It's been four days since Tami Lynn Sturgeon, 55, went missing in the rugged Yellow Hammer Buttes southeast of Gillette while shed hunting. And there’s still no sign of her.
More than a dozen searchers from several agencies and a few dogs spent Wednesday doing grid searches of the area where Sturgeon was last seen.
Sturgeon and her husband, John, were shed hunting on Sunday afternoon when they separated to look for her phone, which she believed she had lost. Searchers found her phone Tuesday, still on the side-by-side she had been using that day.
Beyond that, there haven’t been many clues for searchers to follow.
“We've had people out there continuously since Saturday afternoon,” Campbell County Sheriff’s Office Operations Division Capt. Eric Seeman told Cowboy State Daily. “And we are continuing on.”
Knowing Where She Was
Since the search for Sturgeon began Saturday evening, the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office has used many techniques to locate her. Seeman said their efforts have simultaneously narrowed and expanded.
“We're in the middle of a grid search in the immediate couple of miles, but we've also expanded the search to a several-mile radius around it,” he said. “We'll let the circumstances dictate, and we are always optimistic.”
The search has yielded some results, but not enough to locate Sturgeon. A shoe print and a cigarette butt were discovered during one sweep, both believed to have been left by Sturgeon, Seeman said.
However, Seeman said those clues didn’t provide much information and did not significantly assist the search effort.
“They didn't really yield any leads,” he said. “We do believe that they were hers. But they were found in an area where we knew that she had been. It wasn't in a remote location that gave us another direction of travel or anything like that.”
The discovery of Sturgeon’s phone Tuesday was also a non-starter because it never left the side-by-side.
The Campbell County Sheriff’s Office has been using the expertise of search and rescue personnel from Sheridan and Johnson counties. They have more experience searching for missing persons in rugged terrain, he said.
A Black Hawk helicopter from Rapid City, South Dakota, did an aerial search of the Yellow Hammer Buttes on Monday. Even with a five-person crew equipped with thermal spotters, there were no signs of Sturgeon.
Rescue Or Recovery
After four days, which included a snowstorm and subzero overnight temperatures, many people are worried for Sturgeon’s safety. When she disappeared, she was dressed for cold weather, but was only carrying a backpack with minimal supplies.
Given such circumstances, law enforcement agencies might make the difficult decision to change the focus of their efforts from rescue to recovery. But Seeman said searchers are still optimistic they’ll find Sturgeon alive.
“We are still in a search and rescue mission mode,” he said. “We certainly try to keep optimistic.”
Seeman also emphasized that the ongoing effort is still a search and rescue mission and nothing about the situation suggests foul play.
“The family is completely cooperative,” he said. “We have no reason to believe we're dealing with anything other than a missing hiker.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
