The Volunteers: Mountain Rescue Brings Us Home

[thoughtful woodwind melody] A complete list of funders is available on our website [mountain wind blows] [single piano, lightly played] I'm just practicing to keep myself calm here.

- Okay.

I think we're, I think we're ready.

[filigreed musical pattern] That's my pean to Medic One I wrote.

- Really?

Yeah.

It's got sirens in it, lights.

- Oh, I'd love to hear it.

It starts out with an emergency [strong minor chord] and then a phone call to the dispatch center.

[delicate notes] When you have an accident in the mountains one of the first things you need to worry about is the cold.

There was a woman missing just right over here on the back of Tenerife, the mountain I'm looking at right now through the window.

She'd been missing for four days.

[piano becomes more urgent] Even in 50 degree weather it can take only half an hour for a body to grow hypothermic while it lies on the ground.

That's part of what makes us human.

We're that vulnerable.

Our colleagues in Search and Rescue had been working on the search for three days.

So it's my turn to come up to be the base operations leader for this fourth operational period.

I walk up to the base area and there they are.

And the victim's Mom comes up and just gives me a long hug and says, "Greg, please find her for me."

Okay!

No pressure!

We'll get right on that.

[piano becomes driving] Based upon the information we had for the previous three days and more work that we did, we found her about four hours later, five hours later.

[piano becomes insistent] Typically, the useful life that we allow for a rope is ten years.

It can be really hard to part with a piece of equipment that can symbolize safety and connection to friends or family members and also adventures.

[piano slows] All over the world, the men and women of mountain rescue volunteer to keep us warm.

Through practice, they draw strength from their home to bring us safely back to ours.

We helped save their daughter.

You know, a lot of tears.

That was a big one.

[mountain wind blows] [piano fades with tinkling keys] [carabiners clank] - And we were like, alright, let's go find this route.

- At the Ranger station, there's no cell service.

If you want to understand the value of practice, talk to the men and women who volunteer for Seattle Mountain Rescue.

They never stop training for their next mission.

So the plan is we'll head up to practice rock.

We'll have three teams and we'll work on raises and lowers and doing a transition between the two.

Just get that foundational skill down.

No matter how experienced they are, they're continually refreshing their knowledge of their tools.

That's how they strengthen their team.

[on radio]: Rigged for raise.

[ambient piano, Alex Greene, Five Note Theme] - For us, training is imperative.

So we have a cadence of training that takes place throughout the year.

It's as simple as just having everybody understand and know the basics of what they're doing and staying sharp on using the equipment that we have, but also working together as a team and making sure that we can cohesively operate and do what we need to do should we be called out.

- Watch your head.

[Greg]: If we have somebody who has gotten hurt on Mailbox or Mount Si or up on the Tooth or any one of a number of hikes or climbs here, we'll have a GPS location off of their phone.

We'll know what to do and we'll send a team up that night.

Every three days in all seasons, they go into the mountains of Washington State to save people.

They volunteer their diverse skills for a common goal.

It's their bonds with each other created through rescue and through training that provide their greatest security in the wilderness.

These human ties are essential to make a place a home.

This is a story about just how much it takes to build such a refuge and how surprisingly little.

And it's a story about how the bonds in this place, drawing energy from another far away, radiate outward through the community and across the landscape of our still unfinished country.

Seattle Mountain Rescue, founded in 1948, has never had a physical headquarters.

[Greg]: We have traditionally kept all of our gear in people's basements drying and stuff.

And then we had one big truck that was left outside that was sort of our storage unit for gear.

You know, our trucks have sat outside, they get all grungy, but we made it work, we've had big work parties to repair trucks and stuff, and every year getting ready for the rescue season.

So this represents a huge shift from that mentality to something... you know, we're seeing 125 missions a year, you know, so it's time.

Seattle's future is growing from its investments in the high tech digital economy, in companies that, in one way or another are reducing the significance of geographic place, everywhere.

