An Ex-Troop in American Mountain Rescue

By Mick Womersley

A burly male casualty is strapped to a Stoke’s rescue litter, the front line of a forest fire blazing not five feet away, temperature increasing steadily as the medics and rescuers work and sweat and the fire creeps closer. By the time they finish with splints and shots and straps, the fire is almost licking at their heels, and they abandon the plan of using ropes for steep ground security, in favor of an all-out, muscle-wrenching haul up the steep rocky slope of the forested valley wall to the safety of the logging road above. Luckily the road is close, a matter of less than a quarter mile (but almost that far up as well as along), and the cleared trail they must take to get there, actually a recently cut fire break or "fire line", is trending away from the fire itself, so things get cooler and safer as they go. The shot of Demoral the patient was given doesn’t seem to help much, however, not enough time having been allowed for the drug to kick in -- he was such a big guy for just one shot -- and the splint on the broken arm is insecure. The patient is in pain, but getting safer by the second. We stop to adjust the straps and the splint, but are soon at the waiting ambulance.

The patient is a United States Forest Service (USFS) "Hotshot" fire fighter, hit by a falling boulder dislodged upslope by one of his crew-mates earlier in the day. A broken tibia, a "dinner fork" fracture of the radius and ulna, and a ticket "out of the smoke" on full pay, medical coverage assured by Uncle Sam. He’s surprisingly happy about things. There’s nothing he can do about it, and once the damage is done, a broken ankle and arm is a small price to pay for a summer and fall off on full pay, and to be out of this incessant smoke, sweat, and hard work. A Hotshot Crew’s lot -- in the height of the worst, global warming-induced fire season in Californian memory -- is not a happy one.

As for the four-man rescue crew, this is a mixed bag of so-called specialists put together at short notice for this mission by the USFS, other federal agencies, the California Department of Emergency Services, and the California Mountain Rescue Association and its member teams. Usually rescue and evacuation on forest fires is done by the medics assigned to each fire crew, using the grunt power of the crew itself. These guys have been sent here because there have been so many steep ground deaths and accidents (nine killed so far) on this fire alone that the agencies, with the media nipping at their heels, decided they needed some extra CYA. The crew today includes a National Park Service (NPS) Ranger who specializes in Rescue; a USFS veteran professional conservationist who manages a heavily-visited Californian mountain range some three hundred miles to the south -- and who is, with the NPS guy, a mainstay volunteer officer of the US national Mountain Rescue Association (MRA); a rather portly California National Guard Nurse Practitioner (male), with zip mountain rescue experience, a liability on the hill, but who has a sense of humour and can legally dispense analgesic drugs, which the others may not in this heavily regulated US medical context. And, last and very much least in terms of official standing, paper qualifications, and government agency status, an itinerant, English mechanic, latterly discharged from the Royal Air Force in possibly questionable circumstances, who nevertheless has gotten a rather good practical training in the skills of the hour from somewhere, even if the rest of the crew don’t quite understand where that somewhere was, and have certainly never heard of an obscure British military service called RAF Mountain Rescue.

I arrived in the United States in the early fall of 1986, just one year out of the mob. A year earlier I had been rather rapidly drummed out of the service -- it took less than 24 hours from the time the signal came to the moment I headed over the Tay Bridge in my battered Beetle, without kit, orders, or rank for the first time in seven years, free at last. I did, however, get an honorable discharge, and I kept my pension and gratuity, both precisely pro-rated to the last day of service. Fair’s fair, as my mum always says. Testimony perhaps to the fact that my conscientious objection to further service was sincere -- perhaps too sincere for most MR troops’ tastes in politics. These days I’m a Quaker, a peacenik, and even, when occasion demands, a protester. But back then I was an MR troop. Once a troop, always a troop -- and this essay is mostly about what a troop can do and experience in the American West if he or she ever gets the chance.

How I got here: Soon after discharge, I had met, fallen in love with, and eventually married an American woman who was visiting Scotland in the fall of 1985. By mid-1986, the relative opportunities available between our two homelands were starting to look rather unbalanced in favor of America. The best I had been able to do in Scotland was starting and running a rather shaky outdoor program for disadvantaged kids from Glasgow and Morayshire, working out of the Findhorn intentional community (read: commune). I’d had some fun, trying to get the scheme off the ground, but when the Prince’s Trust turned us down for a grant, and I knew that I would probably never get paid that salary I’d been hoping for, things looked bleak. I realized that my organizing skills needed a little honing before I could be good at starting organizations. And for Beverly, my American wife, there had been no paid work at all in that entire year together, a sad state of affairs for a woman who was used to living a rather relaxed Californian lifestyle as a relatively well-paid environmental activist.

