Lost and Found

The alarm sounded on Nancy East’s cellphone calling for the volunteer Haywood County Search and Rescue team. The alert provided the basic information about the situation. Two college students from UNC Charlotte were lost in the Shining Rock Wilderness area.

It was early January in 2017, and a snowstorm was blowing into North Carolina. What started as a mild winter day threatened to become something deadly, with temperatures dropping to single digits. Search and rescue (SAR) teams, including East, were dispatched on foot and by helicopter when the weather permitted them to fly.

Thankfully, the two students had a lighter with them to build a fire.

“It truly saved their lives. They were eventually found after two days because they had a speck of cell service and called 911.

They were taken out by helicopter, but it was a nailbiter,” East said. She was part of the ground search, and her team members found the two students.

Before joining the Haywood County SAR team, East studied veterinary medicine at Auburn University. During her first year, she declared her major after she and her mother went to an emergency animal hospital because their dog, Bo, had contracted Parvo.

“I was completely enthralled with emergency medicine,” she said. “It broadened my horizons for what the profession could be.”

After completing her undergraduate degree and vet school, East moved to Waynesville, N.C. She began working as a veterinarian, got married and later had three children.

Finding Search and Rescue

East passed the training classes and eventually went on her first mission with the Haywood SAR team in 2017. “My parents instilled the importance of serving in me from a young age. I get back from it far more than I give. It makes me feel like I’m doing something to make the world a better place, leaving it better than I found it,” East said. “Auburn certainly inspired that ethos too. I would see that in various pockets and clubs, like the raptor program at the vet school where we did a lot of rehab work.”

After a SAR mission ended in tragedy about a year later, East hung up her stethoscope and dedicated her time to teaching hiking safety. In 2018, she was part of a multistate endeavor to find a missing mother in the Great Smoky Mountains. They searched from sunup to sundown—and found her deceased one week later.

“I wanted to do preventative search and rescue outreach by educating others on how to avoid needing us,” East said. “That morphed into raising funds for the national park to implement a big search-and-rescue awareness campaign.”

For this fundraiser, East set the record for hiking more than 1,000 miles of trails in the Great Smoky Mountains in 29 days. She describes this journey in her book, “Chasing the Smokies Moon.”

“I thought nobody would believe this middle-aged, minivan-driving mom could beat an ultra-runners record, and I didn’t think I could either,” she laughed.

Since then, she’s incorporated her veterinarian background into her hiking safety clinics, teaching others how to safely hike with their dog. On average, she participates in about 35 SAR missions a year. A documentary about the Haywood County SAR team called “Safe and Found” discusses some of these.

Helping in Hurricane Helene

“It felt like a biblical-type flood compared to Hurricane Fred, which came through a few years ago,” East said. “There was massive loss as far as structures and land. We had five casualties in Haywood County from the flood, but surrounding counties had a lot more.”

The morning Helene arrived, East and the Haywood SAR team were told to meet at the sheriff’s department. They teamed up with other task forces and urban SAR teams from around the state. Some came from as far away as Michigan, Wisconsin and Massachusetts.

East and her team became the navigators for others who weren’t familiar with the area. They helped fill empty containers with water brought in from Texas and unloaded pallets of food brought in by helicopters. After the list of missing people was whittled down and everyone was accounted for, East was dispatched into Pisgah National Forest to survey the trails, assess the damage and mark the coordinates of landslides and fallen trees.

“I can’t think of anything more fulfilling,” she said. “Sometimes these crises galvanize us in a way that is just heartbreakingly beautiful. There’s so much loss and pain attached to it, but it’s some of the best moments I’ve ever experienced, seeing people come together in these types of ways.”

Throughout her years on the SAR team, East has become “the mom” of the group and formed lifelong friendships with some of the people her team set out to find. Last year, she attended the wedding of David Crockett, one of the UNC Charlotte students who got lost in the Shining Rock Wilderness area in 2017.

By finding others, East has found herself.

By Lauren Johnson