Perceptions on Climbing & SAR

As a climber and a SAR vol­un­teer, the major­ity of peo­ple I see get­ting hurt or lost are aver­age hik­ers going out for a day hike or back­pack trip. Many of them are unpre­pared for the out­ing, such as not car­ry­ing the 10 essen­tials. If you get hurt or lost, please know that search and res­cue efforts in Wash­ing­ton are free. In fact, King County’s SAR units are non-profit orga­ni­za­tions which are 100% voun­teer run. If you need help and have cell cov­er­age, you can call 911.

From Inclined (Amer­i­can Alpine Club’s blog):

Real­ity: False…only 5.5% of SAR searches resulted from climbing.”

Some Thurs­day read­ing for every­one: the recent issue of the North­west Moun­taineer­ing Jour­nal included a spe­cial fea­ture on the stats of climb­ing and SAR efforts, debunk­ing and explain­ing com­mon per­cep­tions. The arti­cle addresses charg­ing for res­cues, how most climbers call for res­cue, and the use of sig­nal­ing devices. It also includes a great table of SAR facts relat­ing to inci­dents, fatal­i­ties and recov­ery rates. The tim­ing fits well with a recent Sum­mit­Post thread pro­vid­ing a graph­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of climb­ing acci­dent stats pub­lished in Acci­dents in North Amer­i­can Moun­taineer­ing, which we posted on the AAC Face­book page last week. Enjoy.

Edu­ca­tion is a good step towards being pre­pared in the back­coun­try. If you in Wash­ing­ton, King County Search and Res­cue pro­vides free clin­ics on com­mon back­coun­try mis­takes and nav­i­ga­tion at local REI stores. You can visit REI’s web­site for lat­est list­ings on an upcom­ing clinic near you.

Tags: , , , ,

This entry was posted on Friday, September 17th, 2010 at 3:26 am and is filed under climbing, search & rescue. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a comment