We borrowed money for the air-fares, and arrived in San Francisco in late August with a Karrimor backpack and three hundred dollars between us. The woman who is now my best (and longest) friend in the United States, Diane Kopec (a marine mammalogist and fine field biologist), collected us at the airport in a battered VW bus. It was dusk, and surprisingly hot. The exotic aromatic scents of the California coast, sage and surf, drifted in through the windows as we drove the Pacific Highway to her home, where we would stay for the next few weeks while finding our feet. I found various jobs as a mechanic and handyman, my "sumpy" training holding up surprisingly well to the demands of the lower end of the US job market. Luckily, the RAF trains it’s technicians from the ground up. Basic principles learned at Halton, and applied in sections up and down the UK, can be applied to any kind of engine or equipment. Beverly eventually went back to her environmental work. I bought a series of similarly battered VWs (I think I went through a total of three that first year). And I began to drive them to the mountains, those oh-so-tempting snow clad buttresses to the east, which could be seen even from San Francisco rooftops on a clear day. The Sierra Nevada. Then the Coast Range. Shasta, Lassen. The Trinity Alps. Desolation Wilderness, and on and on. This was all a kind of wild heaven to a kid from Sheffield, endless Kinder and Stanage, wild and free as far as the eye could see, or the VW could drive.

It took me a while, asking around, to figure out how the rescue and outdoor world was organized in California and the US in general. There are "official" MR outfits scattered here or there, such as the NPS ranger teams, or the military Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Service (ARRS: the famous PJs that troops are familiar with). But there are also volunteer teams, organized under a rather bewildering number of inter-competing national organizations. More on the politics of this later, but for me, after figuring out the business, it was natural to align myself with the civilian volunteer Mountain Rescue Association (MRA), probably the most professional and the most mountaineering-orientated organization. And, for paid work, there are many, many public and private programs that use or hire guides and instructors, although the competition for paid jobs is stiff, and the number of people willing to do the work for free, or very little, tends to drive down the salaries well below that of PT or other educational positions with comparable skill and training levels. Soon after arriving, however, I became a novice member of BAMRU (Bay Area Mountain Rescue Unit), and a part-time, unpaid or poorly-paid, weekend instructor for Outdoors Unlimited (the student outdoor activities program of the University of California at San Francisco). In another landmark step in my American outdoor education, I received my life membership in REI (Recreational Equipment Incorporated), the cooperative outdoor gear store with depots all over the ‘States. And I began to learn the lingo. "‘Biners", or "snaps" for a snap-link "crab". "Litter" for a stretcher, almost always a "Stoke’s". "Raingear": your anorak or caggie, "rain-pants", the caggie bottoms. And so on. After fifteen years, it’s the British terms that are hard to remember.

I went on several searches and rescues with BAMRU. There were some particularly memorable "project" searches in Yosemite National Park. A project search is a major search and recovery operation, usually when the National Park Service pulls out all the stops to find a lost visitor. A big one may include upwards of two hundred personnel. The NPS have to be especially diligent because court judgments have occasionally found them to be liable for the safety of their park visitors, however stupid or unprepared these guests turn out to be. The basic rescue practices from the RAFMRS stood me in good stead, but I also learned some new skills. One notion entirely new to me was the idea of tracking. With much of American wilderness and backcountry travel taking place on developed trails and roads, and with the far better weather of the North American continent, at least in spring, summer, and fall, the scope for following the victim’s tracks to their location or accident scene is much greater than in the UK. The best times to track are dawn and dusk, when the shadows of feet and tyre imprints are cast long on the ground. You use a "flashlight," held at a low angle to track in the dark, and a "tracking stick" (used rather like a drill sergeant’s pace stick) to measure the stride and predict the next footfall. I got to be rather good at this new game, a skill that stood me in good stead in later work as a field biologist.