In connecting us around the world they're uprooting us from where we actually live.

That disruption of our social architecture is being felt throughout our political life.

[upbeat synth, Trapper Robbins, Alpine Jitter] Oh, these are great.

This is early copies of "Accidents in American Mountaineering."

I'm a historian, a scholar of law and politics, and I have some training in wilderness medicine.

That's how I first heard about Seattle Mountain Rescue.

The more I learned about its planned new home and what its volunteers do, the more I wondered about the origins of its spirit and its meaning for us today.

[wistful waltz, Alex Greene, Skate on the Moon] In this system, we have our tree, which is our tie-off point.

We're really lucky in the Pacific Northwest because we have a lot of really wonderful trees that we can use as our anchor points.

I've got my ATC device here that's got teeth on one side, which is where my brake hand will go when I'm lowering my rescuer.

And then I've got my friction knot on this side.

We teach that you can hold the rope like this or you can hold the rope like this, just not like this.

So it's "smoke it, toke it, don't choke it."

I like the image of ropes especially a coiled rope, because it's aesthetically pleasing, but it also gets at that idea of connection.

There's also a wistfulness, I think, because often when I'm creating these pieces, it's raining outside, it's a long way before a Washington summer where I can go out and climb again.

So they also have that wistfulness where I'm dreaming of being in the mountains, but me and the climbing rope are at home.

Volunteering has been part of my DNA since I was 17 or 18, with professional ski patrol work, with rescue work on Mount Rainier, moving into police work and then ultimately into my profession as a city manager and then as a volunteer firefighter-EMT with my local community here in Snoqualmie for about 13 years.

And then mountain rescue since 1976.

[gospel piano, Alex Greene] Maybe I'm old school, but I believe that, you know, we have an obligation to our society, and volunteering is a core part of that, I believe.

Volunteering, I think, is really an important component of building a society.

Actions embody ideas, ideas about who we are and what we owe each other, about fellowship, solidarity, altruism and loyalty.

Some people write about social and political philosophy.

Volunteers live it, eloquently, in ways from which we can learn.

Do you have a theory about why civic volunteerism may have declined?

Yeah, I think it's because of our digital age.

I think the fact that we communicate so often by soundbites and by tweets and by texts... [Alert signal] and that call just came in for... [Dispatcher]: 10-4, Engine 155 Engine 187 7509 Mullberry Avenue South East Structure, fire unconfirmed.

Structure fire!

That's a big one that just came in.

So they're going to be leaving here with lights and sirens shortly.

- Your guys are off.

- They're coming out, getting in their bunker gear now and you're going to hear them take off in a few minutes.

Ever since Benjamin Franklin, volunteer fire departments helped us imagine our nation.

Structure fire?

I couldn't hear.

- Unconfirmed.

Okay, where is it?

In the country somewhere?

Okay.

Thanks, man.

They've allowed us to see ourselves as an us in the midst of all our political conflicts.

Something we could use today.

Yeah, it's an unconfirmed structure fire.

So they gotta go throw all the bunker gear on, get ready to go, and then crawl into their assigned locations, get the headsets on, get their SUBAs on, and now they're ready to go and I hear the engine firing up, they're about ready to leave the bay, you'll hear the sirens starting shortly.

- How many times have you been in the same situation?

- 300, 400...

I mean, I have probably responded to 1200 calls during my time as a volunteer here.

- You can visualize where it is?

- I know exactly where it is.

I know what street it is because I had every street memorized.

- There's a deep metaphor in there, you have the city inside of yourself.

- I did it one time.

Now that knowledge is waning, but it was like, in Renton, I knew every street in Renton when I was a cop.

I mean, it's just not that hard to memorize, you know?

And so... so when new volunteers come on and they want to become drivers.

I'd say, "okay, here's the map of the city."

We're going to start testing your knowledge on those streets and where stuff is.

