Lost and Found: Inside Search and Rescue Operations

Command team three, radio check. Five one two one point five three six six nine. Good copy. Good copy on the coordinates. A friend of a friend became lost while solo peak begging in the North Central Cascades, and I got the word that he was missing. And that actually kinda really sparked that interest to I I I wanna go out there. I'll go home and I'll pack my pack, and I just need someone to call me and where to go. Well, no one's calling some random person to go out and help. But so I had to search more and and actually find the organization. I got into volunteering with Search and Rescue a little over thirteen years ago. I started off with a local community CERT program. And, once I completed that training realized that unless we had a a large area natural disaster that the training and effort that I was willing to invest just really wouldn't get used very often. I learned about, volunteering with search and rescue through a neighbor and good friend and joined the Explorer Search and Rescue training program and haven't looked back since. We have a lot of mountains around here, and, often we are on the wrong side of the mountain from the person we are trying to talk to. So, you know, get getting clear communications is often very challenging. We can have teams that are isolated and unable to, you know, make contact with base. So and base doesn't know exactly One of the largest communication challenges that we face in the resources they need. One of the largest communication challenges that we face in the field is the terrain that we, have most of our missions in. Probably over seventy percent of our missions are, along the I ninety corridor here in Washington. And it's, generally mountainous terrain with lots of wonderful lush, foliage. And so propagation of RF, is already severely limited. Add to that, the natural train from a trail head where a command post might be to where a subject might be located on another valley over, makes it a constant challenge to make sure that we can always communicate with the field teams that are out looking to rescue someone. We we need to be able to communicate both from the teams back to base and also between the teams to keep ourselves aware of what this what our situation is, where we are located, what the situation of an injured subject is, and there's no better way to do that for us than than having two way radios. Phones are sometimes useful, but, we're often working in areas where there is no good phones phone coverage. Two way VHF radios are a life and death link between our command staff, the the sheriff's office that we work under, and the field teams that are out looking for a lost or injured subject. Failing that, you know, we we have to figure out what our backup plan is at that point. So, you know, sometimes we'll using inReach communication, which is very short messages and a long lag time. But if we are really out of contact with each other, you know, we start just having to backtrack to places where we can get communications. Or again, talk about relays. So if I if I can't reach base directly, I will try calling out for another team who may be able to hear me and who can then relay my message back to base. Once we got them programmed, we're able to select our channels easily and communicate. I been having problems with them. I personally love, my Icom radios because they are, incredibly reliable. The radios that I have in my truck, the hand towels that I personally own, they've been a lifeline that I know when I need to grab it and communicate something, whether that's to a command, base or to a team in the field, I know that I have the best possible chance of getting my signal through to them. Right now, we have different ways of getting team locations live. A lot of that is done via our our telephones and that being transmitted back to base. It would be nice to be able to just pick it all off one one single thing. You hand a team member a radio, they've got communications, and they have GPS location communications back as well. A lot of the missions that we go on now, have changed from a search and rescue to a we know exactly where you are and rescue you. And so, data telemetry, tracking of field teams and their statuses has revolutionized how we approach search management, the tracking of resources, and really being able to play that that large chess game of moving the pieces into the the correct places, finding the subject that we need to rescue, and getting them back to a higher level of care. We have had, you know, our own our own people get injured in the middle of training. So we have had, you know, men that's been, twisted ankles, things like that. So we have to pivot at that point and focus our efforts on getting our injured person out of the field. We have also had other missions come up not in our immediate area. Like, for example, we were doing training on Tiger Mountain, and there was a pack out of an injured person on, I think it was Mount Si. And so we actually did pivot. We we pulled our teams out of the field, trainee teams, and moved them over to Mount Si to assist with that pack out. The event that we're at today, is a culmination of six months of training for our explorer search and rescue trainees. This weekend, functions as a series of of mock realistic missions that happen across a wide range of different terrains, with a wide range of, realistic scenarios with patient care. So to force them the opportunity to search for a missing subject, to participate in the patient care of someone, and most importantly, the practice of the litter of carrying someone back out so that we can get that person to a higher level of care.