It’s the textbook beginning of a nightmare: lost on a hiking trail, with no water, and an injured dog too heavy to carry. Fortunately for the family of three this story happened to, they literally ran into a boy scout.
For JD, Aimee, and their dog Smokey, a two-mile hike had become a seven-mile disaster on the Waimanu Trail above Pearl City, Honolulu.
Their phone was dead, and it was getting dark.
That’s when they came across 12 year-old David King and his mom Christine.
“We asked ‘oh do you need any help?’ They said ‘yeah,’ they showed us the dog’s paws had some cuts on it,” David told local reporters. “When the dog would walk, it would just be really painful.”
David was just three miles short of getting his 15-mile-hike merit badge, but despite having done that and played a soccer match earlier in the day, David did what all boy scouts do: he lent a hand.
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First, he suggested they build a stretcher by using two lengths of wood and stringing their t-shirts across it—a technique David had learned from his eagle scout older brother.
“It was his idea to make the stretcher,” said Christine. “We didn’t think it would work because we didn’t think the dog would get onto the stretcher. Smokey was just happy to, and we just carried him out.”
Someone (presumably David) knew the way back to the parking lot as well, and so they all worked together, sometimes in twos, sometimes in fours, to get Smokey to safety, who despite his injuries occasionally hopped off to give some relief to the exhausted hikers.
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David would later take the opportunity to tell KHON2 News when you’re off on a hike, a good way to be prepared is to imagine what could go wrong, and plan for that.
Good on ya, David.
(WATCH the KHON2 video for this story below.)
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