I'm going to give you a blank map of the city and say, "fill the streets for me."

[bright piano, Trapper Robbins, Bearing Up] The men and women of mountain rescue are first responders of a special kind.

For one, they volunteer in the backcountry.

In medical terms, that's anywhere over an hour from a hospital.

This binds them intimately to the common lands, which create the boundaries of our political community.

What ideas do their actions represent?

What kind of country can they help us imagine?

[Greg]: When you get lowered out of helicopters with people, when you pick up dead bodies with people, you're working all through the night with people on evacuations.

I've done that with all these guys.

I mean, Doug and I have probably been on 150 missions, 200 missions together.

- Yeah.

- Some pretty minor, some where we had to pick up a couple of bodies on airplane crashes, stuff like that.

- Your favorite trick is I'm hiking in and Greg pauses in base camp until the helicopter arrives so he can fly over the top of me... - Wave!

- Wave as I'm sweating away trying to get in there.

- Get lowered out of the helicopter, walk up and save the day!

[laughs] [Doug]: So this will be the main entryway.

So we'll come in to the kitchen and a foyer area.

We'll have a TV up here on the wall that will be showing mountain rescue stuff.

And the door is going to be a solid walnut door that we're building ourselves.

And we're going to put a big mountain rescue emblem on it.

It's been hard to maintain a sense of community without a physical location, and especially since when we bought this site and this building, we had such a long way to go.

It was so intimidating.

A lot of the membership were unsure whether this was the right thing to do.

It's a rough transition to go from coming back from a mission at two o'clock and then you show up to work and nobody knows that you went through something a bit intense the night before.

So to have a place to stop on the way home and get warm and be with people that were there... even if you're not going to talk about it, eases that transition.

Instead of jumping into a car and driving home alone and then getting up the next day and going into a world where it feels like nothing changed but maybe something did.

[Greg]: You know, we can do a couple of things here.

Number one, this is about team cohesion.

This is really a spot for us to meet.

Continue to bond, debrief, de-stress, train so we can get better at what we do, a spot where we keep our vehicles out of the rain.

It's about focus.

People were gathering in this building when we still had massive holes in the floor.

It was so necessary that we were just going to start using it the minute we could.

It means a lot to me.

It means a lot to me to see that my community has a home now.

So yeah... it's been worth it... During the pandemic, a few years ago, much like everybody, I had a bit of time on my hands and thought, what could I do to maybe couple some of my interest in technology with what I also do with Seattle Mountain Rescue?

This is an example of some of the early minutes that we've digitized that go back to the early fifties, though we have some that go even further back.

In this case, you'll see some of the members of the organization who really made up kind of that early era: Ome Daiber, Wolf Bauer, Dr. Otto Trott... and folks from that group had come over from Europe and settled in the United States, areas like Washington, Oregon, where you have very similar topography and mountainous areas.

And one of the things that they brought with them was an early publication.

It was developed in Austria and it was written in German.

They were able to get some funding and develop a project to translate this book.

- So this is the translation of the Austrian rescue manual, which was done by Otto Trott and Kurt Beam of the Mountain Rescue Council, which became Seattle Mountain Rescue.

And this is Otto Trott's copy.

And what's so nice about all of these books together is they show the intellectual context in which this translation occurred.

Wastl Mariner had written one of the earliest books on mountain rescue technique, and my father felt it was the Bible of all mountaineering knowledge at the time - it was.

And so he wanted to introduce that to the American public.

[Roxanne]: You can define my father as music, mountains and medicine.

He always listened to classical music while he did surgery and the nurses knew it.

They put on classical music, he directed with one arm to classical music on the radio... while we drove up to the cabin.

For him, mountains were infused with a sense of camaraderie and a sense of looking out for each other.

This is one of the things that my father was very adamant, was a necessary feature for bringing people out of the mountains.

When you're traveling through the mountains, a one-wheeled device would allow you to carry somebody out over rough terrain.

