He may be a committed Boy Scout, but Brennan Hawkins needs to work on his sense of direction.
The 11-year-old somehow got lost from his camp during a trip in the Utah wilderness, and then defied logic -- and a four-day emergency rescue effort involving helicopters and hundreds of people -- by heading uphill, rather than down.
He was eventually found on Tuesday by one of the volunteer rescuers, miles from the place he was last seen.
Summit County Sheriff Dave Edmunds said Brennan was found in reasonable health and might have been discovered sooner had he done what children normally do when they get lost.
"Typically children walk downhill, along the least path of resistance," he said.
Brennan had hiked 183m up and more than 8km into the mountains when Forrest Nunley, a decorator, found him.
"I turned a corner and there was a kid standing in the middle of the trail. He was all muddy and wet," Nunley said.
Brennan had apparently seen some volunteer searchers on horseback but avoided them because he was scared, he said.
"He was a little delirious. I sat him down and gave him a little food," Nunley said.
The boy was taken to hospital in Salt Lake City.
He had been climbing a rock wall with a friend at the Boy Scout "camporee" when he went missing. The friend had gone off down a dirt road to the canteen hall and told Brennan to meet him there.
"He just didn't want to talk about how he got lost," Edmunds said.
"People say that the heavens are closed and God no longer answers prayers. We are here to unequivocally tell you that the heavens are not closed, prayers are answered and children come home," said the boy's mother, Jody Hawkins.
Emotional appeals by his family led to hundreds of people volunteering to look for the boy.
A spokeswoman for the Boy Scouts called the boy's rescue a "modern-day miracle."
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