About

CSAR’s mission is to bring organizations together to find, rescue and recover those in need in the Colorado backcountry. Composed of volunteers from our member teams, CSAR assists and empowers through public education, advocacy, coordination, collaboration, and continuous skill development.

A Colorado Parks and Wildlife study showed that 92% of Coloradans recreate outdoors, and 62% recreate in parks, trails, and open spaces one or more times a week. In addition, out-of-state visitors to Colorado have increased steadily in the past 20 years. It’s not surprising that backcountry search and rescue (BSAR) teams in the state are busy -- and getting busier.

Backcountry Search and Rescue (BSAR)

The Colorado backcountry begins where the road ends. Backcountry search and rescue is defined in Colorado statute as, “The utilization, training, and support of responders, with their specialized equipment, coordinated by a sheriff to provide the services described in this subsection during emergencies or disasters in forests, deserts, mountains, canyons, caves, waters, parks, plains, and at times, in more populated areas.” The subsection continues by describing BSAR services which include finding and extricating lost or injured people, providing emergency care, recovering the bodies of deceased individuals, providing public backcountry safety education, training volunteers to provide these services, and supporting their physical and mental well-being.

There is often confusion about what “backcountry” really means. If you get off the pavement and out of town to hike or mountain bike, ski outside of a ski area boundary, go rock climbing, boat, hunt, fish, or even ride an off-road vehicle, you are in the backcountry. The backcountry is beyond where traditional street-based medical services and fire/rescue services typically respond. When you need help in the backcountry and call 911, it is likely a BSAR team will come to your aid.

BSAR efforts in Colorado are mostly a local issue, with county sheriffs required to coordinate efforts within their counties. They do this by relying on BSAR teams, most of which are nonprofits staffed by professional volunteers. These teams do not charge for their services.

Until recently, the only state funding support for this important work was $400 - 500k in annual grants from the Department of Local Affairs’ SAR Fund. Most of these funds are raised from a 25-cent surcharge on hunting and fishing licenses; motorboat, snowmobile, and OHV registrations; and the sale of Colorado Outdoor Recreation Search and Rescue (CORSAR) cards.

Because of our legislative efforts in 2020 - 2022, BSAR teams in Colorado are now beneficiaries of the Keep Colorado Wild program. When Colorado residents register vehicles, they may automatically purchase a heavily discounted state park pass. Funds from this program go to state parks, the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, and the BSAR Fund, which is administered by Colorado Parks and Wildlife and provides an inflation-adjusted $2.5 million annually to support professional volunteer responders and their local BSAR teams.

CSAR assists its member teams in several ways. Our state coordinators rotate in an on-call role to facilitate resource requests from any county that needs help, whether it be additional responders from other teams, dog teams from other counties, helicopters from the National Guard, cell phone forensics from the Civil Air Patrol, or other specialized resources. CSAR also provides training programs and conferences, advocacy, best practices, and collaboration tools for its members. Finally, we work to prevent backcountry incidents through our public safety education efforts.

If an incident becomes a state-declared disaster, CSAR works closely with the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management to ensure the right BSAR resources are available. CSAR and the BSAR teams work closely with a host of State of Colorado departments, federal agencies, the Colorado National Guard, the Civil Air Patrol, and a great number of other for-profit and nonprofit entities and local agencies, not to mention our colleagues from other first response agencies and the health care systems.

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FAQs

In Colorado, sheriffs have an unfunded statutory mandate to provide backcountry search and rescue services, and they generally opt to do so through the use of volunteer teams. Most counties have a single team, some have multiple teams. Some sheriffs delegate almost all of their duty to the non-paid professionals; some have paid sheriff positions overseeing SAR; and others combine fire, EMS, and SAR personnel.

The primary function of CSAR is to coordinate resources across the state. We have 25 state coordinators who rotate in an on-call role to facilitate resource requests from any team that needs help. Those resources can include additional manpower from other teams, rescuers with special skill sets, dog teams, helicopters from the National Guard, or cell phone forensics from the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center (AFRCC). We also provide educational resources to our member teams, including Basic and Advanced Search Management classes, a class for public information officers, and an annual educational conference called SARCon. Externally, we provide public education through our social media channels and traditional media outreach, and we work to educate public officials and legislators on the challenges of backcountry SAR in an effort to help design a more sustainable system.