A lot of the techniques, however, were much the same as those used in the UK. Radio work tended towards numerical codes, particularly when discussing casualty condition (many people, especially journalists, have scanners and listen into law enforcement and emergency services broadcasts), but I could break into English-accented open text and be understood well enough. The standard Stoke’s litter is lowered either horizontally or vertically much as with the Bell system. The Stokes system is lighter and smaller, and it seems to me more versatile as a result, but you can’t use the litter as easily for traction as you can the Bell. In fact, rescuers rarely use traction even on long limb breaks, that technique, as with many others, requires a doctor’s supervision here, unless you happen to be a paramedic in touch with a doctor by radio. You do tend to see more doctors on MRA volunteer teams here, though, which helps. No more would I carry ampules of morphine or Fortral around the hills though, as we used to do in the UK -- that would be to contravene the strict US laws on medical drugs! Other differences: A ‘scoop" is the practice of lowering the Stokes in the vertical position, generally with a single rescuer, going up underneath the casualty and then continuing in the horizontal position, made possible by the use of an adjustable four-legged "spider" sling. After a while, I realized that lowering methods need not be limited to the ones learned by rote in the UK, and I began to adapt to the new equipment and come up with hybrid systems that also worked well. A particularly interesting notion, the "long line", is a rescue done using a fixed rope attached to a helicopter. Winches are rarer here than in the SAR Squadron aircraft, as indeed are "proper" rescue helicopters, so one alternative is simply to clip a (weighted) length of non-stretch rescue rope or cable to the bottom eye of whatever chopper you are using, fly in, and use the rope to move casualty and/or rescuer from a remote rescue scene to an LZ (landing zone), where transfer to land transport, or the interior of the helicopter, can safely be made. The choppers mostly seemed to be Bells, about the size of a Gazelle, or in fire-fighting, Vietnam era "Hueys", a little larger. A call-out is still a call-out. That was one term that didn’t change.

And there were call outs. A telephone call in the middle of the night would send me out to the vehicle, either across the coastal hills (I lived on the Pacific side) of the Bay Area to meet the BAMRU van or ambulance in Palo Alto (otherwise known as Silicon Valley -- our team included a number of computer "techies" or "geeks") or straight out to the scene in one or the other VW. One particularly memorable BAMRU call out to support the NPS at Yosemite in 1987 involved a institutionalized, developmentally disabled man on vacation with his group in the Park, who had left the campsite while unattended by his caregivers sometime during the day, and wandered off into the Tuolumne wilderness -- miles and miles of forests and peaks, with bears, cougars, and precipices galore! Another BAMRU mainstay and I were given a tracking party search to do by ourselves. We had been given a description of the shoes the boy was wearing -- some enterprising Ranger had driven to town with a witness from the caregiver staff to buy an identical pair to show to all the trackers. We hiked off slowly up a forested trail to a corrie lake that was a likely spot for the guy to end up, searching for tracks and track fragments that might just match the shoes, stepping on the edges of the trail only, so as not to disturb the evidence. And, of course, we found some small signs, but then you’ll always find a track fragment that will look like the one you’re looking for, if you want to badly enough -- a chronic problem with tracking is the tracker’s ability to self-disceive. In our naive concern, we called the information in to base and went on looking for more. Pretty soon we had a decent series of the same, or similar, track fragments in a dusty spot on the trail above the lake -- heading, unfortunately, to the north side of a peak with a precipitous south face. We called it in again, but soon lost the tracks on a rocky section, and then the footpath itself petered out. Next thing we knew, we were told to meet a chopper back at the lake. Scrambling aboard, the pilot took off with us there to verify the direction of the track. He then dropped us at base to start a new search. Very shortly thereafter, the same pilot found the victim on that peak, quite safe, but with no idea where he was, and rather distressed. Did we find his tracks? Was that the trail he took? I have to say that I doubt it very much. There were any number of other ways to get to that peak, especially through the woods, but you never know.

Another California incident revolved around the issue of discipline, and was in some ways a continuation of my education about a dissident or rebel element in the American psyche. They are, after all, a nation of revolutionaries, so none of this should come as a surprise to British folk. This particular event involved not rebellious colonials, or even hippy environmentalists, a fraternity with which I was by then quite familiar, but rebellious hard rock climbers. I had been called out to another project rescue in Yosemite, this time for a little girl lost in the woods, close to the site of the previously described rescue. As was the policy then, and I believe is still, in Yosemite, the Park service keeps its rescue team numbers up by using volunteers, who have to be rock climbers, and are housed for free at the climber’s camp, Camp Four, or "Sunnyside." They get paid for two days training a week, and are expected to swell the ranks of the permanent staff of Climbing Rangers on rescues. They need to be climbers because of the Yosemite terrain, and because of the relatively large number of cliff, or "high angle" rescues.

