Wild Rescues by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the weeks that followed, I quickly learned there were three types of SARs in the Sierras. The first normally occurred around dusk and typically involved hikers dialing 9-1-1 because night was approaching, they didn’t have a flashlight, and their cell phones were dying. Along with not having the appropriate gear, this brand of hikers often had no idea of their location, telling dispatch things like, “We’re near that big strand of trees and rocky crag,” as if that narrowed it down in a national park. While we sometimes sent a ranger up to help the reporting party, those calls rarely elicited a big SAR response. Normally, the lost party found their way back down by stumbling upon the trail or joining another group and hiking down with them.

The second type of mission was for people who should have called for a SAR response earlier but elected not to. These were folks who got injured in the backcountry but miraculously hiked their way out. They’d appear at trailheads or pullouts looking like the walking dead—bruised, battered, and broken—and then call 9-1-1. “Patient stated he was hiking alone above Little Yosemite Valley yesterday when he slipped on an icy patch of the trail,” I wrote in one of my patient care reports. “Victim stated he fell on his left side and tried to brace his fall with his left arm. Patient stated he lost consciousness after the fall. He noticed his left wrist might be broken and decided to turn around and seek medical attention. Near Yosemite Valley, patient stated he fell off a rock and experienced another ground-level fall. Patient stated his pack rolled down a hill, so he hiked to the Valley without his pack, slept in his car due to exhaustion, and in the morning decided to seek out medical attention by having someone call 9-1-1.”

The third type was the legit SARs, where the person was lost or too ill or injured to walk out, and we launched a search-and-rescue response.

The first SAR where I was the lead patient care provider occurred in early January, when I was dispatched with Sarah, my EMS supervisor and partner on the ambulance that afternoon, to the rocks beneath Lower Yosemite Falls to attend to a thirty-two-year-old woman who’d fallen. As I called “SAR Grange” over the radio for the first time, my mind raced with worry. How high did she fall from? Did she simply trip, or is there a medical complaint behind the injury? Is her blood sugar low? Was she severely dehydrated? Did she have a blood clot in her lungs?

Sarah and I parked the ambulance, loaded up our bags, and started up the steep paved path. She was at the front of the gurney, and I pushed from behind yet grew exhausted after only fifty yards. I was going to have to get into much better shape just to work at Yosemite, I realized.

As we crossed the footbridge, the paved path ended abruptly, so I threw the green BLS bag over one shoulder, the orange ALS bag over the other, and grabbed the gray cardiac monitor.

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