When Ben Wilson moved to Boulder from upstate New York to attend CU, in 2000, it was for the backcountry recreation more than anything else. He was already an avid mountain biker, trailrunner, backpacker and fisherman, but he wanted more. The former boy scout thought joining a backcountry search and rescue team might be a good way to learn to rock climb and backcountry ski safely, and that’s how he ended up a Rocky Mountain Rescue Group (RMRG) member. It wasn’t long before he was selling his bike gear to buy climbing gear.
Ben loved backcountry SAR and was RMRG’s highest volume responder in the early years. “My professors – and female classmates – loved it when the pager went off during class,” he recollects. “They would say, ‘Yeah, you gotta go! Just make sure your homework is turned in.’”
RMRG was one of the only teams to do their own equipment testing back then, and they focused on teaching team members to think critically and make good decisions rather than follow rigid protocols. Their attention to detail was in understanding their equipment rather than in writing task books, and Ben loved that. In fact, his first date with his now-wife Lauren was to take her to an RMRG movie night. “You knew that if a date could survive an RMRG movie night with all those nerds,” he says, “it was probably going to work out.”
But like many BSAR volunteers, what he loved most was the camaraderie, the trusting relationships between team members that made the team tick. Sometimes the best part of responding to an incident was when everyone was miserably cold at the trailhead together, waiting to be deployed.
One of the most memorable responses in his rescue career was a mutual aid call in Eagle County for a missing backcountry splitboarder in March of 2014. A group of doctors from the Midwest were on their way into the Eiseman Hut for an annual medical school reunion. One of the doctors was a triathlete with a much higher level of fitness than the rest of the group, and they agreed that he could ski ahead and they would meet at the hut. When he didn’t arrive, the call went out to Vail Mountain Rescue Group and VMRG quickly recognized the seriousness of the call. Teams responded from all over the state for what turned out to be a five-day search, and Ben responded from Boulder early one morning with a group of RMRG teammates.
During the debrief, the group learned that the search area was massive – approximately 18 square miles, centering on Peak H in the Gore Range. Ben and his teammates flew in on a Colorado National Guard helicopter with a US Forest Service ranger. He remembers that there was so much snow, the helicopter couldn’t land. It put one skid on the ground and the responders tucked and rolled with their skis and packs, half swimming and half postholing out of the deep snow. They navigated to the hut, then created a search area in a nearby bowl, an area that took nearly 16 hours to clear. It was sunny, the snow was light and fluffy, and it was the most beautiful backcountry skiing Ben had ever done, although the avalanche danger was constant.
The adrenaline of the search kept him from realizing he was injured until the drive home, long after midnight. The next morning, he could barely get out of bed. He had slipped a disk in his back, an injury labeled “weekend warrior syndrome” by an urgent care facility nurse. In the weeks and months following, Ben began to associate the injury with his desk job and decided he needed to do something else, and that’s what inspired him to go back to school for a degree in education, a move that benefited to CSAR in later years when Ben took on management of CSAR’s education program.
Ben became a director on CSAR’s board in 2016 after RMRG teammate Jeff Sparhawk recruited him to help implement a new vision. He had always been good at change implementation and thought it would be a lot of fun to help grow the organization, which was then called the Colorado Search and Rescue Board (CSRB).
Ben says the same thing about joining CSAR that he said about joining RMRG. “It was a firehose of learning – about nonprofit governance, about leadership, about building a team. I’ve always had great mentors and I felt like I learned more from my rescue career than I learned from my first bachelor’s degree at CU. I knew I’d gotten lucky and I always told myself, you have to stay in this, no matter what it costs.” He stayed active with RMRG for 15 years and continues as an auxiliary member today.
The missing doctor wasn’t found during that search in Eagle County. Backcountry skiers found his body the following spring, 4.5 miles from the trail to Eiseman Hut. He had evidently become hypothermic and disoriented, and kept going in the wrong direction instead of following his tracks back to the trail. Eventually, he fell to his death at the bottom of an ice chute. “Most missing persons in the backcountry are found within the first four hours, and when they’re not, it’s a major event and we have to try to understand the behavior,” Ben says. But the most important takeaway of the incident, for Ben, is that a successful search is not defined by whether the subject is found. A search is successful when responders rule out a search area and can say they did everything they possibly could. “If your only goal is to find the subject, you can’t do the best job. Then how are you going to motivate volunteers to come back for the next search?” This has been a central tenet of CSAR’s search management classes under Ben’s leadership.
CSAR transitioned leadership of its education and IT programs in late 2024 so Ben could focus on his new role in leading the board of directors. He says his most rewarding work with CSAR is connecting rescuers across the state, understanding the different systems they use and helping to facilitate mutual aid response and training concepts. To that end, his focus as president will be on continuing to establish and expand CSAR’s services to its members. “I want to keep helping to build a membership that is interested in what everyone else is doing,” he says, “because there’s so much that teams can learn from each other.”