Inside Search & Rescue: Fall Into an Active Volcanic Fumarole on Mt. Hood

[MUSIC] You're listening to the American Alpine Club podcast. Your guide to the climbing community. [MUSIC] A skier on Mount Hood had slid out and fallen into an open volcanic pit, the Devil's Kitchen Fumeral. With a broken femur and the toxic gases of the volcano potentially swirling in the air, the situation was dire. Many of the folks on Portland Mountain Rescue and the Hood River Cragrats weren't sure that the patient was survived when they first got the call. But with their unique femoral self-lowering rope system, PMR and the Cragrats were able to get the patient out of that alien world of ice and snow and toxic gases. To dig into the details of the mission, we sat down with Cully Wiseman, a surgeon and the head medical lead on this mission, and Scott Norton, a rescue leader on the mission. Learn about their decision making process during rescues, the types of accidents they most often see, and what they wish climbers knew about Search and Rescue. We are talking to these SAAR teams because the AAC and Rocky Talkie have teamed up for another year to offer the Rocky Talkie Search and Rescue Award to the unsung heroes of the outdoor world. Search and Rescue teams are often all volunteer, and yet they put their lives in the line to bring stranded and injured climbers home. The award gives back to these incredible figures in our community by sharing their story and offering a grant to help them run their volunteer operations. The 2023 award winners each pulled off an incredibly technical and impressive mission, and Portland Mountain Rescue, Inyo County Search and Rescue, and Chalon County Mountain Rescue deserve all the kudos for these rescues and the many more they accomplish every year. But we're wondering, which mission most inspired you? Help us share the kudos by voting for the most inspiring mission at rockytalkie.com/pages/2023SAAR award. Haven't heard all the stories yet? Make sure you check out the other AAC podcasts featuring each of the winning SAAR teams. I'm your host, Hannah Provo. Here's the inside beta on the Fumaroll Rescue. [MUSIC] Since 1981, outdoor research has created trusted apparel, accessories, and equipment for you to thrive outside. Your award-winning outdoor gear is meticulously researched and tested for outdoor enthusiasts and military users around the globe. Grounded in their values of curiosity, passion, innovation, collaboration, and community, OR strives to create space for all in the outdoors. OR celebrates wins outside at every level, together with their ambassadors, nonprofit partners, and employees. Check them out at outdoorresearch.com. [MUSIC] Okay, Scott and Cully, welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited to talk to some more folks who are on search and rescue teams. I think a lot of everyday climbers, every outdoors people aren't really familiar with what goes on behind the scenes. And so I think a lot of people are interested in all of the logistics, all of the high-intensity emotions that you guys go through. And you guys are nominated for a search and rescue award with Baraki Taki. And we're really excited to be sharing the story of one of the missions you guys accomplished in order to get nominated. So can each of you tell me a little bit about yourself? What do you do in daily life and how did you get involved in search and rescue? Yeah, sure. Hannah, thanks for having us. It's an honor to be on the show. My name is Scott Norton. I'm a volunteer with Portland Mountain Rescue. I've been on the team for 18 years, seen a lot of interesting things during that time. But in my day job, I work at Nike, a large company here in Portland. And I find that the volunteer work really allows me to stay connected with the outdoor community and gives me a way to really help back or contribute back toward the climbing community in a meaningful way. Thanks, Scott. And thank you also, Hannah, for hosting us. My name is Cully Wiseman and I live in Hood River, Oregon. I have been a member of the Hood River Crag Rats. We are the search and rescue organization for Hood River County. We also happen to be the oldest search and rescue organization in the United States. We were formed back in 1926. We have our 100-year anniversary coming up, 2026. I've been a member for about eight years. My day job is that I'm a physician. I'm a general surgeon here in Hood River. I joined search and rescue and joined the Crag Rats because it really melds my professional life as a physician with my passion and hobbies of skiing and climbing mountains and rock climbing outside. For me, it gave me a way kind of to justify doing all the activity that I do and becoming a better climber and skier. Being to use those skills that I'd love to develop for a purpose to help somebody out is what I'm all about, is why I joined. Awesome. Yeah. Before we get into kind of search and rescue and all the details there, can you guys just tell me a little bit about you guys as adventurers or you guys as climbers? What are you proud of that you've accomplished? What gets you stoked? What are some goals of yours? Yeah. I started climbing back when I was a kid. I've always been into outdoor stuff and really found the passion for climbing when I moved out to Portland in 2001. That was a different time in my life. That was before kids and I couldn't get enough of it. I wanted to climb anything that stuck up out of the ground and got up most things around here in the Pacific Northwest, done some other things like the Grand Teton and even went to Africa and climbed Kilimanjaro. So I've really gotten a lot of excitement out of climbing. I joined Portland Mountain Rescue not long after moving to Portland and that has been a way that even though as my life changes and my priorities shift, spend more time with my family and less time in really challenging climbing environments, but the Mountain Rescue community helps me stay plugged in, gives me a reason to stay active outdoors and keep those skills sharp and a real meaningful reason to get out up on the hills and help somebody out when they need it. A similar story, I grew up in Texas where my only skiing was like family taking me on vacations to places. It's funny though. I'm so grateful to my parents for taking me on ski trips when I was young and shoving me to ski school and skiing. You would never think that like being a good skier would help you help somebody else, but it happens all the time. Because Kragrats, we almost everybody skis and skis pretty well and they become tools. They become a means to get up and down the mountain quickly. So I'm grateful for that background. My kind of, I guess, mountaineering life began when I moved to Seattle for surgery residency, gosh, back in 2009. Did climb all the volcanoes around here, Rainier, Hood, Adams, Helens. Nothing major, nothing big. I try to get up, at least get up Hood once a year and if I can get another volcano in, I'm usually happy about that. And then I do all the other Hood River stuff, a mountain bike, a rock climb, I try to kite board when I can. It's kind of what we're famous for, is our wind sports. And yeah, and I totally agree with Scott. It's a motivation to stay sharp, to stay in shape. I also have kids and it's a huge balance to say, sorry, lovely wife. I'm heading out on this rescue, you've got duties until I get back. That literally happened yesterday. So it requires a really understanding spouse, as I'm sure Scott can attest to as well when you've got little ones and you're going to be out on the mountain for a while. That's right. Yeah. So I think that is a really good segue into some of my first questions is just to set up, tell me a little bit about the structure of the Hood River Crag Rats and Portland Mountain Rescue. For example, is it all volunteer? Do you guys get paid? They're shaking their heads. Yeah, I guess I can go first. Like I said, the Crag Rats have been around a really long time that I bring that up because I think probably the biggest motivation we have in our group is to kind of continue to make a good name for ourselves in the rescue community. I mean, it's a small community, but the people that are in it, especially the Northwest, know us. I feel like we have a reputation to uphold. So the organization, you know, we, gosh, there's not much organization there. You would think that there's this like really, you know, people are on call and it's not like basically what happens is someone calls 911 when they get into trouble outdoors. If they're in Hood