A family camping east of Buena Vista, Colorado, noticed three children had wandered from their campsite on Saturday morning, Sept. 26. One child was 9; the other two were 6. The family group, which came from the Denver area, was staying near the Midland Bike Trail. By the time the children were found, they were about a mile and a half from camp. They were uninjured, in good health, and back with their family.
The Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office says the family first noticed the children were missing at about 9 a.m. Relatives searched for roughly two hours before calling law enforcement. Deputies were dispatched to the trail area around 11 a.m. and met with family members. The sheriff’s account gives no names for the children or their relatives, and no details about why the children walked away. The family asked for help, and a wider search began.
Chaffee County Search and Rescue joined the response. The sheriff’s office says several foot teams were deployed to search in a grid, while multiple drones and a helicopter went up. A canine deputy, Archie, known as Arch, was also sent to the area. The response combined ground, canine and aerial teams.
Arch picked up a scent near the campsite and began moving into the wilderness in the direction the children had traveled, according to the sheriff’s office. The post says he quickly helped pinpoint their route. That clue gave the ground teams a direction to work, but the dog did not make the final visual find by himself. Search-and-rescue foot teams moved in the same direction and worked toward a higher location.
From that elevated position, members of a foot team spotted the children at about 2 p.m. The sheriff’s office says they had traveled approximately 1.5 miles from camp after getting lost. The children were found without injuries and in good health, then quickly reunited with their family. The department’s account does not describe medical treatment or say that the children needed it, so the reported outcome remains simple and reassuring.
Sheriff Andy Rohrich praised the teams and volunteers after the search. “The teams worked amazingly quick and effective to bring these kids back to their worried families,” he said in the post. He also credited Chaffee County’s volunteer search-and-rescue members and Archie, describing the dog as a tool that had joined the team. His comments recognized both the canine’s contribution and the people who searched on foot and from the air.
Denver7/KOAA and Gray News also reported the event, attributing details to the sheriff’s office. Their accounts match the official post: the children were found around 2 p.m. by foot teams that followed the direction Archie indicated and looked from higher ground. The reports do not add interviews with the family, and neither names the children.
The public account does not identify the family, explain the children’s route, or provide a minute-by-minute record of each team’s work. It does document the response’s key sequence: relatives searched, contacted deputies, and were joined by county search-and-rescue volunteers; Arch picked up a scent; foot teams used the direction and a higher vantage point to locate the children. By midafternoon, the search had ended with the children found and reunited with family.
For families reading the story, the outcome is the news: three children who had become lost while camping were found uninjured. For Chaffee County’s responders, the sheriff’s post points to the teamwork behind that outcome. Arch helped narrow the direction of travel; the search teams combined that information with grid searches and an elevated view. The children were about a mile and a half from camp, and the people searching brought them back together with their family.
Chaffee County Search and Rescue North separately describes its work as volunteer-driven and traces its history to 1964. That offers context for the sheriff’s praise of local volunteers, but the incident post does not identify a specific SAR branch or name individual searchers.
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