Montrose - Daily Press

MONTROSE — While the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park is ideally a place to have fun and enjoy the natural wonder, inevitably some visitors find themselves in life-threatening situations.

But those unfortunate few also have a twist of luck, as 10 volunteers spend their time preparing and training for any type of emergency situation that may come up. In the event of an emergency, those volunteers are just a page away from heading straight to the canyon.

Black Canyon’s volunteer climbing ranger program takes advantage of the vast climbing expertise in the area by taking experienced technical climbers, giving them search and rescue training, and using them in rescues that would otherwise require outside help.

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“We’re out here because we want to be out here. Most of us have been climbing a long time, so it’s really rewarding to be able to say to our fellow climbers ‘If you guys need help, we’re here,’” volunteer climbing ranger Nick Wasser said.

Whether visitors venture off the rim and into the inner canyon to rock climb, fly fish or hike, if they get themselves into trouble they are hours away from help. It typically takes two to five hours from the time of incident to when the first authorities are notified. It takes even more time for the rescue team to assemble, formulate a plan and reach the victim.

The rescue team uses the North Rim Ranger Station as its base of operations since 90 percent of the climbing in the park takes place on the north side. In the five to six miles of the park that host the majority of climbing, there are over 285 individual routes.

Likewise, the majority of team members live on the north side of the canyon in the Paonia/Hotchkiss area, with two in the Montrose/Ridgway area and another two in Gunnison. That three-sided approach makes it so that someone can quickly respond to an incident regardless of which side of the park it is on, while the rest of the team is no more than an hour and a half away.

On average, seven of the 10 team members go out on a rescue mission, but only two are required to access and stabilize a patient.

“Even though we’re really close, because of the terrain we work in, it’s more like being in a wilderness setting — like being on a big mountain in Nepal or being somewhere way out in the backcountry in Alaska, where we end up being with our patients for several hours,” Black Canyon Climbing Ranger Brent Mims said.

On the rescue team, three of the volunteers plus Mims, a full-time ranger in his sixth year with the park, are certified Emergency Medical Technicians, six are Wilderness First Responders, which is one level below EMT with a focus on backcountry rescue, and one member simply has a wilderness first aid certification.

That focus on wilderness rescue is necessary because rescuers must not only bring the supplies necessary to treat medical injuries; they also need to bring survival gear since the injured person most likely was not planning on an extended stay in Black Canyon’s at times unforgiving climate.

“Even a person that may not be critically injured, if they’re injured where they’ve got to be down here longer than they were expecting to be down here, we’ve got to be able to bring in enough gear to keep them warm, to keep them fed and to keep them dry so that they don’t deteriorate on us,” Mims said.

During one particularly complex rescue this April, the team had to descend 600 feet down a gully, climb 150 feet up a pillar, traverse across that pillar and then rappel 400 feet to the climber, who could no longer climb but did not sustain life-threatening injuries. Once the eight rescuers reached him, they had to reverse that to get him out. The entire process took eight hours to complete.

In order to limit the response time as much as possible during climbing season, the volunteers routinely go on climbing patrols, in which they hike down into the canyon and climb a route in an area busy with other climbers.

“A lot of people-they think ‘Well, what is a climbing patrol? You guys are just out here having fun,’” Mims said. “Well, these guys are all climbers, so hopefully they are having fun while they’re out on their route, but they’re meeting a ton of objectives for the park.”

In addition to simply staying in shape, during climbs the volunteer rangers document many things that they find along the route, including natural hazards, fixed gear (such as bolts previously installed in the rock) and any additional gear that would make ascending the route easier in an adrenaline-rushed rescue.

Two rangers perform the climbing patrols every Saturday and Sunday in a busy area of the canyon to meet another objective of the patrols, which is to try to be within seeing or hearing distance of any accident that should occur so they can quickly dispatch the team.

“They also write a narrative on what they feel would be the best rescue tactic off of various points on that route,” Mims said. “Basically what they’re doing is pre-planning a rescue so we’ve got a good idea of what we’re gonna do if and when we have an accident on a specific route.”

While rock climbing is the primary focus of the rescue team, kayakers and fishermen are also active in the park. Therefore the team must be prepared for swift-water rescue as well. During this month’s training session, held Aug. 4-5 and designed to be mellow since only four volunteers could attend, the focus was swift-water rescue methods including different techniques for getting someone out of the water and crossing the river.

They were also treated to some real practice in removing a kayak pinned in some Class 6 (non-runnable) rapids. The kayak had been pinned since mid-July, when two kayakers from Asheville, North Carolina abandoned their boats during a failed attempt to run the section. The kayakers then hiked and swam downstream to a trail out of the canyon and successfully made it out.

The rescue team set up a pulley system with a six to one mechanical advantage that allowed them to pull out the kayak with relative ease. Rescuers said the boaters were “lucky” to not have been stuck in the water as well.

“I guess I feel pretty lucky... It’s just what happens when you paddle and our number got called that day,” said Nick David, one of the Asheville kayakers. “It’s definitely given me more of a respect for certain Western rivers. This is probably the first time where I’ve been stuck in a canyon and the only way you can get out is to go down.”

Contact John Deneen via e-mail at johnd@montrosepress.com

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