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