Don Kane was clearing star thistle when he came upon Roland ‘Rolly’ Renfro, who had driven his truck down the side of an old logging road

Sams Valley resident Don Kane was out for a hike with his deaf, one-eyed Jack Russell Terrier, Razzy, when the pair happened upon 73-year-old Roland “Rolly” Renfro on Thursday morning.

Roland “Rolly” Renfro, a Gold Hill father and grandfather, had been missing since Monday, lost for three nights down the side of an old logging road along East Evans Creek Road after driving over an embankment.

Friends and family of Renfro — who is recovering from the ordeal that left him bruised, battered, dehydrated and sitting in a patch of poison oak while struggling with low blood sugar — had become gravely concerned as search efforts neared a fourth day.

Renfro, reported missing to the Jackson County Sheriff’s office on Wednesday, had gone for a drive in his pickup truck with his senior dog, a pug named Stanley. 

As the week wore on, search and rescue crews were activated and family members took to social media for help.

Hiking on an old logging road near his home off East Evans Creek Road on Thursday, Kane, who is also 73, had seen reports of the missing man but various reports placed Renfro elsewhere in the region. 

“I had thought, ‘Keep your eyes open,’ but I wasn’t constantly thinking about it,” Kane said.

“I knew he was diabetic so I knew it wasn’t good that so many days had gone by.”

Kane had walked four miles and was pulling invasive star thistle to keep it from spreading to his own property when he said he walked right by where Renfro’s truck had gone off the road.

“You couldn’t tell there had even been a vehicle but, for whatever reason, I just happened to look left and I could see the tailgate down off the road into some brush,” Kane told the Rogue Valley Times on Thursday.

The missing person report for Renfro described the truck: a silver Ford F-350 with a custom license plate, ELK-RNR.

“When I saw the plate I remembered they said it started with elk. Then I looked around and saw his body off to the right and I just said, ‘Oh my god. Oh my god. That’s Roland!”

Kane rushed down the embankment, fearing the worst.

“I started down toward him and I said, ‘Sir, are you OK?’ He kind of mumbled something and then he said, ‘Water!’” Kane said. “When I first saw him, I thought he was dead. I really did.”

Trekking through poison oak to get to Renfro, Kane helped him sit up before checking Renfro’s nearby truck for an emergency pack that contained an apple juice pouch. He then ran several miles home to call for help and get some water to drive back with his car.

Kane said he briefly lost track of his one-eyed hiking buddy, noting, “I make sure I stay in sight of him at all times since he’s only got one eye that he can see me with,” but Kane said he had to run home to call for help and get water.

Thankfully, his 11-year-old dog was sitting with Renfro and Stanley when Kane returned.

Klamath Falls resident Laurie Harris, Renfro’s daughter, said she and her husband, Mike Harris, drove from Klamath County as soon as she learned her dad had gone missing and had searched all week. The couple returned home late Wednesday to change clothes and sleep for a few hours. She said family members feared that search and rescue efforts by Thursday could soon become “more of a recovery effort.”

“I’m a nurse so I had an idea where we were at hour-mark 48. I knew he was running out of time,” she told the Times.

“I knew we had to find him today or we weren’t going to. … Everybody was in tears (Thursday) knowing we were getting to the end. I cried the whole way over from Klamath.”

Harris said she later learned that Renfro pulled over to a spot along East Evans Creek to let his dog relieve itself. When he lifted the dog back into the truck, he fell backwards and hit his head, knocking himself out. After coming to, he got in his truck to drive home and, confused, headed the wrong direction up the deeply rutted dirt road before going over the embankment.

As emergency responders scooped Renfro up, Kane held on to Stanley the pug and went home, posting to social media to alert friends and family that Renfro had been found alive. A friend of Harris, who heard on police scanners about the rescue, called Harris.

“A friend of mine, who I hadn’t talked to in years, called and she goes, ‘They found him!’” an emotional Harris recounted. “I burst into tears. … He was so far down the embankment they had to get off-road equipment to get down to him and then put him in a police truck to drive him out of there to the ambulance.”

Ruts in the road are so deep, Harris said, her husband, who is 5-foot-11, stood in one rut that came up to his waist.

“Where my dad had pulled over, he tried to turn around and hit one of the ruts so hard it popped his tire and shot him from the driver seat to the passenger seat. He was stuck, kind of upside down, so he opened the passenger door and crawled out,” Harris said, noting that the pickup truck stayed running until it ran out of gas, with noise from the diesel engine “driving him crazy,” but country music offering a slight improvement during an incredibly lonely wait on the hillside.

From the hospital Thursday, Harris said family members were “over the moon happy” to have her dad back and grateful for unexpected support.

Community members who saw that Renfro was missing helped by deploying drones, driving down remote roads, checking trail cameras and alerting river rafting captains to watch for signs of crashed pickup trucks.

“This week has just been awful but the amount of people that have gathered around has changed my outlook on life. … . People I haven’t spoken to since high school, out doing search parties. People we don’t even know, messaging us… asking, ‘Where do you want us to search next?’ It’s been amazing.”

Kane said community members responded to his post, calling him a hero, which he shrugged off.

“There was nothing heroic about it. I was just in the right place at the right time,” Kane said.

“There’s no doubt in my mind he wasn’t gonna make it much longer in this heat. The fact I stumbled onto him, literally, in the last moments. … When you’re out walking, you always wonder if you’ll ever find somebody that’s lost out there. To actually have an opportunity to help somebody like that makes you very happy.”

A retired truck driver, Kane said he took up walking six years ago to keep his body moving.

He walks 25 miles each week with Razzy.

“I’m 73 years old. I was just trying to get my butt off the couch — that’s what really happened,” he added.

“I hemmed and hawed (that day) about going out to walk. It was so hot… I needed to do watering and stuff. I just keep thinking, ‘Thank god I went out today.”

Reach reporter Buffy Pollock at 458-488-2029 or buffy.pollock@rv-times.com. Follow her on Twitter @orwritergal.