John Agnew no longer remembers what year he got involved in backcountry search and rescue as a volunteer responder for Summit County Rescue Group. It was sometime in the late 1980s, and he knew something about the group from veteran member Dan Burnett. Doing something to help people in need appealed to him.
It wasn’t long before he was serving on the team’s board and as a mission coordinator. He rotated through various board roles as equipment director, treasurer and president during his more than 20 years on the team. John’s wife Janiece, now of 31 years, was supportive of his involvement with the team and often attended team events and celebrations with him.
“What was most rewarding at the time,” John says, “was the teamwork and camaraderie. We were like a family back then, often getting together socially between training events and responding to incidents.” John believed then, and still believes now, that time spent getting to know one another is critical to that teamwork. “You need to get to know each other on a personal level so you can understand your teammates’ capabilities and be able to recognize their mental and emotional states,” he says. During the early 2000s, John was known not only for his focus on in-person teambuilding for SCRG, but also for getting members of various emergency service and law enforcement organizations in the county together for weekly beer-and-wing nights to teambuild on a higher level.
But what he didn’t know at the time was how much that experience would contribute to him becoming a successful entrepreneur and businessman.
“People join rescue teams for different reasons, but they don’t always realize the personal development that will come from their service. When you’re part of a team doing high stress work like backcountry rescue, especially as a mission coordinator, you quickly learn the importance of teamwork and how to leverage it for successful outcomes. You learn how to deal with different personalities, stay calm under pressure, motivate volunteers, think critically, and make high stakes decisions under pressure. You get practice building organizational relationships through working with your sheriff’s office, local fire and ambulance organizations, ski areas and the US Forest Service. I wouldn’t be who I am today without the professional development that came from my early BSAR experiences.”
John’s company, Breeze Thru Car Wash, has 250 employees and washes three million cars a year in 15 locations between northern Colorado and southern Wyoming. It is the only ISO-9001 certified car wash organization in the world. But eventually, the rapid growth of his business demanded that John leave Summit County to move to the Front Range, and later he had to leave the team too. He kept in touch with the BSAR community by having Breeze Thru sponsor annual fundraisers for Larimer County Search and Rescue, but he was too busy to join that team.
“I missed it,” he says, “so when CSAR reached out in 2024 to see if I’d be interested in board service, the timing was right. I thought it would be good to be able to contribute to the Colorado BSAR community at a higher level, a business level.” CSAR’s elected directors voted to appoint John as a new director in November of 2024.