Petr Novotny searched 67 kilometers across Taiwan's mountains, climbing a cumulative 6,800 meters in three days, after a man disappeared following a typhoon in October 2021. The fire department stopped after two weeks. On day 29, Novotny and the family made one last attempt. He found the man's body trapped among rocks in a creek. [1]
That first search became a private vocation. Novotny says he has found seven people alive and a larger number dead since 2021. Sometimes he works beside the fire department. Sometimes he continues after officials call off an operation. The Guardian account presents the work through his memory, methods and grief; it does not supply official case files or a complete census of searches and outcomes. [1]
His method begins before the mountain. He studies old maps, the missing person's last phone signal and trailhead surveillance footage. He and his wife interview relatives and friends about experience and state of mind. On the ground, his knowledge of remote routes and ability to move quickly become practical advantages. When he finds someone, the task changes at once from detection to extraction and notification. [1]
The public-private handoff is the unexamined part of the story. An official search may stop because weather, terrain, elapsed time or responder safety changes the risk calculation. A family's reason to continue is different: uncertainty remains intolerable even when survival becomes less likely. A private searcher occupies the space between those judgments, but the account does not publish the rule that authorizes him to enter it.
A workable handoff would record the last official search area, evidence already checked, hazards, forecast, communications plan and conditions for renewed public assistance. It would tell a private team whom to contact before entering and what triggers an emergency extraction. Without that packet, a new searcher may repeat covered ground, contaminate a site or become another person responders must find. The same information could preserve official caution without forcing a family to begin again from rumor.
Payment makes that boundary sharper. The family in the 2021 case paid Novotny 300,000 New Taiwan dollars, about GBP7,200, plus a daily rate of 15,000 dollars, about GBP360. The money was described as thanks for an answer. [1] It was also compensation for labor and danger. The record does not say how prices are set, what families agree to, whether insurance applies or what happens when a search yields nothing.
Evidence custody matters too. Novotny asks for phone and camera records, films his searches and may discover clothing, equipment, a survivor or a body. Each can become evidence in an accident, disappearance or criminal inquiry. A useful protocol would define when police are notified, how a scene is preserved, who controls video, who confirms identity and who authorizes removal. Heroism cannot substitute for chain of custody.
Extraction is another public function that does not disappear when a private person makes the discovery. In the first case, the family assembled eight men, cleared a helicopter platform and helped return the body. [1] Who approved the aircraft, assessed the landing site and carried liability is not stated. Nor is the procedure when a living person needs urgent treatment beyond the searcher's capacity.
Novotny's account explains why families call. Taiwan has more than 250 peaks above 3,000 meters, and he says hikers often make danger worse by descending into steep valleys without offline maps. He knows forgotten trails and remote regions. Yet his reported success cannot show whether private continuation is generally safer or more effective than the official stop. The missing denominator includes declined requests, failed searches, injuries and cases in which officials were right to withdraw.
Safety oversight need not turn private skill into a bureaucracy. Registration, insurance, minimum equipment, route check-ins and incident review would make risk visible while leaving room for specialist judgment. Public agencies could then compare private discoveries with their own stop criteria and change those criteria when evidence supports it. Families would know whether they were hiring a trained operator, a gifted volunteer or someone whose confidence exceeded the mountain.
That clarity would protect Novotny's genuine skill from the mythology built around it.
The failed X retrieval supplies no verified hiking-community check. It cannot tell the paper whether Taiwanese rescuers welcome this work, regard it as reckless or see it as a necessary complement. The source itself is a first-person profile. Its detail is valuable precisely because its limits are visible.
Novotny gives some families survivors and others a body to bury. That is consequential work. The institutional question is who carries the risk after the state stops: the searcher, the family, the police, the fire service or all four without a common rule. The answer should not wait for the next person to vanish beyond the last official marker.
-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo