UPDATE: After more than five hours of looking for a 70-year-old hiker who told police he was lost and injured in the Ramapo Mountain Reservation, authorities suspended the search tonight. They’ll try again come daylight.
A New Jersey State Police helicopter was involved in the search of the 3,000+-acre county park — along Mahwah, Ringwood and state park police and the West Milford Search and Rescue unit — but had to return after it began running low on fuel.
Ringwood and state park police were checking for parked cars on access and other area roads.
The trouble was: The caller apparently doesn’t have a working 911 response on his phone.
The search began at 2:20 p.m., when the hiker’s call from Ringwood was received by central dispatch in Ridgewood via an Oakland cell tower.
Mahwah Police Capt. Stuart Blank told CLIFFVIEW PILOT that he also had officers calling area hospitals, on the off chance the man was being treated but neglected to tell police.
“When officers first went up, they were met by workers plowing a utility road,” Mahwah Police Capt. Stuart Blank told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. “They said they hadn’t seen anyone.”
“Officers walked the entire lake and found a set of footprints headed into the area and then out,” he said.
Searchers thought they had a promising lead after finding a car parked in a reservation lot around 6:30 p.m. — more than four hours after the search began — but it was another hiker.
Authorities were hoping that if someone was, indeed, injured and missing, as Blank said, he got out OK and had merely neglected to let them know.
Unless they hear otherwise, they intended to resume looking in the morning.
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