The Laibin fire department in Guangxi said on the 16th that three high school students in the city got lost while hiking to unwind after taking the Gaokao, and ended up trapped on the mountain for a full day and night. Thanks to a search operation by local firefighters and villagers, the three students were safely rescued and brought down the mountain.
It is reported that at around noon on June 14, three high school boys took a small path to enter the Baiya Slot Grand Canyon scenic area. When they tried to return at around 4 p.m. that afternoon, they found they couldn’t find their way back, and at that time they only had a small amount of water and food with them. It wasn’t until around 7 p.m. that the three students remembered to call the police. After learning about the situation, local public security, fire, and other departments immediately formed a search and rescue team of about 50 people and headed up the mountain to search for them around 9 p.m. However, as it was the flood season, the mountain was shrouded in heavy fog, and soon after, there was a strong rainstorm, making the rescue extremely difficult. Local villagers said that the forested mountains connected to the Baiya Grand Canyon scenic area span nearly 500,000 acres, with the highest elevation reaching over 1,000 meters.
“The biggest difficulty was that there were no paths to follow,” firefighters explained. The ongoing search continued until around 4 or 5 a.m., when rescuers faintly heard someone responding to their calls from the opposite hillside, but they still couldn’t pinpoint the exact location. Moreover, the terrain was extremely rough, with steep cliffs, dense shrubs, and very limited visibility, which posed significant challenges to the rescue effort.
By 9 a.m. on the 15th, the rescue team had grown to nearly 100 people. Guided by local villagers, rescuers used tools such as machetes to clear a path toward the location of the three high school students. By around 4 p.m., rescuers found the three trapped students in a depression on a mountaintop. At that point, they had run out of food, and only one out of their three mobile phones still had some battery left. After examination, apart from appearing extremely fatigued and having cuts on exposed skin from bushes, the three students were not seriously injured.
Around 5:30 p.m. that day, the three trapped students were successfully rescued off the mountain. Under the arrangement of local police, the three students each made their way back home.