It was a snowy March morning, and twenty backcountry search and rescue volunteers were gathered in a meeting room in the Riverside Inn and Travelodge in Fairplay, Colorado. They crowded around what looked like a checkered carpet with six columns and nine rows of squares. They pointed silently but vigorously at different squares in the carpet while one of them stepped carefully through, following the group’s instructions. Some made complicated hand gestures that meant nothing to a casual observer. Suddenly, the carpet made a loud beeping noise. The volunteer on the carpet walked backwards in a complicated pattern, stepping on the same squares he had stepped on before, and another person replaced him.
Jeff Klem of Adventures in Leading says the “electric maze” is an exercise in handling uncertainty, building trust and resilience, and learning to reframe individual mistakes as opportunities for team learning. The objective is for the entire team to safely navigate a challenging path through the maze to the other side, meaning by stepping only on squares that do not beep, in under 12 minutes – without talking, marking the trail, or using resources other than individual bodies and brains. Each time a member of the team steps on a beeping square, she must return to the beginning of the maze. But the team learns to see this not as a failure, but as the gathering of new information that will eventually lead to group success. And because they cannot speak, the team also learns the difference between loud leadership and effective leadership. This is a key skill of leaders in any organization, and perhaps especially an organization that holds the literal lives of its customers in its hands on a regular basis.
CSAR’s first year-long Leadership Journey series began in September of 2025, in Breckenridge, just before the start of that year’s annual SARCon. The 20 participants in the first cohort came from leadership positions in 14 teams across the state, including Hinsdale County SAR, Routt County SAR, Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office SAR, Vail Mountain Rescue Group, Western Mountain Rescue Team, West Elk Mountain Rescue Team, Delta County SAR, Grand County SAR, Ouray Mountain Rescue Team, Front Range Rescue Dogs, Custer County SAR, Colorado 4×4 Rescue & Recovery, and Diamond Peaks Ski Patrol. Facilitated by Jeff Klem and Mark Gasta of Adventures in Leading, the cohort has been studying core leadership competencies identified by a task group of Colorado BSAR leaders in 2025, including strategic thinking, trustworthiness, emotional intelligence, thoughtful decision-making, and effective communication. Through a combination of virtual and in-person sessions, with peer coaching group work between sessions, they have been discussing and problem-solving around key BSAR leadership challenges such as how to hold volunteers accountable, how to build strong interagency relationships, how to handle interpersonal friction on the team, and how to spread the administrative load of running a nonprofit amongst more than just a small handful of willing volunteers.
Rick Agostin from Grand County SAR comments, “The facilitators have a way of getting you to think about things from multiple different directions at the same time. As incident commanders, we’re in a similar spot with very tactical things. We have to think about a whole host of things at the same time: the weather, the slope angle, the medical needs of the subject, how many teams do I have. It’s a ton of little pieces to the puzzle. I had never really thought about personal interaction and leadership that way.”
A common theme expressed by the participants is the value of networking between BSAR leaders across the state. “I would never have met the guys from Routt County SAR, for example, if it weren’t for this course,” says Harry MacKendrick from Hinsdale County SAR. “I had never met Dolgio Nergui from Ouray Mountain Rescue Team even though she’s just over the ridge from us. Every team has a different skill set and no one needs to fly solo. Now if we ever get pulled into a big mutual aid call, recognizing some of the people and knowing their team’s capabilities will be a major asset.”
“The connection opportunity is new for me,” adds Lindsay Davis from Western Mountain Rescue Team. “I’m learning that not all teams have the same challenges but there are consistent themes. For example, some teams experience burnout related to responsibility consistently falling on a core group of members, while teams with more turnover risk burnout because it’s challenging to be consistently recruiting and training.”
“These are some of the smartest people in the state,” says Rick Agostin after the in-person session in Fairplay, “and to have them all together in one room for a couple of days was pretty special. There was so much experience in the room and I found it very helpful to get multiple opinions on how to handle challenging situations. Time will tell, but I think the lasting impact of this first CSAR Leadership Journey will be the trust built between the leaders across the state and what we bring back to our individual teams.”
Steve Chappell, a 30-year veteran of Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, brings not only decades of BSAR leadership to the group but also many years of leadership experience from his day jobs in aerospace engineering. He was part of the task group that identified the BSAR leadership competencies prior to becoming a participant in the cohort. “Volunteer organizations are different,” he says. “Maybe some people think they shouldn’t be, but they are. For example, creating a culture around spreading the administrative workload is different and more challenging in an organization where no one is getting paid. We can bring a classical leadership development view to our world but we need to take the differences into account. But while volunteer leadership is different, there’s a lot of crossover too. That’s why we created the competencies – they can be applied from the business world.”
For Rick Agostin, strategies to handle interpersonal conflict on a team resonated most with him. “For example, being able to identify that an event is going to have an impact on the results I am trying to achieve and knowing that our natural response is to start “making stuff up” (MSU) about why that event might have happened, and in turn the MSU could really derail the results I was intending for in the first place. This seems like a no-brainer on a rescue incident; not knowing all the facts or all the “whys” of a specific situation is easy enough to move past in the field. But, for whatever reason, all that goes out the window when there’s personal conflict within a team, fundraising stresses, or recruiting challenges. Sometimes you just need to stop and realize you’re making stuff up in your head.”
For Lindsay Davis, who leads her team’s resilience committee, the biggest takeaway has been about how to coach others through tough situations, including in the field. “I’ve been thinking through how to best support team members during difficult calls and stressful situations, and also through the demands of a rigorous training schedule. Talking to other leaders about how they manage and balance those aspects of team leadership has been helpful.”
The 2025 – 2026 Leadership Journey will finish at SARCon in September. Stay tuned for information about the application process for the next Leadership Journey in 2026 – 2027.
