While warming hot dogs on a stove, Tami Laird snapped a picture of her 9-year-old son Stirling on a dirt road where they'd become lost in Stanislaus National Forest. (Courtesy of Tami Laird)

By luck, Tami Laird had a stack of papers in her car. She'd packed the usual camping supplies – sleeping bags, food, flashlights, first aid kit and duct tape. At the last minute, she'd also printed a stack of campsite maps to share with other Cub Scouts she and her son were meeting in the Sierra.

Lost deep in the woods, with cell service long gone, she grabbed a map.

"HELP," she scribbled on the back. "Me and my son are stranded up the road to the right. Please get help."

Nine-year-old Stirling lugged a rock into the middle of the narrow, dusty forest road where they were stuck, and Laird taped the note to it. Night was falling, and Laird's mind was racing. Was her son warm enough? How much should they ration their food? Would they ever be found?

"I was sick to my stomach," she said.

Laird and Stirling had set out the afternoon of July 11 from their home in Roseville to drive to Camp Wolfeboro nestled along the North Fork of the Stanislaus River. The trip should have taken about three hours.

But they didn't arrive that night. And they didn't turn up the next day.

Tami Laird took a photo with her son Stirling on July 12, 2025 as the pair searched for an area with cell coverage while lost in the Stanislaus National Forest. (Courtesy of Tami Laird)

Laird knew Camp Wolfeboro was roughly two miles down a dirt road from Highway 4, and by late Friday afternoon she knew they were lost in a labyrinth of logging trails and forest service roads of Stanislaus National Forest. Her Nissan Sentra kept bottoming out, no matter how carefully she maneuvered.

"I turned around and tried to retrace my steps, but there were so many interlocking dirt roads," Laird said.

Laird and Stirling tried to reassure one another. They had food and a camp stove. He had his emergency whistle around his neck. They took breaks to play cards then kept driving.

Then the car got stuck. Laird had hit the gas to get up and over a berm but the wheels were off the ground. They used their hands to dig the dirt away, pulling away rocks and sticks until they had enough traction and could drive away.

But then they got stuck again. They dug the car out and kept driving, but then got stuck again. Stirling tried his whistle – blowing in three short bursts like he was trained to signal distress. Laird tried dialing 911, but they had no signal.

Tami Laird's son, 9-year-old Stirling, pictured in his Cub Scouts uniform. (Courtesy of Tami Laird)

That night, Stirling tossed and turned but seemed to rest. Laird watched the stars and moon move across the sky through the towering trees. She kept hoping she'd see a helicopter appear in the sky. She wondered if anyone had reported them missing.

No one had, yet.

The next morning, July 12, Laird and Stirling filled their backpacks with snacks and water, and set out on foot to see if they could hike up to cell service. They tore up an old brown sheet and tied strips onto branches so they could find their way back to the car.

They also brought pen and paper, and started leaving notes, hoping that someone was looking for them.

They didn't know it then, but they were roughly 20 miles as the crow flies from Camp Wolfeboro, deep in the dusty forested canyon folds that rise from the foothills into the high Sierra. Totally lost, they began rationing hot dogs.

It wasn't until the next day that the Cub Scouts group alerted Laird's emergency contacts that the pair hadn't arrived. They called 911, and the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office began searching.

Sheriff's Lt. Greg Stark said they mapped a broad general search area using the last coordinates transmitted from Laird's phone before losing service. Then, early in the search, campers in the area told a deputy they'd seen a mother and son in a sedan and watched them turn around.

"There are not a lot of sedans out there, so we adjusted our search areas again to tighten that up," Stark said.

They had called in the volunteer search and rescue team, and many members happened to be training nearby. Sixteen volunteers assembled at a base camp in the Stanislaus National Forest within about a half hour and soon set out with paper maps in teams of two.

Tony Fernandez and another volunteer drove along dirt roads in his Toyota Tacoma.

"It went from gravel to just dirt to moon dust," Fernandez said. They marked each road they searched on the map.

They headed up a really steep and bumpy road, even though Fernandez, an off-road driving enthusiast, didn't think a sedan would have made it. But he turned down the road anyway, and something caught his eye.

"I jokingly said, ‘Is that a rock with a note?' Not thinking she would have thought of that," Fernandez said. He recalled his partner, Adam Salazar, exclaiming that it was.

While lost in the Stanislaus National Forest, Tami Laird and her 9-year-old son left notes that helped rescuers find her. (Courtesy of Tami Laird)

"My partner said, ‘Dude, it's a note that says help on it,'" he said.

They followed the note to the right, then found another note instructing them to take another right. A third note told them to head to the left.

Moments later, Fernandez saw something blue ahead. It was a set of camp chairs.

Suddenly, Laird was running down the road toward the pickup with tears streaming down her eyes. She'd heard Fernandez honking and had initially thought she'd imagined it.

"It was a little over 24 hours. We were so lucky it wasn't more," Laird said

Fernandez had tow equipment and pulled the sedan off the berm where it was lodged. His partner drove the sedan and Laird and Stirling rode out of the woods in Fernandez' truck.

Calaveras County search and rescue volunteers tow Tami Laird's Nissan Sedan off a berm where the card had become stuck in the Stanislaus National Forest on July 12 2025. (Courtesy of Tami Laird)

The notes, the strips of sheet, staying with their car – all of this dramatically improved their chances of being found, Stark said.

"They did everything right," Stark said.

Except, perhaps, the initial problem of directions. Laird said she hadn't pulled up the camp website for directions until they were too far along the route. By then they didn't have enough cell services to load the page. So she said she plugged Camp Wolfeboro into her phone's Google Maps app.

"Technology is great and works – until it doesn't," Stark said.

Reach Julie Johnson [email protected]