Not surprisingly, this system attracts some interesting characters, and even the occasional ne’er do well. John Dill was the guy in charge of Yosemite rescue at the time, and for all I know still is. These Camp Four guys seemed to me to be an impressively ambivalent resource, sometimes great, sometimes terrible. I showed up for this project search, sufficiently well-known to the NPS permanent staff by now to be given a fifteen-person crew, including several NPS "indoor" staff, some civilian team members pulled in from all areas of California, some Eagle Scouts, by God, and two of these climbing guys from Camp Four. The mission was to sweep a relatively flat, forested area about half a mile wide by a mile and half long. Part of the area was right on the road and crossed by a trail, and it was likely that the victim had wandered off either and simply lost her way in the woods. The mission called for a detailed sweep, over 95% confidence, to exclude this area from further consideration. We were told that the girl was almost certainly "down" by now, several days having gone by with cold mountain nights and hot days. In other words, we were looking for either a little girl’s body, or a very sick little girl lying unconscious or terribly weak on the ground. As readers will know well, this means checking every possible place in the line of the "sweep", in this case every tree, every cavity, and every rotten log. It also means some serious concentration on the part of rescuers, good "line" discipline, good radio control of the ends and middle of the line. It means looking backwards every two or three paces. It means a very tedious, unromantic, hard day’s slog in the woods. And the "boy" climbers were just not up to it.

We started off well enough, the edges of the searched area passed by the line marked every twenty to thirty feet with surveyor’s day-glo tape hung from trees, so that we might find the edge of the searched area on the way back with the sweep. I had briefed the crew well on what was needed, the usual kind of pep talk on how tedious it might be, but that we had to do a good job, that even if we didn’t find the victim, we’d free up rescuers to look elsewhere. I’d received nods of appreciation from the NPS staff and the civvy team members, who no doubt had been there before. The Eagle Scouts took on rather earnest expressions -- the big time, by their standards. Someone was relying on them! The climbers had looked rather blase about it all. I put this down to their obvious experience at the work -- having been told that they had been in the park all summer, I expected them to be at least the equivalent of party trained. As it turned out, they were a walking disaster. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Their main crime was not waiting for the rest of the line on halts and stops. They’d simply pull ahead of the rest of us, leaving huge gaps because it was hard for their neighbors to keep track of where they had been. Or they would lazily walk around various obstacles, bunching up right next to their neighbors, again leaving any number of unsearched holes, each large enough to hide a dozen unconscious children. And they would chat, about routes, girls, whatever. Who knows what they thought they were doing. After the first few sweeps and various complaints from worried crew mates, I took them aside for a "word". After about half the job had been done, and I had to admit to myself that the kid could still have been in the searched area, I simply sacked my two Camp Four rescuers, sending them to walk back to base with a flea in their ear (we had been dropped off by NPS vehicle, so they had a few miles to go), while calling in the reason for their dismissal to base. And we searched the whole thing over, of course, not finding any casualty, but that was the point -- not finding her was as good as finding her, on this search plan. Eventually she was found by another party, still alive, but unconscious and dehydrated. I never did find out if the recalcitrant climbers were actually paid for that day’s "work."

During this California period, Derek "Scottie" Scott came out from Kinloss with a group of MR troops, and I was able to help host them on an official RAF expedition to California’s peaks. Scottie, always a solid, straightforward, and emotionally honest troop, had stood by me during the difficult period of my discharge. I loaned the expedition a van, albeit of rather advanced age, scrounged up some other gear for them to save on air freight costs, stoves and tents and such, and made some professional introductions with the wildland agencies and rescue teams, including Dill, and Mitchell Yee, the team leader of BAMRU and a personal friend. For a three week period Scottie and the troops drove that "California Dreaming" van -- a classic 1967, split window VW bus, my pride and joy, complete with Beach Boys and Greatful Dead tapes -- all around the mountains of the Golden State. I came out in my Beetle on weekends, and my sister showed up from university at Leicester (with a rather good-looking friend). The troops climbed and hiked their hearts out. It was old home time for a while. One of the weekends involved a joint training with BAMRU on Mt. Shasta, a fifteen thousand foot glaciated peak in the north of the state, a semi-dormant volcano. A night ascent was planned, always an easier proposition on California glaciers in the summer due to refreezing of the snow, which melts to knee-deep or worse slush on a hot day. At about twelve thousand feet, with the summit less than a "ben" away, my right crampon broke in two, and subsequently defied attempts to be held together with webbing straps. About the same time, to the north and several thousand feet below, over the state line in Oregon, we could see the flashes of a "dry" or "sheet" lightning storm illuminating the vast forest. The storm gave the expression that you were watching an artillery exchange after the fashion of trench warfare in WWI. An explosion in one part of the forest was matched by another across the way. It was the strangest sight. I had to retire because of the crampon, but several weeks later I learned that this storm had started the forest fire described earlier.

