Missing T-Falls student readies area search crews

A Thompson Falls elementary school student, on an outing with her classmates to Ross Creek Cedars, was found last Thursday afternoon on park grounds after straying away from her group.

“She’s in good shape, just a little bit cold,” came a reply on the emergency scanner at 1:12 p.m. last Thursday.

According to scanner traffic between a Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department dispatchers and U.S. Forest Service employees, the girl was last seen between 10:30 and 11 a.m. by “the moose tracks near the Interpretive Trail.”

The report of the missing girl, who was described as a 5-foot, 6-inch-tall blonde, weighing 120 pounds and wearing jeans and a gray shirt, came at 12:07 p.m. Searchers at that point said she had been missing for “an hour to an hour and a half.”

The girl, who was not identified, reportedly was missing for about 2-hours, 40-minutes before scanner traffic announced, “we found her!”

At the height of the search, U.S. Forest Service employees had begun to screen vehicles — recording license-plate numbers — as they left the park.

David Thompson Search & Rescue personnel of Libby were summoned, but the girl was found before that group was mobilized. A rallying point for searchers, reportedly, was the Bad Medicine Campground.

Classmates of the student were en route to their school at the time the girl was found.

Later attempts to learn the identity of the girl were unsuccessful, as neither the family, school nor law enforcement would release her name.