I Passed! And Other News of the SAR and Backpacking Kind

Yyyaaayyy! I'm a very happy—and very relieved—SAR girl. I had test anxiety all last night and this morning before I began demonstrating my new technical rescue skills, as my experienced teammates watched at each test station. I had no idea how it all would go, but I'm happy to report that... well, I didn't suck. 💪 😃

I started off at the patient packaging and litter rigging station, moved on to ascending and rappelling with a hot changeover on the rope, and then went to the pick-off station. (A pick-off is what you do when someone is stranded over the edge, either on a rope or unsupported, perhaps clinging to a rock face.) Next, I set up belay systems, anchors, and mechanical advantage systems and then tied a bunch of different knots and a load-releasing hitch. I had to explain a pretensioned back-tie, make improvised chest and seat harnesses, and be checked for having the required personal tech gear.

When I had gone through all of the testing stations, the instructors had marked off and signed my entire checklist. Phew! Then I got my naew rock rescue patch for my SAR shirt. (Yay! again.)

I'd been a little worried that I hadn't practiced quite enough right before the test, since earlier this week I'd opted instead to go backpacking in Grand Canyon for four days with one of my friends from the team. She's a volunteer for the Park Service and had an opportunity to hike the South Bass Trail to check some archaeological and historical sites for the park. And she invited me to come along. Neither of us had ever hiked this amazing and rather remote trail so I could hardly pass up the chance, though I'd miss two final pre-test tech practice sessions.

But I'm really glad I decided on the hike. Here are some photos:

This is one of the archaeological sites we looked at: granaries used by the Anasazi.

We also saw the remains of the (William Wallace) Bass Camp, the Ross Wheeler Boat on the rocks above Bass Rapids (abandoned in 1915 by Charles Russell and August Tadje after an unsuccessful attempt at running the river), some agave roasting pit,s and other evidence of past human residents of the Canyon.

This is a view from the Esplanade, 1300 vertical feet and a 1.3-mile hike below the South Rim. The Esplanade in this area is covered with vegetation, whereas in other parts of the Canyon it's nothing but rock. Here, we cached a couple of gallons of water where we'd camp on our return trip to the rim...

After leaving the Esplanade, we descended another 3,000 vertical feet over 6.5 miles to the Colorado River, passing through this narrow side canyon in the Red Wall formation along the way. We were glad for the shade on that part of the trail as the temperature soared midday...

By the time we got to the Tonto platform and below, we were starting to roast, but we knew the river was getting closer.

This was our first view of the Colorado River below, which we couldn't see or hear until we were less than a quarter mile from the point where we scrambled a couple hundred feet down to the beach over some very hot rocks...

We were relieved to get to the water, soak our feet, and rest in the little bit of shade provided by some willows. We spent the afternoon and evening on the beach, watching river runners float by, listening to Bass Rapids, and watching butterflies, birds, lizards, and later that night, the stars as we slept on the sand.

And this is the old and somewhat battered Ross Wheeler boat on the rocks above Bass Rapids...

 

For a trip report and more photos, see: Hiking Grand Canyon's South Bass Trail.

I could yack on and on about the hike—now one of my all-time favorite Grand Canyon trips—but to get back to SAR stuff...

I wanted to mention a nine-hour mission that took place last Sunday, the day before I left for the canyon. Make that nine hours of driving, with me bouncing around in the backseat most of the time. These were some of the worst dirt roads I've ever been on. I think my head hit the roof of the vehicle a few times, even though I was wearing my seat belt. Needless to say, I was very relieved—and my neck, back, and backside were very sore—when we finally returned to pavement after finding the overdue West Clear Creek (canyon) hikers at the trailhead and transporting them to their friend's vehicle. They were tired but in good condition, which is always what we hope for, so my sore self was happy about that.

Um... so, I guess that brings my blog up to date for now. And now I'm off to find a needle and thread to attempt to sew my Rock Rescue Tech patch onto my uniform shirt. (Yay! just one more time.)