I love this!

[Roxanne]: There's a history to all of these techniques that started in Europe, where mountaineering was much more a part of the culture long before the United States.

To understand the original mountaineering techniques that my father felt were essential coming from the Austrian tradition, I think we should return to the Alps.

[ethereal theme] So that's where I went.

I traveled to the land where the spirit of mountain rescue burns especially bright.

I've come to Austria, to the Alps of Tyrol.

The mountain rescue service is one of the most respected institutions of Austrian society, and its volunteers link community, rescue and land in ways similar to what I saw in North Bend, but also more explicitly, more clearly because they've been so central to the country.

The rescue service is at every public festival in Austria.

They're like what the Lions or Rotary Clubs once were in America, but with boots and ropes - and now, with drones.

[drone buzzes upward] I want to explore what Seattle rescuers will nurture by building themselves a home.

With all the world's political conflicts, I hope to find how we can build better societies out of the very dangers that confront us.

[ethereal music] [mountain wind blows] This was once a smuggler's valley, but today it's the heart of the Tyrolean mountain rescue service, which launches 3000 missions every year, an average of eight missions a day, from 91 local station houses.

Every new volunteer is taught in this state-of-the-art facility, and all 4500 members return here regularly for refresher classes.

In a way, training is the real work.

Rescue itself is an echo.

I'm here to watch a group of experienced rescuers bone up on their skills.

Volunteers from every walk of life: doctors, machinists, bakers and lawyers.

My guide to this special world is Markus.

One of the things that I like about Markus is that over the course of his life, he's voted for every single one of the five major political parties, plus some of the smaller ones.

He's an improviser interested in whatever might work to solve the problem at hand.

He's not hung up on ideology.

It all began with a lecture.

Markus is a champion of a program called Tactical Alpine Medicine.

The landscape is divided into zones of risk.

In the backcountry, rescuers need a finely honed sense of place.

But mostly, this isn't a landscape for talking.

The volunteers train with their hands.

[Piano, Schubert, Impromptu in G-flat Major] To tie a knot over and over, to train, is like clicking beads on a rosary, swaying or prostration in prayer, yogic breathing or chanting.

It's a liturgy, a ritual repetition which goes deep into the body.

They bind themselves to the land.

They bind themselves to each other.

They tend to the wounds of others.

They wake up early and do it all again.

[Schubert style piano] But what is all this training a liturgy to?

What might it mean for how we think about America?

To answer that question, we need to consider the present in relation to the past.

Markus invited two respected older members of the service to offer their perspective.

[crime jazz, Alex Greene, Witch's Journey Beyond] It turns out that when this lodge was built, it was something very different from a place of rescue.

I found these long lost architectural plans in the regional historical archive.

They show the lodge was built in 1942, an ambitious project at high altitude.

It had a weighty political purpose: to create a lookout post for the border patrol of the Third Reich.

This place existed to keep people from escaping to Switzerland.

By the end of the war, it was fully under the wing of the SS.

[crime jazz, Alex Greene, Entwined] The modern Austrian rescue service has deep connections to this terrible story.

All the tools and techniques that ultimately made it influential across the world today, including in America, were pioneered within the German military during the war.

The director of mountain rescue research for the Reich was a doctor named Fritz Rometsch.

He recruited a young Austrian engineer named Wastl Mariner to help him pioneer new ways to save people in the mountains.

Mariner summarized those techniques in the book that Roxanne's father later translated for Seattle Mountain Rescue.

One of their revolutionary devices was a steel cable pulley that allowed rescuers to be lowered far down a cliff without having to tie multiple ropes together.

Another was the tubular rescue litter that Roxanne was so excited about called a Gebirgstrage.

It could be outfitted with a wheel for rapid transport across Alpine terrain.

Like Rometsch, Mariner was a member of the Nazi party and not just in passing.

His long forgotten membership card lies in a Berlin archive.

