Volunteers for Teton County Search and Rescue invested nearly 13,000 hours into the operation last year. That’s a 19% increase from 2018.
But that spike in volunteer involvement doesn’t necessarily come from more rescues. In both 2018 and 2019, Search and Rescue volunteers responded to roughly 60 rescues. Those numbers are a jump from previous years. But they still aren’t proportionate with the rise in backcountry users, said Cody Lockhart, chief advisor for Teton County Search and Rescue.
Lockhart pointed to a few reasons why volunteers are dedicating more of their time to the operation. But chiefly, he said it is because they are spending more time training and deepening an already massive pool of skills.
He also discussed other findings from the TCSAR 2019 end of year report, such as rescues broken down by gender and TCSAR’s increasing efforts to address the mental health of first responders. Listen above for more.