A Good Search and Rescue Read

I read this while I was in the Boundary Waters since the searches happened there. Lost in the Wild: Danger and Survival in the North Woods by Cary J. Griffith is really well written and interesting, even if you're not a SAR story addict like me.

Since I already wrote about it on my other blog, I'll just send you over there if you're interested in learning a bit about the book, the area, and the SAR teams that participated. See: Book Review And Some Minnesota & Ontario SAR.

Those North Woods are pretty darn thick, and the trails aren't always too clear, making it pretty easy to get turned around. Here's a photo of my husband ON the Border Route Trail...

Back In SAR Action After The Boundary Waters

After two weeks in northern Minnesota, paddling and portaging in the Boundary Waters Wilderness and exploring, I'm back in Flagstaff and ready for more searching and rescuing.

Sounds like there's been some activity while I was away, which I know because as soon as I was in cellphone range again, I received all of the call-out messages there had been: searches for missing hikers, litter-carries, a downed plane. There were messages about technical rescue practice, too. And some of my teammates helped with road blocks at the Grand Canyon during President Obama's visit. There was also another death from dehydration at the Canyon—another young man, 18 years of age. So sad. And so avoidable.

Last night, I got back to practicing my technical skills and I'll be doing more practicing tonight and tomorrow night... if there's no call-out for a mission. The proficiency testing is going to be starting soon, possibly this weekend I heard. Two weeks feels like a long time to be away from practice, especially when many of the skills still aren't well-ingrained in my body or brain. But if last night's practice was any indication, they'll come back pretty quickly.

And now I leave you with some photos from our Boundary Waters trip. If you'd like to read a bit about it, I wrote an article with some more pictures here: A Trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

A Lot Of SAR Lately

Between the extra technical rescue practices and two missions, it's been pretty constant SAR activity for the past few days. But that's okay; I really do enjoy it... if you hadn't already noticed.

So, there was the call-out on Sunday at about 8:30a.m. I was dressed for Jazzercise and quickly changed into my nylon, convertible pants and the SAR tee I prefer to wear in the summer instead of my long-sleeved uniform shirt. I switched from aerobics sneakers to hiking shoes just before heading out the door. But there was no hiking to be done this time, just lots of driving. And for a change, I was behind the wheel instead of co-piloting.

We were searching for two men who'd rolled a jeep the day before and, with at least one of them injured (a possible broken arm), they'd called a family member and given some sketchy information about their location before the cellphone had gone kaput. The son of one of the men had spent the night driving unpaved roads, many of them not on the map in a very sparsely populated area around Ashfork, Arizona, consisting mostly of ranch land. But he had no luck finding the men or their overturned vehicle.

Enter SAR.

Given the ambiguous information we received, our search area started out rather large. A subsequent cellphone ping from the last call gave us a vector (if that's the right term—or wedge, I guess), narrowing the search area some. With DPS Ranger, the helicopter, in the air, those of us on the ground relocated and spread out as the information changed.

Ultimately, one of our field teams came across the men, hobbling along near a cattle tank. Ranger landed and administered some initial medical care, then the victims chose to ride in a private family vehicle to the hospital rather than accept transport by ambulance (which wouldn't be free, of course).

For me, driving for hours is much more tiring than hiking for hours, so I was glad to get out of the vehicle and shake off the sleepies back at the SAR building later that day, as we waited for word about a second possible mission. But that one was resolved before we went into the field again.


The next day, as I was doing some work on the computer and listening to the Sheriff's scanner online before heading out for more tech practice (I'm getting the hang of some of this stuff, by George), I overheard the initial stages of some SAR activity and knew there was a good chance of another call-out.

Ranger was in the air with one of our SAR coordinators, looking for six overdue hikers in West Fork Canyon. I called a teammate who was supposed to meet me for tech team practice and gave him a heads-up. We proceeded with our plan and went to the building to work on anchors, belay, and pick-off set-ups and all that good stuff, only to be called minutes later about the mission. So, we headed right over to the coordinator's office, a short walk from the SAR building to the main law enforcement complex, for a briefing.

