-The Sharp End-
life, technology, and the pursuit of adventure

 King County Explorer Search and Res­cue is a 100% vol­un­teer orga­ni­za­tion, so there’s really not hir­ing involved, just recruit­ment of peo­ple who are inter­ested in help­ing oth­ers & sav­ing lives.

ESAR only accepts new mem­bers dur­ing it’s train­ing sea­son, and the 2011–2012 train­ing sea­son has begun. You can see new dates posted on www.kcesar.org, so get your back­packs and come out to training!

I’m often asked is: how does it work? Is it super time con­sum­ing? See my answer & last year’s grad­u­a­tion slideshow after the jump.

ESAR has a fairly exten­sive train­ing course that will teach you every­thing you need to know about what we do. You don’t need to be a super climber or out­doors per­son, just a will­ing­ness to learn & help oth­ers. The basic train­ing is a com­mit­ment over five or so week­ends through­out the fall/winter.

Once you suc­cess­fully com­plete the course & com­plete your emer­gency worker require­ments, you are mis­sion ready. When mis­sions for lost & injured peo­ple in the back­coun­try, all vol­un­teers will be paged. If you are able to respond, you will call a phone num­ber let­ting base know you are on your way. If you are not able to respond, you don’t. The com­mit­ment to mis­sions is what you make it.

Over the last cou­ple of years, I’ve not be able to respond to as many mis­sions as I would like. Other pri­or­i­ties & per­sonal com­mit­ments have really put a limit on my free time. How­ever, I still vol­un­teer for sched­uled train­ings as an instruc­tor or other activ­i­ties that I can sched­ule my time around. Hope­fully my work­load will lessen to the point of going into the field soon, but until then, I still par­tic­i­pate where I can. The mis­sions are cer­tainly my favorite (and most excit­ing) part about SAR. But I appre­ci­ate the flex­i­bil­ity to con­tribute where I can & still be a part of this great organization.

For this year’s train­ing, I’m help­ing out with Course B  and am doing the train­ing grad­u­a­tion slideshow again, so if you start train­ing this year, I’ll see you there!

You can check out my post last year on what you’ll learn & what ESAR does. Last year’s grad­u­a­tion slideshow which fea­tured a par­ody of Ceelo Green’s F* You song. We pro­duced this in one evening due to a short dead­line. Good times!

Tags: SAR, search and rescue

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 2nd, 2011 at 2:41 pm and is filed under 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.