Apparently I Can't Help Myself

                                 Don Ryan / AP

So here are some thoughts on Mountain Rescue in light of the recent loss of life on Mt. Hood, after all.  No ranting I hope.

1. Carrying a locator beacon is indeed a good thing.  Climbers have traditionally rejected this idea, for a variety of reasons ranging from the weight (the early models were clunkers), their lack of reliability (they were awful), the changing standards (a beacon bought one year was useless the next), and their "techiness" (mountaineers generally disdain things that use batteries, other than headlamps, because batteries get cold and die within a matter of hours).  But let's face it, the newer Spot2 models are pretty good: they're lightweight, inexpensive (relative to other mountaineering gear), and they include both an automatic tracker that makes it possible for someone with web access to see a trail of breadcrumbs indicating the climber's path of travel, as well as an "I'm OK" button that climbers can proactively press to leave a marker indicating that (at least at that moment) they were/are fine and a panic button to call in the troops if necessary.  And finally, a beacon helps locate bodies faster.  This is the reason why I ski with an avalanche transceiver when I ski alone -- not so that I can be saved, but so that my family could have some closure, were I swept away.  (FWIW, I don't buy the idea that mountaineers take greater risks if they carry a beacon.   A rescue is a last-ditch call for help; we all know that.  We also know that rescues take hours or days, in the best case.  I don't know anyone who would take an unwarranted risk just because they have that beacon -- who wants to lie in the snow with a compound fracture, for days?)

2.  That being said, charging for rescues is a bad idea. I can think of scores of reasons why it's bad, but a few stand out:

• People who think that they will have to pay money to call for help will probably not do it until their situation is dire.  I can think of a dozen missions off the top of my head in which our patients (what MRA folks call the people they're rescuing) called in early and the resulting search and rescue went well, but in which if they had delayed by even an hour, they would have been dead and the rescue missions would have been extended by days -- if not weeks -- with all the resulting increased danger and expense.
• Mountain Rescue teams are almost exclusively volunteer.  We are funded via donations (read: United Way), so we couldn't charge a victim even if we wanted to do so.  Naval and military support helicopters, too, have mandatory training schedules and are obligated to log a certain number of flight hours -- which they would much rather do in support of a real rescue mission instead of winching a locator buoy out of the water somewhere, so their time is "free" in the sense that they would have logged the airtime, anyway.  (In fact, they even monitor our frequencies here, and have even been known to show up unannounced overhead, "just to see if the search teams could use some aerial reconnaissance support.")
• Charging money implies a mandate and/or a requirement to provide service.  As it stands, signs at trailheads loudly proclaim that no rescue is ever guaranteed.  However, if we charge hikers and climbers a fee, then it's not inconceivable in our litigious culture that the family of a victim might take a rescue team to court, to recover rescue fees (and more!) in the event that the victim was never saved or even located.  When that happens, liability insurance will probably become mandatory for these teams, to be followed shortly thereafter by team members quitting, as we will have "professionalized" the mountain rescue business.  And here's the thing: we are in this as volunteers because we care about our community and want to give back to it.  Helping to save lives in distress makes me feel like I've done something worthwhile.  I won't do it for money, were salaried professional rescue teams proposed, and I won't do it all, if that's the direction we're going.
• Asking desperate families to pay for rescues is just as bad as asking the victims.  I'll support this with an anecdote.  We were once on a big, glaciated peak, searching for a lost backcountry skier, and we had a naval blackhawk in the air to support us.  We'd been out there for a week already, and the family was freaked at the pace, so they paid two separate, private, commercial helicopter pilots to fly in and join the search.  Problem: the two new choppers were not on our MRA frequencies, since they weren't licensed to use them, so now we had two birds flying around randomly with no way to talk to them (since we also weren't licensed to use their commercial flight frequencies).  Only the navy boys could talk, and they became instant middlemen.  The naval helicopter -- the only one with a winch that could be used to retrieve the skier, or his body -- returned to base, given the danger of that aerial and ground situation.  Conclusion: when families are allowed or forced to make payment, they generally agree to do it -- but on their own terms.  In the above situation, we were able to force the commercial pilots to leave the area since we had mission responsibility for it, but if the families had paid for the whole thing we would have been helpless.
• The "expense" of a rescue is already covered by taxes that all mountaineers pay.  Specifically, it comes from the law enforcement folks who liason with the MRA teams, act as the PR interface with the media and families, and generally oversee operations (although they are not the incident commanders and not running the rescue, just running interference for the entire thing).  That's usually where you hear about the cost of a rescue, since the deputies are salaried and they often call in police helicopters for low-altitude searches.  But if we're going to require one group of people (mountaineers, who have an extremely low accident rate compared to unprepared summer hikers) to pay an additional fee beyond taxes for the local constables in the event that they need them, then we should really look into charging everyone else, too, because those dreamy-eyed cotton-and-flipflop-wearing day hikers are the ones who really consume the department resources on a week-to-week basis, at least when it comes to searches and body recoveries.  Alternatively, we could ask only those helped by the police to pay for police services.  Why should I have pay the salary of an officer who saves a child from being beaten?  I mean, it's not me, right?  (Yeah, that's a callous way to look at the world, alright.)

3. People climbing a mountain in winter do not "lack common sense." This meme sure does come up a lot.  People who don't climb often seem to think that although climbing is dangerous, it's at least acceptable in summertime with banner blue skies, and that we should sit in front of our fireplaces recounting stories during the winter.  Were that to be the case -- that we, as humankind, should only venture out into the world when conditions were pristine and outcomes known -- then I certainly wouldn't be typing this in North America, if at all.  In reality, the ability to push our limits is a fundamental human quality, and the slow advance of knowledge has today made winter mountaineering an everyday and practically mundane occurrence that is almost always undertaken safely, and with quantifiable benefits.  A crashed airliner in the Indian Peaks range of Colorado, for example, would have been written off as lost, were this 1950 and in the winter time, but today the Rocky Mountain Rescue team would be responding, at the site, and saving lives within hours of the first report, purely because of advances in winter mountaineering knowledge that have only come about as a direct result of people doing it.

I'm sure that next year, another group will be lost in the mountains, if not Mt. Hood itself, and this debate will repeat itself.  And I'll probably get sucked into it again.