River County that goes to our Hood River County Sheriff's Office dispatch, that sends a message out to about 10 to 15 coordinators that are kind of the initial responders. Someone chimes in, agrees to kind of support the mission. We then try to send an enticing message out to people to get people to respond. You know, that's easy to do on a Sunday afternoon, like yesterday, when you have the coordinates of the lost person. It's harder to do in the middle of the night when everyone's asleep. So yeah, that's, that's the kind of basic, you know, how it works. We are all volunteers. We do lots and lots of training outside of our missions. And yeah, there's that's, that's kind of how we do things. I'll stop him. Let Scott share his. Yeah. Thanks, Gully. Yeah. Portland Mountain Rescue is a entirely volunteer organization. We, we get no government funding or taxpayer funding at all. It's entirely funded through donations from the public. We are a fairly large team though. We have about 100 folks on the team that support all kinds of different things from fundraising and website and special events. But then that also includes, of course, the field deployable team members that are, that are on call to go out on missions. But similar to what Cully described, we don't have a complex organizational structure around on call. Pretty much everybody is on call all the time. And we page the whole team whenever we're needed and, you know, the folks that are available, given the other priorities in their lives at the time are the ones that will respond. And sometimes we can do a little more arm twisting if we need to. We are an independent organization, but we partner very closely with the Clackamas County Sheriff's Department in the same way that the Kragrats partner with the Hood River County Sheriff's Department. And we serve a specific need within the search and rescue branch for, for that county, specifically high angle and high altitude search and rescue, which is primarily Mount Hood. And I think what is unique about the south side of Mount Hood climbing route, it's a very, very popular climbing route, the most by far the most popular route on the, on the mountain. And it zigzags across the county line. Sometimes you start in Clackamas County, but the climbing route goes into Hood River County and then back into Clackamas County a couple of times. And so exactly which county may get activated for a 911 call is somewhat up to the chance of the coordinates on your GPS phone or GPS coordinates on your, on your mobile phone, and which county you get routed to. And then from there, either one or both teams would be dispatched to come help. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm interested in like why you guys ended up collaborating on this particular mission that we're about to talk about. So maybe let's put a pin on that and talk about it in a second. So I guess my last question kind of in the general, that answered a lot of my general questions in terms of radius and how big the teams are and everything. How often are callouts and what are the range of accidents you've seen? Gosh, it varies. 2022 was our busiest year by far. We had, I think we had over 50 activations. Now that ranges in involvement drastically. There were missions, searches that went on for days that are really involved, you know, multiple agencies, you know, Air Force involved, PMR involved, all the way down to, you know, like, I forgot my headlamp and it got dark and needs someone to help me out. So yeah, it sometimes there, there, sometimes you show up and the patient, they're the subject you're looking for comes walking out on the trail and you go back home and that's it. You know, so it varies in intensity and severity, like Scott mentioned, you know, the biggest ones are rope rescues for your, you know, a high-angle rescue or someone's injured and you're trying to raise them out of a bad situation. But yeah, it's a huge spectrum. You almost have to be prepared to show up, to get your bag packed and show up and then get turned right around because if you, if you get just, you know, kind of disappointed by that, you'll miss a lot of the good stuff to where you're, where you're actually needed. Yeah, 100%. With Portland Mountain Rescue, we might be a little bit more specialized. I think the Clackamas County has the good fortune of having a lot of different special different search and rescue resources available. So we tend to get called for the more specific Mount Hood things. Our average call out is about 20 to 25 missions per year. So that is lost climbers or skiers or injured climbers and skiers on Mount Hood. But we are perfectly happy to assist with other things around the county and outside of the county. And for example, recently we spent a few days searching the woods for, I guess, a hiker that was overdue. Part of a large organization, it didn't require technical rope rescue skills, but it required trained searchers who could look for clues and navigate rough terrain. And so we do that kind of thing a fair bit as well. It's like kind of got to be prepared for everything. Yeah. Okay, let's start in on it. You guys were both involved in a funeral extraction mission. I don't even know if I said that correctly. I said it right. Okay, great. As you could tell by the fact that I stumbled over it, I barely know what a funeral is. So like make sure that you fill us in for people who maybe don't live in the PNW, aren't familiar with volcanoes, that sort of thing. Tell us like all the details. Where did this mission even start with? What happened? Sure, I guess I'll answer the first part as best I can. I will fully admit that most of the, especially like the scientific knowledge I have about fumaroles has come from training that I've done with PMR. So the many of the Pacific Northwest volcanoes are active volcanoes. That doesn't mean they're like about to erupt, but, you know, as you start to approach the summit and Mount Hood, you start to, it's funny, you start to smell sulfur and rotten eggs and you're, you wonder what that is. And that's because there are numerous gas vents all over Mount Hood varying sizes and activities. And those gas vents are, they're primarily releasing stuff like water. So you see the steam kind of, you know, coming out of these gas vents, but they also release some dangerous gases, primarily hydrogen sulfide is kind of the one, at least the one on Mount Hood that is the most concerning. They also release other stuff on other mountains, but on Mount Hood, especially hydrogen sulfide is the one that we're the most concerned about. They are also hot and they, you know, in the winter on Mount Hood, when this rescue occurred, no snow really forms on the, the fumarole itself. So what that results in is these giant depressions kind of up on the upper mountain, you know, starting around 10,000 feet or so. And you can imagine that if you've got a, you know, 60, 70, 80 foot snowpack and then a big, you know, fumarole at the bottom of that, you know, things that are falling out of control go down and they often roll into those humor rolls. That presents kind of a whole technical problem of getting that person out, especially if they're injured, that was the case here. You, you know, I guess probably I would let Scott talk about the system PMR has developed with regards to, you know, we've got an actual fumarole rescue on Mount Hood. I'm familiar with it, but I feel like they're the ones that kind of literally wrote the book on it. So I'll maybe let Scott take over that part. Perfect. Yeah. Maybe I'll kind of also just summarize a fumarole. I think Cole said it really well. It's the heat of the volcano and the gases of the volcano melting through the snowpack. And I think of it as a little bit of a push and pull and in the wintertime, the snowfall sometimes wins and snow will accumulate. But at the same time, the mountain is melting its way from the bottom up and there can be times where there's a large cavern that has been melted by the heat of the volcano and is filled with poisonous gases covered very by a thin veneer of snow on the surface. And if a climber were to be unlucky enough to punch through that and the fall down into that cavern, that would be bad news. And that has happened a long time, 50 years or so ago in the past, but is the big concern that we're always afraid of is that that transition period where the heat from the mountain breaks through the snowpack and can cause, you know, a hazard for somebody to fall into. Now the gases, at least the concentration