Scottie, of course, died of cancer soon after, at the tragically early age of thirty. His widow Cathy has almost the last word in Frank Card’s history of the MRS. I was saddened to hear of his death, but in retrospect, helping to make sure that Scottie and the lads had a good time in California was one of the few unequivocally useful and good things I’ve been able to do in my life. And the humourous irony of several young British servicemen having a great time hiking and climbing and driving around California in such a cultural icon -- an American "hippy" bus -- on the RAF’s expense, makes Scottie’s death seem even more poignant. Is there a God, after all? If there is, He or She has a highly advanced sense of humour -- and of tragedy.

The forest fire mentioned in the first paragraph was the largest call-out event that I attended in California, and the only paid rescue work I did during my year in that state. It was also the last rescue work I did in that state. The range was the Shasta/Trinity Alps area, the year 1987. We maintained that ad-hoc team for about six weeks, of which I worked three. When not on rescue, we were required to assist the civilian EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians, in this case local ambulance staff) with sick call, which went on all day, but was busiest in the evenings when fire-fighter crews changed shifts. We did a steady business in cuts, bruises, sprains, strains, and something new for me, painful poison oak lesions, both on the skin and in the airway (from breathing smoke from burning poison oak plant). After a week or more of huge lines and hundreds of patients at each sick call, the Forest Service literally "called out the guard"-- in this case a National Guard MASH unit. These part-time soldiers were doctors and nurses in real life, all at the same southern California hospital, but comprised a paid, volunteer guard unit in their spare time, much as do the "Territorials" in the UK. And the equipment they showed up with was truly space-age. When Americans move in, they do so with style! The MASH transformed the fire camp using portable rubberized tents -- completely sterile, each with air-conditioning unit and generator -- to make operating theatres and recovery wards. Ambulances arrived, proper four wheel drive ambulances built to military specifications, which were then available for our rescues. And, of course, so was the aforementioned fat male nurse, who was assigned to our tiny MR unit at our request, to dispense authorized analgesics and help keep our patients comfortable while we got them off the hill. One interesting facet of the sick call work was that we discovered that firefighters suffered from a great deal of muscle and back pain, and so we dispensed a lot of back rubs, and eventually encouraged the crew members to work on each other’s sore spots, which helped a little with the case load.

One crew I’d met at fire camp came from Montana, a wild state in the Northwest that I’d heard good things about. By this time, my marriage to Beverly was on the rocks. The large amount of time I spent in the mountains, and my wife’s unwanted exposure to British servicemen (sometimes so-called progressive people are not as open-minded as they like to think they are) all contributed to a chronically difficult cultural mismatch -- a California hippy and a working class British ex-serviceman. We had separated and I had been away from home for several weeks already. It didn’t take much of an invite to get me to continue up north to Montana when my fire time was up. Once there, it took ten years to leave. Montana is a good place. My rescue experiences in Montana, where I was able to lead a rescue team -- of sorts -- for a few years, will have to wait for another issue of OTH, as Frank says that there isn’t the room in this one, but I can promise you, the yarn will be worth the wait.