His registration number and ceremonial admission date on May Day reveal something special.

They show that the party considered him to have acted inthe interests of National Socialism even when Nazi membership in Austria was illegal, before the country was annexed by the Reich in 1938.

Today, Austria is a liberal, democratic society, a beautiful one, and the rescue service lies at the heart of its spirit.

Even the recently elected governor of Tyrol, Anton Mattle, is himself an active, longtime volunteer.

The service is respected, honored and it's everywhere.

Membership is analogous in prestige to having served in the military in the United States.

In turn, the service has helped foster an ongoing change in political consciousness, and in the stories that we can tell about the Alps.

This place that was once a site of exclusion is now a landscape of human solidarity.

Consider this: the Tyrolean service today mostly rescues foreigners.

75% of the people they rescue are from abroad.

75%!

Yet the drive to volunteer to save outsiders comes from pride of place and a deep connection to home.

This spirit of local volunteering suggests that if you want to save a stranger, first you should love your home.

And that a home worth its name is built not through exclusion of outsiders, but through solidarity with others.

What would it mean if we put this spirit at the center of our national life?

[piano, Bruckner, Klavierstck in E-flat Major] The rescue service expresses a liberal political ideal rooted in a strong sense of place.

As I saw at Jamtal, it also has an essentially spiritual foundation.

To deepen my understanding of the service's moral energy Markus suggested that I talk with one of his colleagues in a nearby valley, whose thoughtfulness was revealing.

Alois Stckl has attended the training course in Jamtal many times.

He volunteers for his local mountain rescue service, and he works part time for the local rescue helicopter company.

Mostly, though, he works with his hands.

He specializes in religious figurines for private and public display.

[chapel organ, Alex Greene, Rescue From the Air] For Alois, the landscape is a place of emergency, but it's especially a place of home.

[chapel organ, Alex Greene, Rescue From the Air] [soul jazz, Alex Greene, Chick-I-Saw] When I came to Austria, I wanted to understand what it was that Seattle Mountain Rescue is bringing into being by building itself a home.

It turns out it has to do with people in community.

The way they inhabit a landscape.

How they work with each other.

How they view themselves.

On the last day, the training culminated in a high angle practice rescue.

I spent my final evening at the training center with the two grand old men of the service.

We spoke again about the book that Roxanne's father had translated.

The power of rescue to bring people together is something they understood deeply from experience.

[piano plays Schubert melody] The translation was from Seattle, by one of the founders of the rescue service there, to which I returned.

The building is now complete.

Through it, this tool of social architecture, they bind themselves to each other, they bind themselves to the land, they take root in a place.

And today, they celebrate.

Oh, nice to meet you!

Thank you for being here.

It's exciting, especially this connection.

- And this is our mayor, Rob.

Hi.

I'm the mayor here of the town!

Great to meet you!

- That's great.

I'm happy to be here.

This landscape here looks very familiar.

So I always think if I'm looking east then I'm back home.

- Hello, everybody!

Hello, hello!

Welcome, everybody.

My name is David Dunphy.

I'm on the Seattle Mountain Rescue board and a field member with the team.

And I'm so excited to celebrate our 75th anniversary and the opening of our rescue center!

[applause] Oftentimes we talk about climbers helping climbers as our ethos, but it really is about families helping families.

And so it was on July 26, 2020, Seattle Mountain Rescue was called to Stevens Pass to work alongside ESAR and four-by-four for a missing 18 year old.

Please join me in welcoming her parents to share their story.

[applause] Our daughter Gia just celebrated her 21st birthday last month, and... we know this wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for people and organizations like yourself.

We are forever grateful for all you did.

It takes a special kind of person to do what you do.

And believe me, you do make a difference.

Thank you.

[David]: Next, we're going to have the building committee sign out of the roster right here.

Everybody is going to sign out.

Let's give them a big hand.

