A 65-year-old man suffered serious injuries Wednesday when his utility-terrain vehicle veered off an abandoned road grade and rolled down a steep hillside near the South Fork of Catherine Creek in Union County. Family members, who were not with him at the time of the crash, followed his UTV tracks and reached him by radio before relaying his exact location to dispatchers, allowing rescuers to move quickly into rugged terrain.
Emergency agencies responded on Oct. 28 to the crash site between the Buck Creek Trailhead and Taylor Green, according to La Grande Observer. The outlet reported that family members followed the UTV's tire tracks and were able to give dispatch the precise crash location, a detail that proved critical given the remote, steep ground involved.
Responders found the man below the old road grade with the wrecked UTV nearby, having sustained serious injuries when the vehicle left the grade and rolled down the hillside, per Elkhorn Media Group's account of the rescue. The callers who first located him were family members not present when the crash happened, the outlet noted.
A Coordinated Push Into Steep Terrain
The response drew together the Union County Search and Rescue team, the Union County Sheriff's Office, Union Rural Fire Protection District, La Grande Fire Department and Life Flight Network. About an hour after the call came in, deputies reached the patient on foot alongside the Life Flight crew, which had landed roughly half a mile from the scene and hiked in the rest of the way, the same report states.
Getting him out required carrying him up a steep hillside and then traveling approximately half a mile and 300 vertical feet down to the waiting landing zone, according to the outlet's reporting. From there, he was flown to a regional trauma center. The Union County Sheriff's Office thanked all of the assisting and cooperating agencies for what it called a rapid, unified response, per the same account.
A Busy Year For Volunteer Rescuers
The call adds to what has already been a heavy workload for Union County's search and rescue volunteers. The team logged 32 missions in 2025, up sharply from 13 call-outs a decade earlier, the station's report on the group's year-end reflection shows. Rescues made up 58% of those 2025 missions, with searches accounting for another 39%.
June was the busiest month of 2025 with five call-outs, while July and December each saw just one, according to the same source. Volunteers put in roughly 3,350 hours of time that year, including 885 mission hours and 2,018 training hours, and drove approximately 18,321 miles, more than 13,000 of them on their own personal vehicles.