My time in Montana was dominated by guiding work. For much of the ten years I lived in that state I was a professional mountain guide or outdoor instructor of one kind or another. The first outdoor job I held was in what is euphemistically called "wilderness therapy". Many American parents with troublesome teenagers send their kids away to wilderness schools. Courts in the US often sentence troubled youth to periods of time in wilderness therapy programs, as an alternative to traditional jail or youth detention. This is not the time or place to describe my experiences with these tearaways at any length, but the main fact is that I was now able to give up mechanical work to live full time in the backcountry. I spent the years of 1988 and 1989 in far northwest Montana, in the Bull River and Trout Creek area, living in a rather dilapidated log cabin in the woods, becoming an experienced woodsman, hunting, fishing, and growing gardens for my "meat and veg", and working for my bread and beer at the nearby wilderness therapy school, first as an outdoor instructor, later as part of the management team. During this period I also volunteered as wilderness ranger for the local forest service wilderness area (the Cabinet Mountains), explored other British Columbia and Montana wilderness, and familiarized myself with the rescue services, or lack thereof, in the undeveloped northwest.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that there just were not good mountain rescue teams in Montana in the late eighties, except for the professional organizations at Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks.Various friends and acquaintances told stories of lost hikers and crashed aeroplanes that were never found, incidents poorly handled, or just never responded to at all -- by any authorities. Here some explanation is needed of the cultural and political context of American rescue services, because it will all certainly seem a little strange and foreign to readers. In 1988 I joined the volunteers of the Sanders County Search and Rescue Team, a county government department under the Sheriff’s Office, and a member team of NASAR (National Association for Search and Rescue). At the time I was merely intrigued to discover how poorly trained and incompetent most of the members were at mountaineering -- It took me a while to realize that the team was primarily instituted to rescue lost hunters in relatively flat country, and people missing while driving the endless local forest tracks -- not climbers or mountaineers. They also fulfilled the role of the old western Sheriff’s Posse -- looking for bad guys, or, I guess, bad gals too. Members were generally poor to middling hikers (no runners at all), didn’t understand contour maps that well, had no personal mountaineering gear, and so on. What they did like to do was drive around in four wheel drive vehicles and talk on the radio. Some rode horses in the backcountry to search, a new thing to me at the time, but an idea I came to accept. However, you miss a lot from a horse or a four wheel drive vehicle, and the lack of mountaineering training ensured great difficulties with any rescue on steep ground. Montana has an awful lot of steep ground, alpine mountains, glaciers, precipices, everything a mountaineer could want. Simply put, the Sanders County SAR team as constituted was not a mountain rescue team in the way we know the species. They were an adjunct department of the Sheriff’s Office used for easy searches, for driving backcountry roads looking for people, and occasionally -- looking for criminals in the woods. In hindsight, I have come to realize that my sense of MR culture and of a "proper" team was so strong that I had cultural blinkers on and couldn’t realize that I was dealing with an entirely different institution, with its own strengths and weaknesses. But it wasn’t the MR I knew.

At the time I was using the wilderness regularly as a working guide, and a volunteer ranger, but also as a mountaineer, a hunter, and a fisherman. As someone who made part of his living taking people into the mountains, placing them at risk, I felt a moral obligation to support the rescue services, and in so much as this was welcomed by the team, to help improve some aspects of the training. I taught map-reading, abseiling, and high angle rescue techniques to the team on several occasions. After two years, I moved from Sanders County to Missoula County, to take up a university degree program at the University of Montana. There the county SAR team was neither a member of NASAR, nor the MRA, but (wait for it) something called the "Jeep Four by Four Search and Rescue Association" the third, and least mountain-orientated, of the national organizations. And things, naturally, went from bad to worse. I joined the team, along with my college house-mate and long-time friend, Michelle (Mich) Carey, a veteran Outward Bound Instructor and Program Director. Mich and I felt the same sense of obligation -- if we were to be using the backcountry to make a living in guiding and outdoor programs, then we should support the backcountry rescue services. But our attendance at the weekly SAR trainings and at only a couple of incidents were sufficient to tell us both that this was not going to be easy. There were other members at the time who felt much the same way. Women mountaineers such as Mich or our friend Andrea felt particularly that their expected role seemed to be to run base camps and cook food, this in spite of the fact that they could out-climb and out-hike and generally outperform the older male members at all mountaineering skills.