of the gases will depend on the environment. There's good air flow through the fumarole, mixing fresh air in with the volcanic gases. It can be not very toxic, but if there's not a good air flow due to the shape of the fumarole, not allowing much air mixing or maybe there's just not much wind, then those gases can accumulate and they can be very toxic, they can be deadly. So we don't always know which exact condition we're going to experience on any given day. The snowpack varies, it piles up in the winter and then melts back down. And so it's a very dynamic environment and we need to be prepared for a situation where the concentration of toxic gases is too poisonous to sustain life. And that's kind of the worst case scenario is, you know, do we have somebody who has fallen in there and has succumbed to the gas concentrations or even worse maybe is somebody in the process of succumbing to those gases. And if we were to put a rescuer into that environment now we would have two people being poisoned by the environment. So it's been a very difficult challenge to solve technically how do we establish guidelines for our rescuers to follow and equipment to keep them safe and make smart decisions in the variety of the situations that we might encounter. Maybe one of the, maybe I'll describe the situation is similar to a crevasse rescue environment where you've got somebody in the bottom of a confined space and we need to lower a rescuer down into that environment, connect the subject to our system and then raise them both out. That's usually the gold standard for these kinds of operations. But we modify our crevasse rescue system to give more control to the rescuers so that they can control their own dissent and can stop their own dissent at any time as well as to rig the system so that they can be pulled back out very quickly if need be. We arm them with scientific equipment that can monitor the concentration of gases that are preset with alarm levels that will go off if the concentrations reach above a certain threshold as well as give them air purifying masks. So that can help a little bit reduce the gas absorption into your body but they're definitely not a perfect solution. We really have to operate within the established guidelines of gas concentration for what's safe to put a rescuer into versus what's not safe to allow a rescuer to enter. Yeah, that's a lot of really good context and I think it helps set up kind of, it's really interesting because I think a lot of times when people are reading about accidents especially, you know, the AAC puts out a lot of accident analysis in these types of situations and we start with what went wrong. But for both of you and for search and rescue people, a lot of the time you don't really know what went wrong in the first place, you're coming to an accident with a lot of training and a lot of experience and then you get thrust into a situation. So now that we kind of have that background, you guys have a specialized rescue system for funerals, you get this call out. What was that experience like? What was some of the first information you got and what started happening? Gosh, I was eating dinner with my family. The call came out in the evening, which is a really bad time to get a SAR call on top of Mount Hood. So they come to us via a text message and, you know, I mean, honestly, the first, I read the words, you know, broken femur in a femoral Mount Hood 10,000 feet and the first thing I thought, you know, just realistically is that guy's not going to make it. I mean, it's January and it's dark and, you know, just to get a team up there and begin assessing the situation takes a fair amount of time. And there's a chance that whether it's his injuries or it's the gas or it's the cold, you know, something is going to cause him to get worse before anybody can get to him. That was my, you know, potentially pessimistic initial response to that call out. Personally, I was recovering from COVID. My whole family had been quarantining and kind of staying away from everybody. And I also personally, I really wanted to go. I wanted to be a part of this. I didn't want to give everybody COVID. I didn't want to give the subject COVID. I made some phone calls, I took a test and I was negative and I said, OK, I think I'm not contagious. I think I'm going to go. So that was my initial, you know, from my perspective of the subject and my own kind of, you know, perspective of myself, my gut reaction to it. Yeah, I think the initial call went to Hood River County based on the GPS coordinates of where the call was placed inside just over that line into Hood River County. And so, Kole, I think your team was probably called first, which is the normal way that things would go. But given the severity and the complexity of this situation, plus the, the funeral hazard, which the, which PMR is an expert in, it was quickly decided that we wanted both teams to respond to this. And my situation is similar to Kole's. I think I was just finishing up dinner, got the, the phone call and had that same reaction about this is, this is bad. This is worst case scenario in the middle of winter, kind of an all hands on deck situation. And let's, you know, there's very little in life that is more important than this. And so really quickly he gathered the, my gear together, I usually keep it pretty close to the truck and, and headed up to Mount Hood. Now what most people maybe don't always understand is that we're not just sitting there at the lodge and at the trailhead ready to go 24 hours a day. We're at home living our lives and I live almost two hour drive away. And most the folks that live in Portland are anywhere between one to two hours away. So it takes a while. We have to stop what we're doing, gather our things, get in the car and drive up there. I think in this situation, there were several members of the Kragrat team that were actually quite nearby. They had been doing recreational things on the mountain that day and were able to get there quickly. But we still need to have enough people arrive and get all the gear organized before we can actually start sending a team up the hill. Yeah. I think that, that kind of brings up a good point. You can, you can literally, if you're going down the hogsback, which is kind of an important feature on Mount Hood. And if you, if you fall like skiers right, you're in Clackamas County, if you fall skiers left here in Hood River County, and for that reason, you know, a huge number of these rescues are done jointly between Portland, not rescue and the Kragrats. And, and from my point of view, that is fantastic. You know, I think that there, there are definitely some, you know, strengths that each of us have. I won't say that either of us have weaknesses, but I think, I think there are definitely some things that they're good at and some things that we're good at. And I think, you know, most importantly, we get along really well. We work together really well. We do a lot of trainings together. I think we have a lot of respect for each other's teams. And so it's pretty easy to, to activate the two teams together and for us to, to jump in and work together. We've done it, bought some lots of times and probably do it a lot more times. Yeah. We share a lot of the same knowledge. We work together plenty of times that we can really integrate well. And we know enough of the, of each other to see familiar faces from time to time and, and recognize who we're working with. And so it's a pretty seamless operation when both teams are involved. Okay. So you're getting there where, where, who become questions, who, who's, who's in charge and like, like you guys are talking about, you know, waiting for a quorum of folks to show up before you send anybody up. How does that process start of like thinking about what are the next steps, who is, who is the team? That sort of thing. Like how, how does that decision making process work? Yeah. I think that's a good question about who's in charge and that is a legitimate potential point of confusion. But in this case, it's, it's been pretty clear. This was a Hood River County operation. Their sheriff's deputies were there and, and both teams were, were responding under the the authority of the Hood River County Sheriff's Department. The way these things typically start out, you want to get somebody to the scene as quickly as possible. You know, you need to have a trained rescuer there with good communication so that we can get some reliable information about the situation. You need to get medical