“The Adirondacks have been getting hammered every year,” said John Bulmer, president of Adirondack Mountain Rescue, a volunteer SAR team in upstate New York. “[Rescue calls] are just higher and higher and higher. You just see really bad choices. They show up with one water bottle from the store and a pair of sneakers.”
In recent years, rescue crews in Boulder, Colorado, have seen their call volumes climb by about 20% annually. Rescues in the Seattle area have nearly doubled over the past 10 years, reaching nearly 200 last year.
Colorado Search and Rescue Association at work
In southwest Utah, crews that were taking 50 to 60 calls a year less than a decade ago took 130 last year.
“We're keeping pace but we definitely see the writing on the wall,” said Jeff Sparhawk, a member of the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group in Boulder County and the president of the Colorado Search and Rescue Association. “To ask volunteers to get out of work 150 times, that's not sustainable.”
As the need for rescuers increases, many SAR teams have been losing members to attrition. Most volunteers pay thousands of dollars to equip themselves, and they commit many hours to rigorous training and must be prepared to respond without warning.
“The person who volunteers has to have a job that is very flexible, lets them go at a moment’s notice — they could be gone for an indeterminate amount of time — and have a certain amount of discretionary cash,” said Chris Boyer, executive director of the National Association For Search And Rescue, a Virginia-based nonprofit. “They're paying for their own training, their own uniforms, their own gas.”
These requirements have made it especially difficult for younger members, who are often less financially secure, to fill the thinning ranks of SAR teams.
While many public lands were closed early in the pandemic, most have since reopened, with parks and forests across the country reporting record visitation.
SAR leaders say they’ve rescued many people who traveled to the wilderness to escape strict urban lockdowns. Sparhawk said several Colorado teams are seeing call volumes at all-time highs, and Utah’s Washington County is on pace to far exceed previous records.
Washington state, despite a slowdown in calls in March and April, is set to exceed last year’s total, thanks to an ongoing spike in rescues as public lands have reopened.
Leaders reported that some of their members have lost work or switched jobs, leaving them unable to deploy. The SAR members most likely to be available, retirees, also face the highest risk from COVID-19.
“We have volunteers who are high-risk themselves or have a high-risk individual in their house, and they're just flat-out not responding,” Brenes said.
Crew leaders say their biggest fear is one of their members testing positive for COVID-19. Brenes cited a recent mission that required 40 volunteers; if one of them had tested positive, all 40 would have had to quarantine for 14 days.
Teams have had to decide whether to continue carpooling — the most efficient response tactic — or drive separately to maintain social distancing. Many groups have scrambled to acquire personal protective equipment for their members, and they still face challenges in the field. In Utah, responders sweat through their masks in about 20 minutes in the desert heat.
“We're up close and personal with the patient and other rescuers,” said Colorado’s Sparhawk. “Some of the masks are really hard to breathe through when you’re doing rigorous physical activity at high elevation. … We could lose significant portions of teams very quickly.”
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