For a while there, it looked like four of us would be inserted by helicopter into the canyon. They'd spotted three people believed to be from the party of six, and they'd been waving their arms at Ranger. But whether they were in distress or not was unknown. What was known was that they were already a day overdue, one of the women was three months pregnant, and one of the men was allergic to bees and had no Epipen with him, so said the reporting party, a couple who had left the group the day before and hiked out the way they'd gone in.

As I understand it, the group's original plan was to thru-hike the canyon from bottom to top, so they'd done a shuttle and left vehicles at both ends. But the other six didn't show up at the top, and the two hikers who'd come out early became concerned.

While we were in our coordinator's office, he put the reporting party on speaker phone so we could all hear the information firsthand. Then we headed back to the SAR building to get our gear ready and then head over to the airport to meet Ranger.

Then a plan was carried out that changed our mission from a possible all-nighter to an early morning hike. A radio was lowered from the helicopter to the three people in the canyon, along with instructions on how to use it. Ranger was then able to talk to the hikers and find out the situation, including the fact that they were tired but generally fine. Three of the six had gone ahead to hike out with their four dogs, while the other half of the group, including the pregnant woman and the man allergic to bees, stayed behind, too exhausted and not fast enough to make the rest of the distance that night.

So three of us SAR folks volunteered to meet at 4 a.m. and hike in at first light to locate the three remaining hikers, make sure they were still okay, and hike out with them. Then we resumed tech practice for the rest of the evening.


My alarm went off far too soon at 3 a.m., but I never mind an early morning walk up West Fork. It's really neat to be in there at dawn, when the birds start singing along with the sound of the creek, and the red canyon walls are illuminated by the rising sun.

Oh, sorry, I started to slip into waxing poetic-mode there.

So anyhow... as we hiked, we periodically tried to contact the hikers on the radio, unsure if they'd left it on all night or if they were still asleep or had started walking toward us. At one point, when we'd gone about five miles up canyon, we started to wonder if we'd missed them somehow and passed one another. It would have been unlikely but possible. We got no response to our repeated, loud whistle blasts, either.

Just as we began hiking back to recheck the parking lot where their car had been when we'd started out, I heard static on my radio. I called again: "West Fork, party of three, this is search and rescue. Do you copy?" After more static, I heard a reply. At 7:15, they were just waking up and getting ready to hike out. And they were still all fine.


In a short time, the three of them and the three of us were together, and after a brief conversation about what had happened—they'd taken a wrong turn and gone up Casner Cabin Draw instead of continuing in West Fork—we turned back toward the parking lot. The weary and appreciative hikers were happy to be on trail again after all their bush-whacking, wading, and swimming.

So, all ended well, and by noon, still in my SAR clothes, I was asleep on the couch with my cellphone on the coffee table, just in case something else SAR came up.

The Search Is Over

For those of you who haven't been following updates on the search for missing NAU student, 20-year-old Bryce Gillies, in Grand Canyon, I wanted to let you know that, sadly, his body was found this morning in the Bonita Creek drainage on the north side of the Canyon following yesterday's discovery of some personal items, including a backpack, nearby.

You can read the breaking news story from the Arizona Daily Sun here: Body of missing backpacker found

I'd been hoping there was some way this mission would have a happy ending, listening to radio traffic daily from the Grand Canyon for any hint of what was happening, but that happy ending wasn't to be. As someone said to me today when I told them the news, "We can love the Canyon, but the Canyon is indifferent."

Young Hiker Missing In Grand Canyon

Yesterday, a news release was put out by Grand Canyon National Park regarding possibly as many as four missing hikers. Last I heard, technical rescue personnel were en route, some from Zion National Park, possibly to be inserted by helicopter into a remote and rugged area.