All right, all right, all right, all right!

[Greg]: Building Committee is out of service!

- Alright!

[applause] Standing in the new headquarters of Seattle Mountain Rescue here at the base of Mount Si makes me feel even more deeply that mountain rescue isn't about individual acts of heroism.

It's about people coming together for a common purpose, trusting each other, dedicating themselves to saving people they've never met, binding themselves to each other and to the place they live, making it... home.

You know, almost unbelievable that we did it and we're done - well, at least as done as we're going to be for the next, for the rest of the summer, as far as I'm concerned.

So everybody today has been asking me what I'm going to do now that I don't have the building.

And I've been telling everybody that I'm going to be making art.

And then I didn't know this, but Nate and Britt have been working on a ultralight plein-air easel for me.

And this is under a pound, and I love the logo: "The adventure painter."

This is the way every building morning starts: We don't have all the tools.

Some people are arriving late.

Even when I started out, the magical thing about this place was looking at Si, Teniriffe, Green Mountain, Mailbox.

How many zillions of hours of rescues have we done?

This view has not changed.

- No.

I can't believe we're still friends though!

[laughter] That was what I promised.

When I said Phase II.

- You did!

- I said, number one was it wasn't going to be perfect, but it was going to be awesome.

And two was that we were all still going to be friends.

- It was close!

- And we made it!

Oh, yeah.

- Woh!

Oh, now he drinks it!

Okay!

- Now we're getting Covid!

- That's all I need, I'm good!

- Well, this was our Covid project.

Some people made bread.

We did a building.

- All right, you guys, to a job really well done.

Congratulations, everybody.

I'm very proud of all of you.

- Yeah, here, here!

- Two years of fun!

[Sarah]: We made it.

- Except Russell says we're not done!

[Alert signal] Search and Rescue requesting all grounds teams, 4x4 teams.

All canine and drone teams.

Mobile Command 61 and mission support stage at Cathedral Trailhead.

Any questions, contact 40 WMDR966 1409.

The day after the party in North Bend, a seven-year-old girl went missing in the woods of Kittitas County.

Her family had gathered by the Cle Elum River because the Cascade Mountains reminded them of their former home.

The Mashwani family were resettled in the Pacific Northwest from Afghanistan.

They're part of a wave of Afghans who found their way to America after the war, much like German speaking immigrants in the wake of another conflict.

One moment Shungula was there, the next she was gone.

[Dispatcher]: 911, where's your emergency?

- Hi.

It's, uh, Cathedral Trail.

Number one, three, four, five.

In Ronald, Washington.

There's a little girl that's been missing for about two hours now.

We were doing some searching for her.

She's seven years old.

Her whole family is up there and they don't speak very good English, but several of us were trying to find her for a little while.

It was feared that Shungula had drowned in the river.

Seattle Mountain Rescue was part of a large effort to find her.

Their knowledge of the landscape became a kind of love that they could offer to the newcomers.

They searched far and wide: on foot, in cars, by boat, by drone.

But they didn't find her.

[minor-key woodwind melody] As hopes waned, they continued their search the next day.

The backcountry is a place of tragedy.

But not this time!

At 3 p.m., rescuers found her, 24 hours after the girl went missing, the first thing they did was offer her a blanket to keep her warm.

In this rough and remote country, Shungula had followed the river and spent the night on her own.

She said she hadn't been scared because she trusted in God.

Through knowledge of the landscape, through love of the wilderness mountain rescuers once again reached out to a stranger in distress and in bringing her back to safety, another family was made whole.

Across the world, members of mountain rescue units help the injured and the lost.

They keep them warm.

And it makes me think that what they do, the techniques they use, the tools they employ, their protocols, their knots, are models that can teach us all a better way to live together.

[celebratory soul anthem, Alex Greene, Out On Your Word] A complete list of funders is available on our website To view an extended version of The Volunteers and find out when it will be screening near you visit the watch page at