D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2008
The Seeker
Despite critics who worry she's more loose cannon than lone wolf, Jo Remondini runs her own one-woman civilian search and rescue operation.
Story and photos by Donna Clayton Lawder
The trip out to Jo Remondini's property in Cliff is like the journey to many a rural homestead in the area. It's rolling ranch land, rough roads punctuated with cattle guards and precious little in between the street signs — when there are street signs.
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Jo Remondini on the front porch of
the nearly complete log home she and her husband are building. |
Remondini's method of giving directions adds, well, an interesting twist to the trip, especially to a city-girl journalist coming out to take pictures. Remondini isn't sure of the exact name of this road and that, not sure if one of them even has a name. Look for a pile of rocks on the left, she says, and then "just make a right, right there." After that, why, it's simply a matter of counting cattle guards.
She goes over a segment of the directions again with an explosive little laugh, perhaps trying to put the city-girl at ease.
"It'll probably feel like you're going too far by that point, but just keep going," Remondini instructs. "Don't worry. You'll get here!"
Well, maybe — but not without some help.
In fact, thanks to some confusion over which bridge is the "Gila bridge" — the one actually in Gila, or the one in Cliff that takes you to Gila — the journalist is delayed more than half an hour. Remondini leaves the reporter a message on her cell phone (too bad there's no service out here!) and heads out for a cup of coffee in town. Meeting the journalist on a back road, and luckily recognizing her, Remondini offers to lead the rest of the way back to her house.
Passing some heavy machinery that is re-grading miles of washboard dirt road, the drive begins to feel like "too far."
At last standing on the porch of the log home she and her husband are building and are about ready to move into, Remondini puts her hands on her hips, surveys the vast vista before her and exclaims, "Well, this is why I live here. I just love this land!"
The view of the surrounding landscape is worth the trip, even worth a couple of bitten fingernails.
Asked if visitors ever have trouble finding her house, Jo Remondini gives out another of those explosive little laughs.
"Oh, I'd just go out there and search for 'em!" she says.
Though Remondini's response over missing dinner guests is meant to be humorous, she's also sincere. Searching for people missing in the wilderness, in fact, is a passion of hers.
In the past year or so, Remondini has participated in two high-profile local searches: for Carolyn Dorn, famously stranded in the Gila wilderness for 40 days and miraculously found alive by hikers, and Arsalan Serajian, a Kentucky man reported missing near the Gila Cliff Dwellings last October and, sadly, found dead some two and a half months later, an apparent suicide.
But though she participated in the searches for those two missing persons, Remondini is not part of the Grant County Search and Rescue team. She's not a forest service employee or even a member of law enforcement — nor does she want to be.
No, when she gets wind of someone needing to be found, Remondini simply saddles up her horse or mule and goes. And goes.
Something of a rodeo queen in her youth, Remondini has felt comfortable in the saddle practically since she was able to toddle. She's called the wide-open spaces of New Mexico home all her life, knowing the rolling hills and the surrounding mountain ranges in this part of the state like the proverbial back of her hand.
Her expertise and her "rugged individualist" personality combined in a surprising way when she heard about Dorn's plight in December 2006. Even though she'd never met the missing woman at that point, Remondini says she was compelled to search for Dorn. "I just knew I had to go out there looking for her," she says. It was then that Remondini realized she had a passion for search and rescue work.
But on her own terms. "Outside the box," as she prefers to think of it.
"I don't want to be bound by their rules," she says of the official emergency rescue services. "After a point, they call off a search, but I just can't stop. I can't give up on these people. If they're alive, I want to save them. And if they're not, I want to find them and give their families closure."
Though she's been doing her own thing so far, occasionally with a friend helping her search, Remondini now hopes to find a few more like-minded individuals and dreams of starting up her own Cliff-area search and rescue team.
"I'm trying to put the word out," Remondini says. "I guess we'll get a meeting going, see who's interested. They'll need first aid training, of course, and we'll just go from there."
Whether talking about standard, recognized search and rescue efforts or something like Remondini's civilian approach, getting the call to search is the first order of business. Frankie Benoist, previous president of Grant County Search and Rescue (SAR) and the Type-1 Field Coordinator for the SAR team, describes the usual process of information dissemination about a person reported missing in the wilderness.
"First there's a quick investigation to make sure it is a legitimate search," Benoist says. There can be some confusion, she explains, about the validity of a missing-person report. A family may report their loved one is lost in the wilderness when, in fact, they've gone off to Mexico, run away or simply left the area.
Once the validity of the report is determined, Benoist continues, then the incident commander for the area is contacted and that person makes the official decision to search. SAR is issued an official mission number from Santa Fe. "Then we contact the teams and send them out," she explains. Grant County SAR has rescue volunteers trained in a number of specialties, including horseback search and water search.
Not being a part of the official search and rescue team, Remondini relies on less-orthodox methods of gathering information than, say, police scanners or a phone call from the search and rescue field coordinator. Her daughter is an emergency medical technician (EMT) who, hearing about such situations in the course of her work, passes the information on to her. Remondini says she learned about Carolyn Dorn's disappearance from flyers posted around the area.