The news from 7/22 release begins:

Grand Canyon, Ariz. – At approximately 7:20 p.m. on Tuesday, July 21, the Grand Canyon Regional Communications Center received a report that at least one young man, and possibly as many as three, were overdue from a backpacking trip at Grand Canyon National Park.

The young men are reported to have left on a trip to the Deer Creek/Thunder River area on Saturday after reading about the trip in a magazine. According to the reporting party, the father of one of the young men, his son had stated that he would be back on Monday but did not return. Further investigation revealed that there were as many as four young men in the hiking party. All are in their early 20s, and all are believed to be students at Northern Arizona University. It was also determined that this group did not have a backcountry permit." Read more....

Update 2 p.m. on 7/23: According to more breaking news from the Arizona Daily Sun, it appears there's one hiker missing, not three or four. The friends thought to possibly be missing also have been contacted. Read more here: Overdue Canyon Hiker An NAU Student

This is the young man they're looking for, NAU student Bryce Gillies:


Anyone who believes they have seen Gillies since Saturday is encouraged to contact the National Park Service at 928-638-7805.

And More Practice

Just thought I'd share some photos my husband took while a few of my teammates and I were practicing "hot changeovers" on the ropes in the SAR building. My husband, by the way, has decided to apply to be on the team. Seeing all this tech stuff lately and constantly hearing my stories over the past couple of years has finally gotten to him.

Here, I've rigged myself up for the ascent with my rappel rack attached to my harness, ready for the changeover, and a Prusik for a self-belay. My teammate Marty then does a safety check before I go up the rope.


But we don't have to go up very far to practice the changeover.




Next, I've rigged up my rappel rack and tied it off. Now I have to transfer my weight off my ascenders and onto the rack before I can descend. Sometimes that's easier said than done. Can you see I've been sweating on this attempt?




See the reflection on this one? My husband was getting creative with our point-and-shoot.



This coming weekend, we have another field session where we'll learn how to do pick-offs. That is, how to pick someone off a cliff or wall and bring them to the ground (or back up, I suppose) without the use of a litter, in the event their injuries aren't serious or they're stranded somehow.

I'm also ordering some gear, including an actual rescue harness rather than the recreational climbing harness I've been using (which just doesn't cut it for rescue work), a commercially sewn chest harness rather than the improvised one I'd made of webbing, a couple of Prusik sets, a helmet, and some locking carabiners. It was okay to use team gear for the Academy, but we need to have some of our own equipment for the proficiency test and beyond if we want to be active members of the tech team. Which I want to be.

Losing One Of Our Own

One our our teammates lost his young life in a motor vehicle accident this past Tuesday, July 14th.

Joe Rommel, 22, joined the Coconino County Search & Rescue Team in 2005 when he was just 18 years of age and, since then, earned his Wilderness Search Tech 1, Technical Rescue Tech, Snow and Ice Rescue Tech, and EMT certifications.

Joe was also an experienced Grand Canyon guide and worked at a local outdoor store, where I'd often see him smiling and chatting with customers and friends. I'll think of Joe whenever I take out my snowshoes; he sold them to me this past winter, and we had a really nice talk while I was in the store. He definitely lived well and was a great example for us all.

Even those on the team who didn't know Joe well are feeling his loss, and we'll miss and remember him always.

He Tweeted While He Waited

Kinda funny. Today on Twitter, when I mentioned that I'd been up most of last night on Mt. Humphreys on a SAR call-out, one of my followers responded and gave me the Twitter user name of the young man we'd fetched off the mountain. So I took a peak at his profile page and saw that our subject had been tweeting while waiting for us to arrive. Which is why his cellphone battery just about pooped out, I guess.

But if I were stuck up there at 11,000-some-odd feet in the dark, shivvering in my shorts and t-shirt and without a light, I'd be nervous and wish I could tweet away, too, I suppose. 

