'Ingenious' use of camera

'Ingenious' use of camera flash helps lost walker off foggy moor

• Rachel Williams
• The Guardian, Monday 16 February 2009
• Article history

A walker who spent 13 hours lost in thick mist on a Scottish moor guided a helicopter to his rescue using the flash of his digital camera, the coastguard said yesterday.

Malcolm Murray set out for a short walk with his Jack Russell, Buttons, on Barvas moor, on the Isle of Lewis, on Friday afternoon but lost his bearings when the weather changed. He walked for miles in the wrong direction before night fell.

Sheltering in a bothy at 2am, the 23-year-old heard the rotor blades of the coastguard helicopter, but, with his mobile phone battery dead, had no way of communicating with the crew.

He frantically fired off his camera flash, and finally, a mile away, Richard Dane, the helicopter pilot, saw a split second of the light and moved towards it. The craft's heat-seaking sensors picked up two red blobs: Murrary, waving, and Buttons.

"I was thinking, if they go past and don't see me it's going to be really, really bad," Murray said yesterday. "The only light source I could think of was my smalll digital camera so I starting pointing it at them just to get the flash to go off. I was running out of memory so I kept having to delete pictures. I've got a lot of photos of just pitch black on there now."

Dane said that earlier the crews had been in touch, via the phone, with Murray, who is local to the area and an experienced walker. But the student could not give his location. Twenty rescuers combed the boggy moor on foot and Murray's father drove around beeping his horn.

Dane said: "I just caught sight of this flash - it was a tiny pin prick of light. We took a bearing of it and were able to find him on our forward-looking infrared. That confirmed him waving his arms, and Buttons - who was clearly very excited about the whole prospect of a helicopter ride."

A Maritime and Coastguard Agency spkeswoman described Murray's idea of using his camera flash as "ingenious".

During Murray's outing the temperature on the moor dropped and melting ice soaked his boots through.

The Stornaway-based PhD student said: "I was gearing myself up to spend the night, but it really is hard to say whether I would have got through it or not. By the time I was rescued, I was very, very, cold. There had been a bit of fog when I left. But when I got to the top of the hill it just came right down and I realised I had no idea where I was. All my normal orientation was wrong.

"Buttons was tired from walking because she's not a young dog and the terrain was heavy going. She managed to find a corner in the bothy and just rolled up in a ball and went to sleep for most of it. When I saw the helicopter coming over that was probably the most relieved I've ever been in my life - I was pretty desperate."

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