care on scene as quickly as possible. The challenge in this situation is the subject was located in a potentially toxic environment. And so we needed to be really careful and not just race to send rescuers into a dangerous situation that was going to harm them. We really needed to, we, well, we're always going to prioritize rescuer safety. We do this too frequently to take big chances every time. And so we needed to make sure that we got the necessary funeral safety equipment, the gas monitor, the air purifying respirator mask, and the, the ropes that would be required to get somebody down into the, into the funeral. And so that's the first priority is to gather that equipment. We do have the, the fortune of being, the trailer is out of ski area with chairlift that goes about half the way to the summit of the mountain. Now they're not running the chairlifts at eight PM at night, but they do offer snow cat drivers to help drive us up there. And so we get the snow cat lined up or the, the sheriff's department gets the snow cat lined up and we send that first team a small fast and light team carrying the bare minimum of safety equipment and medical equipment to get to the, the subject and we send them up on that first snow cat as soon as we, as soon as we can, I don't think I have the timing on that exactly, but I could probably look it up if you needed it, but you know, factoring in the drive from Portland and time to get the, the gear together. That's probably two to maybe three hours before we're, we're moving up the hill. Anything to add on that, Colleen? I will add that gosh, it's nice to get most of the way up in a snow cat. That's the only time, I can't believe I'm saying this. It's the only time I have gone to the upper mountain in that hood and not taken myself from the parking lot to the top of Palmer and I couldn't believe how fast you can get up there when you don't have to do that first log. So yeah, the kind of what it, what it feels like is you, you know, I showed up by myself. I knew there was a team, I think primarily of Kragrats and some PMR that were up at the scene already. I was slightly delayed testing myself for COVID and you, you always check in, you, you basically go to incident command, there's, there's, there's one person that's usually kind of like the designated person that's in charge of the whole thing. That's the incident commander or at least like, you know, there's, there's someone near them that where you're going to sign in and check in and let them know you're here. And then you kind of wait to get assigned to, to a team or to a task. I believe Scott and I went up in the same snow cat together. It was kind of a handful of Portland Mountain rescue people. I, like I said, I, I knew kind of there were a few of my, my Kragrats teammates that were already up at the top and yeah, you hop in a snow cat and we, we kind of on the way we're making plans about, you know, who's going to carry what. And once they realized I was a physician, they said, okay, well, we're going to take all the heavy stuff from you and you're going to go really fast up. Which initially I was, I was like, well, that's a lot of pressure. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta climb really hard and fast or I can't let the guy with, you know, with the litter on his back beat me up there. So, but that was really nice because I, I basically had a, you know, my own gear. I had some like modest medical supplies, you know, and layers and just kind of booked it up from the top of Palmer to get up to the, to the funeral. Yeah. Let me just to clarify, we probably sent two teams total or two waves, I guess, of people. So that first snow cat took the hasty team and the hasty team's job is to get there as quickly as possible and start rendering medical care and ideally if possible get the subject out of that toxic environment. And then we follow up with a larger team that brings the rest of the medical equipment and and all of the rest of the equipment that's needed to get, to get the subject out of there. That first hasty team though, it took about four hours for the time that, that 911 call was placed to the time when that first hasty team arrived and was able to get somebody down to the patient. That was four hours and that's actually pretty fast by our standards considering the driving time and the transfer and the, and the complexity. A lot of folks think that you can call 911 and, and helicopter is going to come get you in 10 minutes and that's just not the case in the Pacific Northwest. It takes a lot longer than you might think and, and you need to be prepared to, to survive that, that time period rescue is at best several hours away. And then once we, once we do get to you, it, it takes several more hours to get you out of there. I think that's an extremely important point, Scott, you know, like you said, about four hours to get to this individual and, and you have to also consider that's on Mount Hood where you can, on the South side where you can drive up to about 6,000 feet, it almost anywhere else on that mountain, you're adding another couple of hours at least, you know, the North side, it's much harder to get that pie. It's going to require a snow cat to get up there. So that's, that is an ideal scenario to get to somebody quickly and it still took four hours. And I, when I am packing my bag and I'm going to climb Mount Hood on my own, I think about that really carefully, you know, if I, because when you're moving, you're warm, you know, and if something happens, even if it's a minor injury, you, you, you pop an ACL or, you know, something that just, that makes it so you can't move. And I had to sit there for four, maybe five, maybe six hours, how am I going to stay warm, how am I going to stay hydrated? I have made it a personal goal to not need to be rescued ever. So I consider that quite a lot of like, what, you know, how am I going to get myself down if I can, and how do I stay warm in the interim before someone can get me if they do need to. So we could chat a little bit about the, the potential for a helicopter. I know that was plan A, given the severity of the injuries and, and the location. That's the kind of thing that we would really want a helicopter for. A helicopter can, can get there, it often takes about as long to get a helicopter there as it does to get a ground team, but we can get them out much more quickly. And so that was the, the, the plan A in this situation. However, we are, you know, behold into the environment and the capabilities of the aircraft available to us. And in this situation, the, the local aviation company does not have the ability to fly at night with night vision goggles. The nearest Coast Guard unit that had an aircraft capable of this, of this mission wasn't going to be available until six AM the following morning. And the local national guard company was not able to take the mission. Forget exactly why, but, but we had, we tried three different ways to get a, to get a helicopter on scene and, and, and unfortunately, largely due to the fact that it was at night and it was so late in the day when this happened, that, that wasn't an option. So we, we had to resort to, to boots on the ground, which takes a lot longer. Yeah. Okay. So from the, you guys are in the cats, you're getting up there to the scene of the accident. Tell them kind of like, how does the rest of this unfold? How does the rescue unfold? Sure. Um, so I, um, like I said, I, I was, you know, given the gift of a light backpack and began marching up to, to the, an area that I'm pretty familiar with that I've been up to many, many times. I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of nice. I had like a solid like 60 minutes of like mental preparation of thinking, you know, I had some information about the guy and his injuries, you know, I knew he was in a team role. So I kind of got, had some time where I just me in my head to think, um, about what to do. That's, that's really, really helpful. I mean, I think lots of times you just get kind of thrown into a situation and you don't really get a chance to think about, about what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. So I began to approach the funeral. I could see everyone's headlamps kind of bouncing off the, the bouncing off the snow on crater rock. I was really grateful to get up there and see familiar faces, you know, to see my own teammates, you know, guys that I've, I've known for years and really, really trust both in the Kragrats and in PMR, you know, guys that I've