I try to put myself in the shoes of the searchers that night. It took a while to get the search going, by then it would have been pitch black dark along that main trail, around the bridge, on the private parties, etc. They would have had to use caution, and in some cases extreme caution, in traversing the terrain in those conditions, despite the foliage and much of the scrub not being present due to the time of year.
There was zero indication where the girls could be at that point. So the search centered around the bridge and a little downstream towards Delphi, not upstream towards where they were found the next day. Folks were even searching in town and out in the country at houses they might have gone to. There was little organization to the search I think largely because searchers really didn't know where to go beyond where Libby had posted the images to SC shortly after 2PM.
Those images were distributed among searchers
via their phones, which is where the "7h" designation on the images came from. A young searcher had grabbed the images from SC to put on his phone roughly 7 hours after the images had been uploaded. That searcher was interviewed at the VFD in town where the search HQ was located, and the interview aired on a Indy TV station at either 10PM or 11PM, or both, I don't remember which and unfortunately the video was pulled a long time ago.
All the searchers knew about the girls' whereabouts was they'd made it to the bridge.