Help came from other directions. After a few months in Missoula, I was hired by Wilderness Institute (WI) as their field program coordinator. WI is a University of Montana Forestry School research and education institution operating a number of excellent conservation education programs using mountain and other kinds of wilderness settings. I had the privilege of running their field program for four years while an undergraduate student. My boss was Dr. Alan McQuillan, another Brit, who had a firmly good opinion of British mountain safety practices and the RAFMRS. I was hired to make the outdoor program safe, which is what I proceeded to do. This in turn gave me a little negotiating authority with the US Forest Service, the University, and other parties interested in mountain safety, particularly the local climbing community, which by now had a great fund of horror stories of bungled crag rescues. When things at Missoula County SAR came to a head (I seem to remember it was an argument with the team leader in which Mich and I insisted that snap-link carabiners ought not be used for main belay systems), I was asked to leave, and Mich resigned in protest. Two other good members followed, and this group, along with many other local wilderness guides and the climbing community, became the core of the Western Montana Mountain Rescue Team (WMMRT). We instituted as a non-profit volunteer organization supported by the university student government system, and began training towards status as an recognized MRA team. The MRA chipped in with equipment, donated by Utah state MRA teams, which some members drove up for us, including ropes and a litter. Local climbing shops also chipped in, and we received a university grant. Pretty soon, we had much of what was needed if we were to specialize in offering technical rescue and project search assistance to all the county teams in western Montana. This, we had decided, was the missing link, the best role for us to play. With the proximity of the university, we had the support of the majority of the climbers in western Montana, while outlying county teams were lucky if they had one rock-climber or mountaineer each. There are a dozen or more counties in western Montana, and to drive from one end of our self-chosen territory to another might take as long as twelve hours, but we felt that to have at least one MRA team (besides the Glacier and Yellowstone teams, which are classified as ex-officio MRA members) was a great improvement, and could only serve to foster further gains. Which, in the end, turned out to be true. As we worked on this plan, we also worked hard to gain the confidence of the MRA, MRA officials quietly explained to us that the system we had devised for Montana had been realized by long experience in other states to be the best way of dealing with the low competency of the SAR teams. Universities, apparently, work very well as bases for MRA teams. Even BAMRU, in fact, although I was unaware of the connection at the time, was first instituted at Stanford in California.

One other program that was instituted at this time to "go along" with the new team was a series of mountaineering first aid classes, called Wilderness First Responder, or WFR (woofer) in the US. These began at the Forestry School under the auspices of Wilderness Institute, and were soon an annual event. David McEvoy was an ambulance man "liberated" from Missoula County Search and Rescue to WMMRT in the early days. He and his partner and co-team member Andrea Stevens accepted the challenge to design their own WFR program, and eventually started a business delivering WFR courses both at the university, to WMMRT, and to the SAR services in general in western Montana.

WMMRT’s first call-out was actually no call-out at all, and a personal tragedy for me. I had been involved in field biology studies as part of my undergraduate degree, and one of the researcher I had worked for was Kevin Roy, whose name suited him, for he looked in many ways like Liam Neeson’s "Rob Roy." Kevin and I worked together on and off for several months in the winter of 1989-1990, doing some fairly serious field biology in my old stomping ground, the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, reintroducing an endangered mustelidid species called fisher. Fishers are a kind of super-sized polecat. Kevin and I became good friends, and he helped me gain confidence in my new career. In the summer of 1992, I attended Kevin’s wedding, to a young biologist called Vicki. Five months later, Kevin’s aeroplane was overdue from a bear tracking trip over the mountains east of Yellowstone, Wyoming, with Kevin, a pilot, and one other biologist passenger on board. By now it was wintertime. Only the best snoeshoers and skiers can safely move around in the high mountain backcountry in wintertime, due to the very heavy snowpack and avalanche danger. WMMRT offered it’s services, and some members went on standby, but we were never asked for. Apparently the search authorities had all the help they needed. As it was, there would have been nothing we could have done. It took four years to find Kevin’s ‘plane. Hunters came across it in a forest clearing one fall. The human remains suggested that it had indeed been an instant death, a small consolation for all Kevin’s many friends at the university and, of course, his grieving young widow.

Later that same year of 1993, however, WMMRT got the chance to show what it could do, with a call-out to the Mission Mountains, to help the Flathead Indian Tribal Search and Rescue look for four members of a local family, including three children, in a light plane crash high in the Missions. The Missions are glaciated alpine peaks, topping out at 10,000 and more feet, formidable in summer or winter. WMMRT, with its predominantly student membership of young climbers, gave several hundred man- and woman-hours to the search over three days hard work, covering some of the thickest and steepest timber country in the range. I especially remember getting the entire team soaking wet on a river crossing, which Mich later proved to be unnecessary, a decent log being quite handy for use as a bridge. The ‘plane was eventually sighted by a helicopter on a snow field (white ‘plane on white snow) after a week of searching. The Tribal authorities had by then called off the ground search. The family itself had chartered the helicopter that found the wreck. All had been killed.