Anyhow, I spent most of last night on that same mountain I was up and down, up and down... and up... and down the last time I posted, which was what? Saturday? This time, I drove up in the dark at about 11 p.m. Heck, I could just about do it with my eyes closed now.

On the way, one of my teammates said, "In SAR, we all have our thing. And THIS is your thing." He was referring to me being the UTV driver. Hmm... can I change my thing to something else?

So okay, where was I? Oh, the mission.

Well, it turned out fine. We drove "my little red car" up the ski run and parked it at the bottom of our extremely steep shortcut to intersect with the trail at around 11,400 feet, slipping on the scree. I was grabbing at tree branches, trying not to tip over backwards—boy, would that have been embarrassing—and to our surprise, made voice contact with the young man as soon as we reached the trail. We'd thought he was beyond the saddle as far as the first false summit and then on a scree slope about 800 to 1,000 feet down. In fact, he was just a short distance off the trail, having missed a switchback in the dark and ended up on a boulder field. Well, good. The would be much easier, relatively-speaking, than we'd expected.

After we handed over some Gatorade and extra clothing to the cold hiker, then explained that we wanted to descend, not down the trail but down our steeper but shorter route to the parked UTV, and our subject quickly agreed, the three of us SAR members and one relieved hiker made our way back down the mountain.

The end. (For now.)

Arizona Daily Sun article: Hiker Rescued Off Of Humphreys Peak Early Monday

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My latest SAR Stories News post: Search & Rescue and Social Media

Up and Down the Mountain... and Up and Down... and Up and Down

 "What did he say?" I asked the paramedic sitting next to me, loudly enough to be heard above the UTV's noisy engine. With that racket and my helmet on, I couldn't hear what a teammate perched on top of the litter on the back of the Ranger had just shouted.

The Polaris Ranger UTV is the red machine pictured here:

And we were headed up this mountain (although there was no snow):

"Oh, he's just talkin' trash," the young lady from the Guardian crew replied.

Must not like my driving, I figured. I had come rather close to that last big drop. But, really, there wasn't much room on the other side.

In the end, I didn't lose anybody off the UTV, which is always a plus. I'd never driven the thing up that high on the mountain, so I was a little nervous on the first run, sitting forward on the seat, gripping the steering wheel with my sweating, gloved hands.

By my third time up and down to the spot called Midway on a grass- and rock-covered ski slope at the Arizona Snowbowl, I had the drive down quite well. By then, I knew just where to point the vehicle to minimize the bumping and grinding (of rocks on metal below) and the possibility of tipping over.

What I was doing was shuttling SAR members, Guardian medics, and equipment, including a break-apart litter, webbing and rope, to the highest point we could get to by all-terrain vehicle. I was doing this so they (and eventually I) could hike, steeply, off-trail to the saddle and possibly beyond. The patient turned out to be above treeline, though the initial information had placed him close to the bottom. Big difference there.

The hiker had strained or sprained (not broken, I don't believe) his ankle. Apparently, he'd done some hobbling, but there was no way he was going to make it from the ridge about 4 miles down to the lodge on the Humphreys Trail. So we were headed up to carry him down in the litter. It would take hours.

By then, the helicopter was in the air. To my surprise, the pilot was able to set down at the saddle once the landing zone (LZ) was cleared of hikers by... someone 🤷 and the patient was brought aboard. In a way, that was a relief to us, the ground crew, but at the same time, helicopter rescues do carry some risk. But those in charge know what they're doing and weighed the pros and cons for both the rescuers on the ground and those in the air and made the decision to go with the helicopter.

Search and rescue volunteers and paramedics continued carrying out our assignment until we were told to do otherwise. You just don't know if things will change and we'll be needed after all—not until the patient is aboard the helicopter and on the way to the other LZ near the waiting ambulance.

Once that was accomplished, our incident commander got on the radio and told the paramedic I'd shuttled to Midway, already on her way up to the saddle with a few of my teammates, to return to the drop-off point for pickup. Then he told me to turn around and go get her. I was already close to the bottom where I'd been headed to shuttle more personnel.