been on missions with and with their team in the past. So I walked up to, uh, you know, I think that the Kragrats that were there, a good friend of mine named John Rust, and I knew that I think Ben's word law, I'm saying that correctly was up there. And those are two guys that I, I have a lot of trust in, you know, I, they, I know they built the anchors. I know they set up the system. I don't, you know, I'm going to check it, but I feel really confident than when, when, when a, those, one of those guys built an anchor, it's going to hold me. So that was a huge relief going into kind of like a, you know, a stressful situation. The predicament that I think I was facing when I walked up was that this person was in the funeral. He had been there for hours. And so there was, there was a, you know, kind of a less of a concern about there being dangerous gases down there. There was a rescuer from PMR already down in the funeral with a respirator on. Yon was down there, was on a rope. I think the concern was someone needs to decide when and how in the best way to move this person. Cause if he's got a femur injury, he could have a spinal cord injury as well. And for better or worse, I was the highest ranking medical person that was there. And I knew that was my responsibility. I knew that that was going to be my decision to make. And that, that's just kind of what I had planned on as I walked up, that I've got to be the one to make these decisions about, about how quickly to get him out of there. The kind of less awesome part of it was as I was getting ready, you know, they, they told me that the gas levels were safe, that there was, there was some hydrogen sulfides that was down there, but it had stayed, you know, in safe levels. And they said, we're really sorry, but we don't have a respirator for you. Which it happens. You know, I think maybe that's one of the canisters fell down into the funeral and was never seen again. And, you know, the thing that I remember been telling me was, you know, you don't have to go, you don't, you're, you're a volunteer, you don't have to go down there. But I knew that was necessary to, to, to continue the mission, you know, not, not just for the subject, but just to, to move things along. I knew that was my job. I also knew he had been down there. I knew the gas levels were safe. And I just, I felt like that was a risk that was, that was worth taking. Portland Mountain Rescue has, like Scott was saying earlier, they have a really great system that allows you to lower yourself, but you can also be lowered and raised. You know, most crevasse rescue systems, it takes a little bit of time. One most crevasse rescue systems are not designed for, for someone to get themselves out of. You can have to be pulled out. This is a really great system that allows you to be lowered. And if you want to, you can stop the lowering at any time. They can stop it at any time. They can pull you out at any time, whether you're conscious or not. So I began to lower myself down into the humor roll and it's, it's amazing. I've never been in a funeral before. It's amazing how different of an environment that is your, you know, you're up in the cold and there's snow blowing and it's dark and, you know, and then all of a sudden you're in this like hot smelly hole. There's no snow. There's just like dirt and melted snow and water and it smells terrible. And it, it, it definitely kind of your, your like gut instinct says like, get out of here. Your, this is not a place for people on top of the gas concern. I looked up and I could see that, you know, some of the upper mountain and I know what's up there and I know that anything that falls around that area is going to come tumbling down to us. So I felt a pretty strong sense of urgency to get this guy cleared really quickly in, in, you know, wilderness medicine as in my job as a surgeon, we do a primary survey, which is kind of like a really quick, easy way to just check off the things that are the most likely to kill a patient. You know, it's, it's airway breeding circulation, deficit exposure. So very rapidly I did a quick primary survey. I did kind of some extra stuff to make me feel good that he did not have a spinal cord injury, but at the same time, you know, I, I knew that we were going to be, that I essentially knew that if this were on the side of a trail, we would be doing it very differently. The best way to move a person with a femur fracture, I should back up and say that if you have a femur fracture, you have, your body has been exposed to a huge amount of energy. Femur is the biggest strongest bone in your body. If it is broken, as we suspected his was just by the, the angulation of his leg, you, you've, something has struck your body with great force. So there's, there's a high risk for other injuries, whether they be spinal cord injuries, internal injuries, spleen, liver or whatever. So I had that concern. And yeah, if we were on the side of a trail and it's sunny and 60 degrees out, we would, we would move him very carefully. We were, there would probably be, you know, three people on either side of him, like lifting him up without really even moving him at all. You know, and in my head, that's, that's what I thought, like that's, that's the way to do this. But we're not on the side of a trail and you know, sunny weather, we're down in a, in a fume roll on top of Mount Hood. So I knew I had to kind of do what I could. Once I felt confident that he, he didn't have any sort of spinal cord injury, we lowered what's called a vacuum splint down and that's this great device that, you know, it's kind of like a bean bag and you wrap the person in this bean bag and then you literally pump the air out of it and it becomes kind of firm and it immobilizes them. So Yon and I lifted him up to get the, the vacuum splint underneath him and that really hurt him. That was another part of it that was difficult is as I told him, hey, we got to move you and it's going to hurt, but we don't have a choice. We can't give you drugs. We got to get you out of here. We got to do this fast and it did, it hurt him a lot. We got him up. We put the vacuum splint underneath him. We got him immobilized. We then had to do it again to get this, a litter called the sked. It's kind of like slippery and slides on the snow really easily. We got that underneath him and then once we had, had gotten, you know, safely strapped in and immobilized, we began raising him out and that was a huge relief, you know, to be getting out of that really weird kind of alien environment. We got him up to kind of the top of the funeral. We then kind of pendulum him over where in that, during that time, some of the other team members had kind of cut a little bench for him to lay on. He wasn't really packaged properly for descent and really, really cold environment. So we, we repackaged him in a, you know, a kind of classic, you know, cold pack, hot pack, whatever you want to call it, sleeping, you know, same as between sleeping bags, you know, with some, a bunch of hot pads in there. And gosh, then I felt just immense relief that like he was out, that this guy that, you know, however many hours before I thought was going to be dead, he's not only, is he not dead, he's out of the hole, you know, and, and now it's just a matter of getting him down, which, you know, as, as Scott can relay, it's not a small task. We're still high up on Mount Hood in the middle of the night in January, but it was, it was, I felt like the scariest, most precarious part of the, of the mission was over at that point. Hey, Kelly, how, how deep into the funeral or how long was that, was that raised, do you think? Uh, I think it was about 30, 40 feet or so. You couldn't really, it was very hard to communicate verbally. We had radios, it was just so windy where they were and we were just so insulated by, you know, by the snow. There's kind of snow, you know, all around you or, you know, ice all around you and the ground was just this kind of icky, sulfur-y, watery mud, but yeah, so it was 30, 40 feet or so. Yeah. Pretty, pretty significant, pretty significant hole to fall into. Yeah. I went, I went back to that, it's, it's the devil's kitchen funeral. That's just, that's the name of that one. I went back to it, I guess, two, three months later to kind of revisit it and in one it had already changed. Like the, the, the funeral's constantly changed with the weather with, with what comes out on the form of gas. But I mean, I didn't even want to get close enough to see where I was. It's just, it was, it's, yeah, it's not a, you don't want to be in a funeral. It's, it's got to be one of the worst places to be. I think you had a couple of things going for him though, um, like Kelly said earlier, even this, you know, the situation and severity of the injury, both of us were questioning whether he was going to survive long enough for us to get there. But fortunately for him, the, the funeral was open enough that the air, that the air was circulating enough to keep the gas concentration down to a tolerable level. It wasn't certainly some place you want to spend all day, but it's not going to kill you in only a couple of hours. So we had that going for him. And also the heat from the funeral is probably what kept him, you know, it, what kept off hypothermia and allowed him to be relatively warm, you know, even when we got to him four hours later. So a couple of pieces of good fortune going his way. Yeah. Definitely. Ah, geez. That the, the description of like the alienness was definitely really getting to me of that space. Um, Scott, can you tell us a little bit more now about the kind of the final rescue getting him to a hospital? What, what, what was involved in all of that? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Once, uh, once he was brought up out of the hole, think all of us breathe the huge side of relief. We, we had a shelf cut out in the ice so that we could rest him safely. We did have to repackage him in a, in a better litter that was more suitable for the, for the transport, as well as get all the rest of the, uh, we would do some medical care and then get him wrapped up in sleeping bags and hot packs. And, and he was alert and responsive and even cracking a couple of jokes, which really takes the tension out of the situation from somebody that we weren't even sure was going to be alive. And now here he is, he's doing really well considering the situation. He's having a conversation with us. He's cracking a couple of jokes. We all, you know, really breathe the huge sigh of relief at that point. And the job's not over, but certainly the hardest part is behind us. We lower people down from 10,000 feet on Mount Hood very routinely. We have another special system designed exactly for that. We do it all the time. And so, you know, at this point, we just transitioned into the routine lower. We call it the hogsback lower off of that part of the mountain. And what we have is a 600 foot long thin rope and we build anchors in the snow and we attach the rope to one end of the rope to the litter. And then we attach the rope into a friction device on the anchor. And that allows us to lower the litter down the icy slope 600 feet at a time before we have to stop and reset at another anchor. Now, we like to do everything with redundancy. So we also attach rescuers to the litter with shorter ropes so that if there were to be a problem, we have rescuers that are able to control the speed on their own. And we only use this system when the steep, the steepness of the slope is, and the conditions of the surface are safe enough for it. But in this case, it's, you know, it's a steep hill. It's like a black diamond ski run at that point. You can walk up and down it and you feel comfortable. It's not ice climbing. But it is steep enough that if you were to, you know, to slide, you would keep going along long ways, probably all the way down to the lodge. So we have to have, you know, the safety equipment, the ropes and things to take care of that and control the descent in a safe way. So after getting him repackaged and some medical attention, we kind of loaded up in the litter, got our people organized into litter teams and started heading down the mountain. And it was about as fast as a slow walk, which is pretty good. And you know, it took us a couple of hours probably to get from where he was up there in the funeral down, I don't know, maybe six or eight rope lengths before the mountain flattened out enough where we felt comfortable not using the rope any longer. And then the last little bit, we were able to just kind of walk in the sliding the litter down the snow to the top of the ski area. Again, the Timberline Lodge is excellent at supporting us in this way. They had a snow cat there at the top of the ski area waiting. And from there, we were able to load him up into the snow cat, and then the snow cat drives down 2,500 feet to the lodge, and then there's an ambulance at the lodge. So that's still not a hospital, still an hour and a half drive from a hospital. But you know, we all feel pretty good once you get into an ambulance, you're in pretty good shape. And all told, that took eight and a half hours from the time that the 911 call was placed until the time we got him into an ambulance was eight and a half hours. And you said it was pretty speedy, like that's pretty good timing. Pretty fast. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, folks should expect that they find themselves in a similar situation that eight and a half hours is the time to be that's not necessarily the average. Right. Yeah, any other details or memories from this particular mission? Yeah, I think the hogs back lower that they do, it allows kind of like, there's always kind of a brief, you know, couple of minutes that you can go over and assess the patient there. There actually was another EMT up there and he and I kind of were constantly checking on the subject and, you know, making sure he's warm, making sure he's okay. And that's really convenient. And you know, you kind of think you're done, but you know, then you have to kind of constantly go in and look at the guy and make sure he's doing okay. I'll say he had two friends that were he was climbing with. They stayed up there for, you know, basically kind of until we began to get him out. His friends, the subject himself, he had a really good attitude, you know, I think you get some people that get into trouble and they kind of like feel embarrassed or they feel ashamed or, you know, they have, you know, they're, you know, he like, like Scott said, he was he was kind of joking and kind of making fun of himself and, you know, and he handled a really tough situation really well. I got to give him props for that. I don't know that if I was in the same situation, I would have been quite so quite so, you know, kind of adapted that. Yeah. I remember thinking like, you know, I think this guy's going to do okay. I think he's, he's, he's got to get attitude and he's, he's been through this and he's been down there a while and now he's out and we're making our way down. Yeah. Yeah. I guess my, my final thoughts were that sort of just the emotional ride of, of the night starting with that daunting challenge of, of hearing about this impossible problem for the first time, you know, worst case scenario. And then, and having to go do it anyway, there's nobody else. And so, but having the confidence in the team and the preparation that we can figure this out. It is what we train for. We design systems for this. And the solution may not be immediately apparent, but, you know, once we start working the problem, we'll figure it out. And to see that all kind of work, work to its completion that culminated with that, the high point of him coming out of the hole and being okay and talking to us. And that transition into, okay, now it's probably going to be fine. Like we can get it from here. We've got the hard part behind us and there's still work to do, but, but just that emotional relief of like this guy is going to probably be okay was, was really nice. And to see the whole team go through that and the relief wash over everybody's face and that, that mood and the atmosphere change was, was, was really impactful. And then the camaraderie of, of the team working together to get that all done was really nice. Yeah. I guess just for me personally, it was, I mean, it was, it was a culmination of like my medical training, my, my rescue training, everything from like my fitness to like how to pack a bag to what gloves to bring, you know, all these just little tidbits of, you know, pieces that you learn along the way, I mean, it was, it was profoundly meaningful to me to be able to take all those things, years of medical training, all that knowledge, you know, and advice from other people and bring it all into one scenario to help this guy. I also, to me, those situations where you've got one person that is in such a bad spot and you have, you know, you flip a switch and all of a sudden you activate a whole team of people to help, to