A couple of climbing incidents were also covered by WMMRT that year, to the south of Missoula, in the Bitteroot Mountains of Ravalli County, lending credence to our claim that we would help county teams with the difficult high angle situations as well as the project searches. Finally, in the fall of the year, a Forest Service contract fire-fighting ‘plane, a converted Martin Marauder bomber, was overdue one evening in Missoula. By the next day, the proverbial manure hit the fan as the USFS, the Civil Air Patrol, two county teams, and WMMRT searched for the ‘plane. Airborne searches were hindered in fog and light snow for the first part of the day. The WMMRT advance party consisted of Mich Carey, myself, and Mario Locatelli, a veteran Italian guide and both a WMMRT member and Ravalli County SAR member. We were given the job of climbing the east ridge of St. Joseph’s Peak (about 9000 feet) from the valley floor (five thousand feet of very steep ascent), searching all the way. At about our half-way point, the plane was sighted by a fixed wing spotter on the very top of the ridge, and radio messages began to fly thick and fast. Then followed the hill climb of my life as Mario, Mich and I raced to get there before the Missoula County team, who were heading for the same point, only using snowmobiles to go up the back road, cutting ouit more than three quarters of the ascent. In some respects, this race was a great piece of foolishness on outr part, but I think both Mario and I felt a serious slight to our pride if we didn’t get there first, damn it! Mich, lacking the testosterone effect, was more prosaic, but came along doggedly all the same. It the end, we all got there about the same time, Missoula County and WMMRT.

What we found was a familiar sight, at least to an MR troop. Wreckage everywhere, a clear path of the crash. the stink of AVTUR. Both pilots were dead. It took us a while to find everything. The weather, still cold, but steadily improving, cleared sufficiently to allow a small chopper -- borrowed from fire-fighting -- to land with County Sheriff’s deputies and USFS investigators. We were then cleared to collect the human remains, which we loaded into the chopper with some difficulty. All this took several chopper trips, as this was a light aircraft, not particularly good in the forty knot wind that was blowing. At one point a Forest Service woman ranger and I were placing the last remains (gathered in a body bag) in the small freight space in the chopper, when the pilot felt a strong gust and decided he just had to take off for safety’s sake -- before we quite had the door shut! I managed to slam the thing down, just in time to get knocked over by the rear of the main cabin as the aircraft came around quickly in the wind. Both of us fell on the ground in a messy heap together. The fact that the LZ was right next to a four or five hundred foot crag was no great comfort either to us or the pilot throughout this grisly operation.

Some years later I took a hike up to the crash site with some Forest Service wilderness personnel from the new Arthur Carhart Wilderness Ranger training center (named after a famous wilderness activist and USFS ranger), which was by then established just outside of Missoula (and lending yet another voice to the call for better rescue standards in Montana). The rangers were Diane Taliaferro, also a WMMRT member, and an old friend of mine, and another woman whose name escapes me now. All large remains of the aeroplane had been removed by heavy lift chopper. The family, we discovered, had built a cairn at the edge of the crash site. Some of the pilot’s clothing, and a St. Christopher medallion, were woven into the stones, and a rough cross had been scratched on a flat stone at the base. These professional rangers were quite moved to see the new structure, which was, however, quite illegal under the very strict wilderness management rules used in the US. As it was, I believe the cairn was allowed to stay. It reminded me of the several cairns there are to mountain victims and even RAF mountain rescuers in the British Isles.

Sadly for me, my time in Montana had to come to an end. I worked at the university through my bachelors and master’s degrees, but for the doctorate, I felt I had to leave and try another college. Too many degrees from one college, the sages said, is not a good sign of a well-rounded academic. Bloody old sages. In the late summer of 1996, I wished a very fond farewell to WI, WMMRT, and the Montana wilderness, and traveled (in my "newest" old VW, via Canada, the "scenic route") to the University of Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington, DC. I soon discovered ways, however, to get through a PhD and live in the hills, this time the hills of Appalachia, but this was, I thought, the end of my mountain rescue career.

As it happened, six years later, with the doctorate complete, I was hired at a college in Maine that has its own volunteer SAR team. Now I’m the faculty member I/C the team and have an avenue to explore MR in Maine, where we have hills that would be quite satisfactory to any troop. Trouble is, I’m badly out of shape!

Mick Womersley (ex Leeming, Linton on Ouse, Leuchars)

Monroe, Maine, USA