We believe backcountry search and rescue services are a public good. Lost or injured people in the backcountry who fear being charged may delay calling for help, resulting in greater risk to themselves and the rescuers. Our position is in line with the US National Search and Rescue Plan as well as the positions of the Mountain Rescue Association (MRA) and the National Association for Search and Rescue (NASAR). Please be aware, however, that if an ambulance or medevac helicopter is involved, there would be charges for medical transport. Read more here.

Essentially, they go to work where the pavement ends. They rescue lost and injured hikers, skiers, snowboarders, mountain bikers, snowmobilers, off-road vehicle users, climbers, paddlers, anglers and hunters. They respond to the occasional crashed paraglider, base jumper and downed aircraft, and they are responsible for body recovery in the backcountry. SAR members also provide many public education services, including backcountry safety presentations for schools, maintaining booths at ski area and town safety fairs, speaking at public events, and delivering backcountry safety education on social media channels and to traditional media outlets.

Depending on the terrain in that particular county, BSAR teams look for many different technical skill sets in their volunteers including rock climbing, ice climbing, technical rigging, mountaineering, ATV or snowmobile handling, canyoneering, diving, backcountry skiing/boarding, navigation, avalanche rescue, swiftwater rescue, caving, medical and more. BSAR teams also need "ground pounders" - folks with a basic level of fitness who can hike long distances carrying gear and equipment to the scene of an injured rescue subject and carry that subject back out, or who can hike for extended periods of time on a search for a missing person in the backcountry.

Across the state, there are roughly 50 organizations; most of them non-profit teams, and a few of them sheriff-managed teams. Serving these organizations are roughly 2500 volunteer responders. Generally speaking, each county has one volunteer BSAR team to serve that county; however, a few counties have more than one team, and some counties have no team at all. There are also a few teams that are not affiliated with a particular county and serve across the state, such as Colorado 4x4 Rescue and Recovery and Search and Rescue Dogs of Colorado.

A portion of the revenue from hunting and fishing licenses and hiking (CORSAR) cards goes into a statewide fund for search and rescue. However, the fund can only be drawn on by a county sheriff to offset extraordinary search and rescue costs, not to maintain a search and rescue organization. The funds are primarily used to replace team and personal gear and equipment that is lost or damaged during a mission, and only if that particular rescue subject had a hunting or fishing license or CORSAR card

History

For years we show no record of organized search and rescue in Colorado. If someone were lost in the backcountry, the nearby residents would go looking for them. In the Boulder area, the guides and other mountaineers would band together to bring in a lost or injured climber.

After a critical incident on Navajo Peak in December of 1946, people began to think about organized rescue. A meeting was held in March of 1947 to form Boulder County Rescue, which later that year became Rocky Mountain Rescue Group (RMRG). They worked as the only team in the state until the fall of 1957, when the Arapahoe Rescue Patrol was formed in Littleton. The next team to organize was the Alpine Rescue Team in Evergreen in 1959.

In addition to these teams in the late 1950's there were numerous semi-official sheriff's groups, radio groups, clubs and church groups. Lack of policies and coordination resulted in considerable confusion and competition in the field. Efforts to create an association began in the early 1960s, and after several early organizational iterations, the Colorado Search and Rescue Board (CSRB) was formed in 1970 to concentrate solely on the search and rescue function in Colorado. The Board was originally composed of eight members without regard for unit representation. Its first meeting was held on November 17, 1970, under the leadership of Chairman Chuck Demarest of RMRG.

Since then, CSRB has grown and evolved to be the representative organization that it is today, and teams designate specific members to represent them to the Board. Committees composed of individuals from member teams tackle projects in SAR skills education, helping with preventative search and rescue education (PSAR) and coordinated messaging for the general public, advocating for BSAR-related legislation, collecting statistics for resource needs analysis, and coordinating grant monies received on behalf of the teams. In 2019, CSRB changed its name to the Colorado Search and Rescue Association (CSAR). Countless members from many teams volunteered their time in the early days of CSAR’s formation, and we owe a debt of gratitude to all of them.