Fremont Search & Rescue team honored for saving lost hunter - East Idaho News
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Fremont Search & Rescue team honored for saving lost hunter

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EDITOR’S NOTE: EastIdahoNews.com is teaming up with the American Red Cross of Greater Idaho to honor ordinary individuals who have done extraordinary things to help others.

The 11 winners of the 2017 East Idaho Real Heroes awards were announced March 2. Each day EastIdahoNews.com will feature a different winner.

ASHTON — The Fremont County Search and Rescue team was honored Thursday for saving a Utah man who got lost while hunting last fall.

“He was in a bad way when we finally found him,” Fremont County Search and Rescue commander Justin Liebert tells EastIdahoNews.com. “From what I remember he really couldn’t talk and was just shivering because he was so cold.”

The team was called out on a September evening after the hunter didn’t return to his truck where his son was waiting. There was no cell phone reception and searchers were worried about bear activity in the remote area of the county.

It was cold, rainy and dark when the rescue team began searching around 7 p.m.

Searchers shot a gun in the air three times, hoping the hunter would fire back. He did and one of the team members was able to get a direction of where the gunshots were coming from.

“I rode around with Fish and Game officers as we listened for the gunshots and once we found the gunshots I hiked in with them,” Search and Rescue member Stetson Dutton recalls.

After five hours in frigid temperatures, rescue crews found the 46-year-old man. He was rushed to the hospital but didn’t sustain any major injuries.

On Thursday, the American Red Cross of Idaho honored the Fremont County Search and Rescue team as some of east Idaho’s heroes. They accepted an award at a luncheon and said the honor really belongs to their family members.

“We’re not the heroes here. We all chose to do this job,” Leibert says. “The true people that deserve this award is our wives. They’re the ones that worry about us a lot more than we worry about each other. They’re the true heroes.”

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