By Ben Wilson, former Education Program manager and 2025/26 CSAR president
Early in my now 24-year-old rescue career, it became important to me to look beyond a single incident or a single rescue subject or even a single BSAR team. Maybe it was the first MRA test I was a part of, or the first interagency mutual aid call I responded to, but I recognized a distinct personal drive to uncover two things: How other rescue teams rescued, and how I could do more for more patients. In 2016, that answer came to me in the form of a request to join CSAR, and more specifically, CSAR’s Education Program.
My vision has always been to elevate the Education Program across the state; to provide consistent and relevant training to other SAR teams, particularly those teams lacking time, funds, and people to incorporate quality rescuer training programs within their teams’ mission. In 2020, during Covid lock-down, we were forced to rethink our entire program. Gone were the days of sitting in stuffy classrooms with 30 or 40 other rescuers from across Colorado, working through tabletop exercises for 16 hours a day over the course of two weekends. We had to bring in new technology. We had to develop a curriculum that held student’s attention and could be easily provided remotely. We had to bring rescuers together to collaborate, learn and practice in a search environment as realistic as a screen on a computer could possibly give us. When Covid finally waned, we stayed primarily virtual but were able to bring back an in-person aspect to the classes. What the CSAR instructors had created was truly innovative and could be called CSAR’s; not the National Association for Search and Rescue’s search management class, but CSAR’s. In August of 2023, after our second advanced class, I received this email from a rescuer:
Ben,
…I just wanted to thank you and the rest of the education committee for your work on both the BSM and ASM curriculums. A few weeks ago I was handed the second operational period on a search from another team with very little information to go off of. With the experience and practice I got through CSAR’s classes, it felt like I had a muscle memory of what steps I needed to take. After three hours of planning and an 8 hour operational period, my teams were able to successfully locate and extricate the subject. That mission waned in comparison to the in person scenario on the final day of our ASM class haha. All the work you guys put in to make those classes realistic and applicable seems to work wonders…
This email made all the hard work we had put into creating new and innovative CSAR education worthwhile. We could claim to have elevated search management and SAR education across Colorado, directly and positively impacting patient outcomes in the Colorado backcountry. The innovation of the program is far from over. The team now has plans to approach rescue education training and development across the state in a more collective way, tapping into individual teams’ training programs and aligning language, technique, and training goals.