So, back up I went, picked up the paramedic, and had her back down at the lower LZ just as the patient was being carried from the helicopter to the waiting ambulance the paramedic had originally come from. That meant the ambulance didn't have to wait for her. What timing! (I'm good.)

Then I went BACK up the mountain again to retrieve my teammates, who'd been told to hold their position a bit longer, I guess. (It was hard to hear the radio traffic over that UTV noise and through the helmet, and I had no one to translate for me while I was driving alone.)

"Watch that big drop on the right," my SAR-mate advised on the way back down. He was the one I didn't hear on the first trip up. I considered giving him a few (more) gray hairs but decided to give him a break. 😊

Technical Rescue: Practice, Practice, Practice!

It's like learning a foreign language. At first, it's work, even a struggle. And if you don't keep reviewing over and over again, you can pretty much lose most everything you've gained within days. Then, eventually, you realize you don't have to work at it quite so hard anymore—that you just get it and things make sense. And before you know it, you're fluent. That's basically what I hope will happen with these technical rescue skills I'm trying to master.

Master. Ha! That's difficult to imagine right now. But I'm trying as hard as I can to get the hang of these skills and to commit them to memory, both in my mind and my body. I want my legs and arms and hands and whatever other parts might be involved to execute the knots and the moves and set up the systems like it's all second nature. That's going to take time. And a lot of it.

I went away for two weeks recently on that trip to Colorado, and when I got back and started to think about Rock Rescue Academy again, I was amazed to find how much I'd already forgotten. I was pretty ticked off at myself, actually. And frustrated.

Then I went to a practice session one evening, where we learned something new—the "hot changeover" from ascending to rappelling—and I was even more frazzled. At least, on my first attempt. I was on the rope, sweating and swearing for about half an hour, hanging about 10 feet off the ground in the SAR building, trying to get things figured out. At one point, a teammate even climbed up a ladder to give me some assistance.

After a break, though, practicing with the Rescue 8 rappel device and the release mechanism on the ascenders while on the ground, then lengthening my self-belaying Prusik which was way too short the first time, I went up for another try. 

That time went much better and much faster while a teammate talked me through the whole process, so I'll have to practice, practice, practice that too if I'm ever to do it on my own... while hanging off a cliff. Which will probably be soon, during our next official practice.

In the meantime, I've been getting together with new tech team members and an experienced member at the SAR building to go over skills. This last time, I figured I'd take photos of the set-ups, which would hopefully help me remember how everything goes.

Here are some of those pictures:

This first one is a rescue rack loaded and tied off, ready for lowering.



Here, we're doing a "hot changeover" from a lowering system to a raising system, which is done while the load (i.e., the attendant, patient, and equipment) is on the rope, mid-face. The green webbing with a Prusik is temporarily holding the weight of the load as we attach pulleys and other equipment for a raise with a 3-to-1 mechanical advantage. (Ooh, don't I sound like I know what I'm talking about?)


Next is a tandem Prusik belay with a load-releasing hitch (green rope). The tandem Prusik belay consists of a long Prusik (blue) and a short Prusik (red) attached to the belay line (the yellow rope).


And this is a Meunter hitch, used with the load-releasing set-up. This hitch comes into play if the force of the load is transferred onto the belay line and the Prusiks (in the tandem Prusik belay) become locked. This might happen in the event of a fall or if the belayer doesn't move quickly enough to keep up with the main line, maintaining slack on the belay.

Without the load-releasing hitch, you'd basically be screwed or have to come up some other way (which there probably is, I just don't know... or don't know if I know it yet) to get those Prusiks unlocked. Under force, they're said to "melt" on the rope.


So, those are the sorts of photos I took to help me go through the steps of setting up anchors, lowering and raising systems, and belays in my head as I lie awake at night, wondering if—or, rather, when—I'll get the hang of all this. That is, if my teammates have the patience to put up with me long enough.