TULALIP — Firefighters, police officers and emergency aid crews from Marysville, Tulalip and Snohomish County converged on the woods of Tulalip on Tuesday, June 26, to search for and eventually recover a 20-year-old all-terrain vehicle rider whose family reported him missing after he failed to return from a trip the previous afternoon.

Crews retrieved him from the bottom of a ravine in a wooded area about a mile north of the 9900 block of 12th Avenue NW, where he was pinned facedown underneath his four-wheel ATV, after Tulalip Tribal Police officers followed the ATV’s tracks off the trail.

“It’s a common dirt-biking area,” said Aaron Reeder, one of the three volunteer firefighters from the Tulalip Bay Fire Department who took part in the rescue efforts. “He wasn’t able to make any noise, at least not enough that any of us would have been able to hear, so it’s a good thing they found his riding trail.”

Reeder described the slope as angled slightly downward from the road for about 70 yards, at which point it makes a steeper drop-off. He praised the team of more than a dozen workers who contributed to the man’s safe return, from the Marysville medics who were able to supply IVs on site to the personnel of Marysville Fire District Ladder 62 and Snohomish County Search and Rescue, who pulled him out of the ravine with high-angle equipment, in a basket with a rope.

“Originally, we thought they were going to have to airlift the kid, but he was pretty tough,” Reeder said. “He was transported by ground to the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett.”

Although the missing man was conscious and is expected to make a full recovery, the fact that he spent 11 hours trapped under his ATV, outside and overnight, makes him very lucky to have made it out alive, much less conscious, according to Reeder.

“If he’d been just a few years older or younger, that outcome could have been very different,” Reeder said. “If he’d ridden with someone else, he still could have gone down the ravine and gotten pinned by his own vehicle, but he wouldn’t have had to spend the whole night alone down there. This is why riding with a partner is very important.”