Member of Boulder-based group writes compelling book about emergency service
By Scott Willoughby
Denver Post
Copyright 2007 The Denver Post
All Rights Reserved
BOULDER, Colo. — It can happen at any moment. Day or night, rain or shine, summer or winter - the cellphones ring and pagers buzz all around Boulder and the lives of their owners are altered in an instant.
The task at hand is suddenly less pressing. A life, possibly more than one, is on the line, and the members of the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Rescue Group (RMRG) grab their gear and head for the hills in an effort to save it. Every situation is unknown until rescuers arrive on the scene. Preparation is seemingly impossible.
“Until you arrive, you don’t know what’s going on, the person’s exact condition. Usually it’s something new, and generally pretty shocking if it’s a bad injury,” said Mark Scott-
Nash, who has been on more than 100 “field missions” during eight years as an RMRG volunteer. “But after you’ve done it for a while, you’re pretty prepared mentally.”
Scott-Nash, 45, recently took the mental stride from personal preparedness to public illumination on the topic of mountain rescue, a unique niche in the emergency service community filled by dedicated mountaineers who frequently put others’ lives ahead of their own. His new book, “Playing for Real: Stories of Rocky Mountain Rescue” (CMC Press, 2007), gives an insider’s glimpse into the mountain rescue fraternity that most people would otherwise never know.
“Over the time that I’ve been in Rocky Mountain Rescue, I saw a lot of very interesting, amazing things during rescues, and I noticed that when I related these stories to other people, their jaws would drop and their eyes would pop open,” Scott-Nash said. “I knew the stories were interesting, but other people thought they were just amazing. Other people don’t know anything about it, and it just seemed like there was a story waiting to be told.
“Everybody knows what firemen do because there are tens of thousands of them and you see them all the time. But mountain rescue is only in the mountains. It’s a low-profile kind of thing. We don’t really talk to the press, and we don’t advertise when we go out. We don’t do press releases telling everybody what we do. Maybe we should. My book might help bring out some of the work we do.”
As evidenced by high-profile media coverage of operations ranging from the recent rescue of a Kansas man with a severe ankle injury in Clear Creek Canyon to the helicopter crash on Mount Hood, Ore., a couple of years back, life-
threatening situations in the wild can easily hold an audience captive.
The missions in Scott-Nash’s book range from airplane crashes to avalanche and ice climbing accidents, some with happier endings than others.
But beyond a compelling story, Scott-Nash says, is the reality that accidents can happen to anyone in the outdoors. And the information in his book is another resource in the mountain rescue toolbox.
“The bottom line is these things really happen,” Scott-Nash said. “People should know what’s going on.”
Mountain rescue differs from other emergency service groups in that rescuers are almost always helping people participating in the same pastimes as they do for play. An integral component of the mountain rescue mentality is taking pleasure in playing in the mountains and maintaining the skills necessary to do so.
While the contrast of discovering sometimes gruesome situations in the pristine, natural places mountain rescuers love most can beget its own brand of trauma, Scott-Nash says it also serves as a reminder that a mountain’s beauty can be deceiving.
“A lot of times people go out not understanding the environment and the risks they are taking,” he said. “The mountains are not Disneyland, even though it seems like that at times. They can be benevolent, but even in Colorado, you are pretty remote when you go up to the mountains. If something goes wrong, you’re not going to get a helicopter in there every time, and definitely not an ambulance.
“Accidents do happen. A rock can fall off a mountain, hit you in the head and kill you. Unless you don’t go up to the mountains at all, which is not an option for most of us, there is some risk involved. But understanding that will help you avoid it.”
Like all RMRG volunteers, Scott-Nash is an avid mountain climber, understanding the allure of risk and the attitude of learning things on your own, even if those lessons are sometimes learned the hard way.
“I’d say the most important lesson I’ve learned from my experience is that accidents happen to everybody, from people who don’t understand anything about the outdoors to people who are far more expert about what they are doing than I’d ever hope to be,” he said.
“And both end up the same way: severe injury or death. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop recreating, though.”
Summer, and July specifically, is historically the busiest time of the year for the 60-year-old RMRG - the state’s oldest volunteer search-
and-rescue organization - and this year is on track for a repeat performance. Already this year, 44 emergency calls have made their way through the RMRG switchboard, 22 resulting in field missions. Historically, the group averages 120 to 135 missions a year, 60 to 65 percent of which are genuine emergencies.
Last year, RMRG members volunteered an estimated 20,000 hours of service - nearly double the rate of the previous five-year average - attributed to numerous litter evacuations requiring complex rope work, new federal training requirements and three large searches. The largest - a five-day search for Lance Hering accounting for 7,000 person hours through the foothills west of Eldorado Springs - was ultimately determined by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office as a “staged disappearance.”
Such hoaxes are infrequent, but serve as testimony to the dedication of what Scott-Nash describes as the busiest volunteer team in the nation.
“Rocky Mountain Rescue is priceless. We actually save lives every year, many lives,” Scott-Nash said. “If somebody is stuck in the mountains, it’s not a trivial thing. We can’t leave them there. That just won’t work.”