me, it's very much akin to the medical system where, you know, somebody gets cancer and all of a sudden, you know, the oncologist and the nurses and the surgeons and everybody kind of activate to, to help this one person that something bad has happened to. And gosh, that, you know, that's one of the things that just like reaffirms my faith in the world. You know, there's so much negativity and so many bad things that go on. And then you're, you know, to go into a situation where you're surrounded by all these other people, you know, Portland Mountain Rescue and the Kragrats that are there, like, I'm here to help. I came out to do this, to help this one guy who got into a bad situation. It's a really profoundly positive feeling and it kind of does reaffirm your faith and humanity, which is, I think, super important to do. Yeah, I wanted to specifically ask you guys about, you know, the emotional heaviness of search or rescue, because sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes it's intentionally a body recovery. So like how in the long term, do you guys cope with the kind of the roller coaster you guys were talking about of emotions? Yeah. Yeah, it can be tough. They're not always happy endings. I think the word compartmentalized comes to mind. There's times when you just need to get worked on and you need to push out of your mind the doubts and the sadness and the hard things. And you have to focus on the task at hand and just get it done. There can be time to grieve and to process later, but part of it for me I think is balancing those things, like, you know, knowing when to process the emotions versus when to focus on the task. And then just having the support system of the team and the family, we do, we study and do training on psychological first aid on how to help each other through these situations when you've gone through a really tough rescue or a recovery that didn't work out, be able to process through that. We think of it as kind of like first aid, you know, like you've had a bit of an injury psychologically or emotionally, you need to kind of nurse through that and get back to a healthy state. Yeah. We, I guess, maybe two years before this rescue, PMR in the Kragrats, I think you were on this when we did the body recovery up on the north side, that climber that had fallen into the Elate Glacier. Yeah. I mean, that was a very similar scenario where someone had fallen and they had died, but they were stuck in an extremely remote spot on the north side of Mount Hood, and it was another, you know, collaboration between Kragrats and Portland Mountain Rescue. It took a full day to get him out of there, you know, and I will never forget at the end of that day, making my way back to Cloud Cap, like, completely exhausted. I told my wife I was going to be home by three and it was eight o'clock at night. And this guy's family, you know, walked up to all of us and said, like, you have no idea what this means to us. You know, my son was just like you. He would have loved to have met you. You know, this helps us so much to see you here. And it was. It was probably, he was even more people than the funeral rescue. It was probably, you know, 30, 40 people that were involved in just taking his body off the mountain. When you, when you, you finish and you're kind of all you're thinking about is how tired you are, you know, and then you get that, like, you realize how important that was to two parents who just lost their son. To me, that's, that kind of is a lot of the first aid, you know, is, is a lot of the, like, why, you know, why did I go through seeing all this? Why did I go through this day and you just get the answer, you know, kind of, like, right in your face. So yeah, that's the best answer I can give you. Yeah. It seems both like very hard, but very rewarding in many ways. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mentioned my day job is mostly working at a desk in an office and I love it, but you know, it doesn't, doesn't scratch that itch to really contribute to society in a meaningful way in the same way that literally going up onto a mountain and saving somebody's life does. And that is, that is just so fulfilling to be able to do that. And even if it doesn't result in the, the rescue of somebody alive, even if it's just bringing the remains of, of somebody back down to their family, it's, it's so important in it. And even though it's tough, it's very fulfilling on a personal level. Yeah. So maybe you guys have already answered this, but I'll ask it directly. What's the best and worst part of being on a search and rescue team for you personally? Um, I mean, the best part is what I just, what we just described, you know, it's, it's taking all the stuff you've learned over the years and, and using it, you know, even the dumb things that you, you know, that you've learned while you're on a chairlift that you think are not going to be useful or helpful. And you're like, yeah, you know, I remember someone told me you could put your ski strap on this way and it keeps you pulled down. Having all that knowledge, you know, to have a positive outcome is by far the best. The worst, it's a great question. I think the, the worst is probably when, when you get completely ready to go do something like the funeral rescue and you show up and you're ready to go and either something terrible happens that the, the, you know, you find that the subject, you know, succumb to the, their injuries, um, or they just walk out and everything's fine. That's great. That's a way better outcome, but you're, you, it is kind of like another emotional roller coaster. Like I was ready to go. I wanted to help and now I just got to go home and try and sleep, which is usually impossible at that point. But no, I don't think there's a lot of negative about it. I mean, joining a church or rescue group has been such a overwhelmingly positive part of my life in so many regards. Everything from the training, the knowledge, the rescues to just the, the friends that I made in the camaraderie. I mean, we, we spend a lot of time skiing and recreating together when we're not doing rescues. And I think that helps a ton. So there's, there's very little negative. I'll put it that way. I totally agree. I think the, the people that I get to spend time with is the highlight for me, volunteering your time to go help out other people tends to attract really, really great folks. And so I've got some of my best, my best friends, part of the unit that, that I get to enjoy. I think maybe the hardest part is that you can't, it's a volunteer organization. My job is as a volunteer, I have other things going on in my life. I can't go to every single one of them and managing that balance is, is tough. Cause you, you want to respond and you want to help, but you also want to coach soccer and you know, how do you prioritize between those two things? But that's a balance that we all have to strike depending on where we are in our lives to be able to, to give, to give time to, to support the rescue activity as well. Also doing the other things that, that require our attention. Yeah, I would add, I should add that the worst part is really for my wife because, because I have, you know, and she is amazingly supportive of this. It's less, she's less supportive when I'm just going to go, you know, kite boarding for the day. But if, you know, she's got both kids and I'm supposed to come home, but instead I'm going to go on a rescue. She knows how important that is to me. She knows how important it is to the team and to the person that's lost. And she allows that. And that's, I feel often guilty and bad because sometimes I miss something or I just kind of have to give her more work. So I mean, I think especially if you have kids having a supportive family and a family that understands this work is really, really helpful, fortunate that I do. Yeah. Yeah. 100% that to have that support that my wife has never once questioned or given me, you know, a bad look at the suggestion that I'm going to go off on a rescue. There's never, there's never a question or a challenge there. It's always like, yeah, you have to do that. I'll cover whatever else is needed. That's, that's great to have that support. I was on one couple of years ago and kind of just got ready really quickly. And my, my, I have a, my wife's text message rings a specific way in my pocket. And I was like, oh gosh, she's probably telling me when, you know, to come back or I need to do something. And she had looked up the lost person and said, you know, I