.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
