Calls for SAR triple in Colorado - it's a sign that our visitors and residents mistake the West as one big resort

You can observe the deep misunderstanding of wild spaces in New Westerners by their overuse, misunderstanding, and misuse of Search-And-Rescue (SAR) teams in the West.

In my last post, I talked about how new westerners are changing the face of the outdoors by finding their way into places they found on social media and other platforms, but with no skills or cultural integration with the place they’ve found their way into. That change has a few direct markers, including what PBS News Hour recently did a story on – the overuse and misuse of Search-And-Rescue (SAR) teams. And the details of the uptick in activation of these teams is alarming. 

The PBS News Hour piece on the subject includes one of the most important pieces of data that informs this condition at the very end, and only in a quick text-based slide – that activation of SAR teams in Colorado tripled during the pandemic. As in, calls for SAR jumped by 300% over the last two years. That’s pure insanity. 

While I’m not surprised by the increase, and I’ve directly witnessed the rise population and outdoor interest; And the abject decline in skills or acculturation to outdoor recreation, it is a fact that directly supports the position that the West is in a state of free-fall from a space with wild character to a highly domesticated space that is socially- and urban-centered. 

A source of deep fascination for this News Hour piece comes from my prior experience as a SAR volunteer. A little over a decade ago, I was on a local SAR team, and observed the early stages of this rise in use by individuals who sought adventure first, skills last. And I got out of SAR volunteering within a couple years, because I realized that I was never participating in rescues of people like me who were prepared – it was only of pre-novice-level individuals who were primarily seeking the feeling of adventure, but without any of the time and practice it takes to do it safely.

Another point of fascination comes from the dozens of other volunteer / good Samaritan rescues I’ve done over the last 20 years. Not a single one of the people in need of help were prepared. In vehicle recoveries, those stuck had no tools, no maps, no recovery equipment. In helping hikers, they were all lost, out of water, didn’t have proper gear, or had found themselves into a place with exposure to elements they didn’t even know were possible. 

The trend in all of these recoveries were three things:

(1) They found their way into the place via some social/tech platform, and had no map or map reading skills.

(2) They were carrying no equipment to be in the place they were in or to be able to self-recover.

(3) They expected the first person who stumbled upon them to drop everything to help them. (And, who wouldn’t stop to help someone? The answer is no one who isn’t a sociopath.)

But here’s the thing the PBS News Hour piece points to, but only grazes … the reason for this uptick in rescues and body recoveries in the outdoors in the West is that all of the newcomers only understand wild spaces through the lens of resorts and other similarly controlled places. Those spaces include ski resorts, National Parks, day camps, trailheads near a city, or campgrounds with a dedicated host. They do not understand these controlled places as domestic spaces - they view them as being part of the “great outdoors.” And they appear to assume that everywhere they go operates basically the same way; With help rapidly available at the push of a button. 

Ski resorts are very likely a primary gateway for the ex/urbanite to even be present in the West. Ski resorts use mining technologies to haul people up mountainsides on cables, just like the old mines from the Gold Rush used to carry people and transport ores. They have entire staffs and facilities entirely centered around SAR, in the form of the “Ski Patrol.” I think those whose experience is entirely framed in the safety of a resort then project that system onto every other outdoor space they enter. As in; If you want to go hike this mountain you found on Instagram, if you run into trouble, SAR will be there just like the ski patrol at your favorite ski resort. And that assumption couldn’t be further from reality.

What I’ve found is that most of the people in need of rescue outside of these resort spaces do not realize how SAR works, and most of their mental image of the process either comes from their experience at a ski resort, or that of a Hollywood movie. 

On a good-Samaritan rescue a few years go, I was ensnared into helping a couple late-20-somethings from West Virginia who had found a remote peak in Colorado on Instagram, had just shown up, bought brand new climbing/approach shoes, and decided to go test them on this peak - no exaggeration, this was how they found the place, and what motivated them to do this - and it was their explanation to me.

That’s a whole post in itself – but these two full-grown adults had gotten separated near the top due to one of them developing acute altitude sickness and became disoriented and combative - neither of whom knew what altitude sickness was or the signs of it. Then he fell, then he was injured, then he went into survival mode with nothing but a lighter he brought along to smoke weed at the top of the peak (no joke, not even a little bit.) He stayed out all night, and with only pure luck survived the night without any gear … and by burning the plastic climbing helmet he had (but was not wearing) to stay warm.

During the incident, the friend who approached me at the trailhead was seeking help, and so I asked a few questions and started helping him through it. I learned that he believed that SAR would just come in at night and do an overnight trip to find this guy – and at one point, he revealed that he thought SAR would send a helicopter to locate and pull his friend off this 14,000 foot peak (ahem, at night…).

He was quite distraught when I told him that SAR was very likely to not be able to go in until the morning given it was mid-September, it was 5pm, a New Moon, and we were about 30 miles from the nearest town. And that there would be no helicopter or movie-grade heroics. Then, the county’s dispatch told him the same thing.

The delusion about how SAR works, where it is available, and what risks they would take to save someone was alarming. 

Given that I’m compelled to tell that whole story later, because it’s shocking – and a great indicator of what the New West is looking and feeling like – I’ll summarize that these people vastly and almost-fatally misunderstood where they were, the skills required to be there, and how SAR worked. Their understanding of risk and adventure in Colorado’s mountains were entirely social media-, resort-, and entertainment-borne.

In some places in the West, SAR may not be available — and those places are the only ones that are still wild.

The PBS News Hour piece of SAR teams being over-activated was likely understated. As novice users see that piece (sadly, they probably won’t), they always (and I mean - always) view these scenarios as being something that wouldn’t happen to them. They also always misunderstand what SAR is, what they do, and how long a rescue can really take. The novice and newcomer image of SAR is more akin to a ski patrol from a ski resort, or a Hollywood movie, than what it really is and where it’s available. 

That’s a big problem, and it’s a problem that is growing exponentially in the West - and almost solely in the West. 300% increases in SAR calls over two years in places like Boulder, Colorado – which has no wild places left, and all of the trails are heavily used, signed, and improved — is absolutely insane. It’s not just a problem for SAR, it’s a problem for the entire cultural and environmental shape of the West.

As SAR teams are called on more and more, it creates more demand - more interest - and more need for SAR as a service to protect these people from themselves. As I’ve watched these systems develop and evolve in Colorado, they’ve acted as an artificial safety net for people to find anywhere on social media, and just go do without any form of preparation, education, or experience. And that is a direct act of dewilding in such a way that is completely juxtaposed to what these individuals think they’re seeking.

Places with truly wild character, with true access to what most people call “nature,” does not include ski patrol-like SAR teams to haul you out in a helicopter in a moment’s notice when you get a little scared or hurt.

In the end, I found this PBS News Hour piece to be pretty good. Sadly, it merely grazed the meat of the issue, and didn’t dive into the implications of this rise in interest in outdoor exploration with only an understanding of these places as domesticated spaces with services in place to make it safe. The users driving these astronomical increases in SAR activations appear to only understand non-domesticated spaces through the lens that well controlled spaces created for them — the well-controlled resorts, National Parks, and other domesticated spaces.

Without further ado… this piece on News Hour is nine minutes well spent. Enjoy, enrage!

PBS News Hour report on SAR overuse in Colorado and the West (watch it)

The Fleeting West is written by a rooted westerner with an eye on the preposterous changes in the West - shouting observations into the vacuum of the internet.