found the person that's lost and she's a physician. Here's her picture. You know, she's got, she's married. She's got three kids and she'll often do like some detective work on the side and send that out to everybody. So yeah, that's, it's, it's huge to have that. That is so awesome. Yeah. I love the, that throughout this entire conversation, we've just had so many examples of like people being really good people for each other, you know, in community in whatever way possible. I wanted to ask a few more questions before we finish because we're about time, but kind of taking a step back, have you guys noticed trends in rescues? Like what would you tell hikers, climbers, skiers if you could, based on all of your experience with rescues? I think we've definitely, I mean, we've seen popular, just general popularity of outdoor activity increase, resteadily over the last 20 years. And that's, and that's fine. Yeah. The percentage of rescues has actually probably gone down, I would say, as a, as a percent of total outdoor recreation, at least in our area, but we still play, stay plenty busy. I think one of the biggest pieces of advice I would give is that you see these amazing glorious photos and videos on social media that make it look like it's just going to be magnificent. And it's not always that way. And you need to assess the situation that you have today, right? What are your conditions? What's the snow like today? What's the weather like today? And don't try and gauge your accomplishments to the glorious things that you see others doing on social media. You got to make the right decisions for yourself in that moment. I think the advent of the cell phone has changed search and rescue. I guess I see that pretty profoundly because we have, I mean, there are members of the Cragrats that are in their 90s. They've literally, they, you know, they're, they're not active. They're not going out on rescues in their 90s, though some are doing it in their 70s. And so back before everybody had this communication device in their pocket, it really was search and rescue. It really was like, hey, you know, my, my husband went on a camping trip for three days and now he's been gone four days and I don't really know where he is. And that is a much bigger problem than, hey, I just ran out of water and I don't know where I am, but here's my cell phone coordinates, you know, I need some help. So I think that's a big change is people, you know, and what's going to revolutionize things again is the, the SOS function on, you know, on iPhones, the iPhone 14 now has the ability to communicate with satellites and basically communicate your location and your emergency messages, even when you don't have cell service. I have to imagine that's going to become standard on every iPhone in the future. You know, I, like I carry a garment in reach with me on any concerning, you know, outing. And I think it'll, that'll kind of, you know, take that over to an extent. So that's changed a lot the, in that regard, one of the biggest, it sounds so silly, but one of the most important things I would tell someone to bring is a cell phone battery. The subject we rescued yesterday, he was struggling, he was lost, he had no water. His water bladder is his cable back broke. It was 85 degrees and he had like 2% on his phone left and he had no battery. And if he had not called or he had not gotten the message out that he was lost and in trouble, it's a totally then, then you're back to that scenario where you're, where he's, he told us that he would not have been noted that he was missing until Tuesday. That would be three days that he would have been lost in the gorge, having, you can buy a relatively inexpensive lightweight battery that will recharge your cell phone three or four times and having that lifeline to talk to people. And that, it's not just a phone, it will tell you, help us where you are every, almost every phone has some GPS, you know, capabilities and those coordinates are usually pretty accurate. So I don't want people to place too much trust in that. Like I don't want people to think like, ah, I got my cell phone in my battery so I can go off without other important things like the 10 essentials. But I almost think like the 11th essential should be a backup cell phone battery. Yeah, people may not know this, but when you call 911, your GPS coordinates get relayed to the 911 operator automatically as part of that phone call. And that's relatively new in the last couple of years. And has, like Kelly said, taken a lot of the search out of search and rescue. And that was the situation. And this, I think we got the, we were able to get the GPS coordinates as part of that first call. So that eliminates the first challenge I have about, we know exactly where the person is. Now it's just a matter of getting them. Okay. And last question, make it fun, because my suspicion now that I have talked to you a number of folks who have been on search and rescue teams for years is just that you guys like playing with the gear and you're excited about the systems. So tell me like, what's your favorite like system or piece of gear that's specialized for search and rescue that you're just like always psyched to be talking about or like use or whatever? I mean, my, the, the piece of gear that like, I think I haven't used, but I, and I hope to never use is the pencil rad line. It's a small lightweight six millimeter hyper static rope with a few other bits and pieces and a set of skis and you can make a crevasse rescue system really, really easily. I just was, you know, training with it with some students up on the late glacier this week. I think the one of the biggest deterrents to bring anything in your pack is its weight. And if you, if you have something that, that's, that's lightweight and small and compact and you can throw it the bottom of your pack and hope you never need it, you're a lot more likely to bring it. So yeah, if you are traveling on glaciers and whether you're skiing or roped up or whatever the pencil rad line and the associated kind of bits and pieces that are involved with turning that into a crevasse rescue system are, are pretty sharp and they're very light. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I think I'll put a plug in for our, our hogsback rope, the hogsback kit rope that I described earlier, that 600 foot rope that we used to lower people down from the hogsback. Over my years with the team, that used to be almost a full strength climbing rope, 600 feet of it stuffed into two different rope bags, each in one rescuers backpack. And so two people would have to carry this thing is probably 10 pounds each tied to each other all the way up the mountain to use this kit. And over the years we've, we've worked with rope manufacturers and we've explored new technologies for a while, we even had a sailing rope that we used, but we're now down to, I believe it's a six millimeter diameter rope that we use for that through careful calculations of the physics and the forces involved. And over my time with the team, the weight of that, of that one tool is probably gone down to about one fifth of what it was when I first started now, a single rescuer can just stuff that into their pack and more and then, and then head on up the mountain. So it's great to see technology getting stronger and lighter over the years. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much for sharing this story and thank you very seriously for all the work that you do in serving this community, the outdoor community and helping people when they're in really tight positions. So thank you so much for all of your time and effort on that. Absolutely. Thanks for having us on. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. Rocky Taki's are backcountry radios designed by a small team of climbers in Denver. The radios are lightweight and rugged and clip directly to your harness or pack with a built in Mammut ultralight carabiner. Since launch in 2019, Rocky Taki has donated $2 per radio to search and rescue teams. Like good communication, these volunteer teams save lives and provide critical peace of mind in the backcountry. Learn more at rockytaki.com. This podcast is presented by Outdoor Research and Rocky Taki. Today's show was hosted by me, Hannah Provo and produced by Sierra McGivney and Shane Johnson. Please consider supporting your local search and rescue team in whatever way you can and share your stoke by voting for the most inspiring mission of the 2023 winners at rockytaki.com/pages/2023saraward.