Jennifer had never been so cold in her life.
After a couple hours of riding, getting stuck, digging out and riding again, she and her teammates were at the top of the gulch. The wind howled and snow blew sideways. Jennifer got off the back of Lester’s snowmobile, sunk two feet into the snow, and staggered toward firmer ground. She must have looked cold; Lester shouted, “Who’s got hand warmers or extra layers for Jennifer?” She took some hand warmers gratefully.
“I’ll be alright once we get going,” she told everyone. A team of four strapped on snowshoes, shouldered their packs, and headed for the ravine they believed the missing snowmobilers to be in. Jennifer was grateful to get moving and felt sorry for the rest of her teammates, who would have to wait on top of the ridge for them in the fierce wind.
They hiked for several hours, following snowmobile tracks down into the ravine through increasingly dense woods and steep terrain. They talked on the way, speculating about the subjects’ chances of surviving the night. They had been out since noon, and it was now 10 p.m., with temperatures estimated at 25 below. Near midnight, they came across a snowmobile crashed into a tree. Tracks led away, into deeper, denser trees. They continued to follow them, and not long after, they heard shouts from below.
“Boy are we glad to see you!” one of the men said, grinning. They were huddled around a fire, their remaining two snowmobiles buried in deep snow nearby. Somehow, no one had suffered serious cold injuries yet, and all three were able and willing to walk. In fact, the only reason they couldn’t follow their tracks and hike back on their own was because they didn’t have snowshoes.
Jerry pulled a Jet Boil out of his pack and began to make tea for the three men, while Jennifer radioed the mission coordinator to ask them to send in a team on skis with extra snowshoes.
“Copy that,” mission coordinator Alex responded. “It might be a while before we can put a team together. The team at the top of the gulch is dealing with an emergency right now; they were building a fire and one of them got a stick in the eye. We’re evacuating him now and he will have to go to the emergency room.”
Jennifer realized it would be a long night hiking the snowmobilers back up to the top of the gulch, but they were lucky; if they hadn’t been able to walk, it might have been a long couple of days.
Why would anyone in their right mind, even someone who loves backcountry recreation, sign up to do backcountry SAR as a volunteer? Not only are BSAR responders unpaid, but most of them pay out of pocket for gas to get to incidents and personal gear they’re required to carry. They get woken up in the middle of the night, called away from family dinners, and often miss holiday celebrations. The incidents they respond to rarely result in a nice hike on a beautiful sunny afternoon. More often, they’re in the dead of night or the middle of a snowstorm. Sometimes they’re like Jennifer’s story and involve being cold, exhausted and occasionally even injured in the wilderness.
Ask ten BSAR volunteers why they do it and you will probably get ten different answers. Some will talk about the rewards of giving back to the community or the satisfaction of seeing families reunited. Some will talk about the camaraderie of being part of a team and the lifelong friendships that can come with BSAR team membership. Others might mention a love of being outdoors, the fitness benefits, the skills we learn. We asked a few of our members recently to tell their stories of why they joined their teams and why they stay.
Ellie Kanaber
Ellie has been with Arapahoe Rescue Patrol (ARP) for almost two years. ARP is unique in that its membership is made up of high school students, most of whom join the team as freshman and stay until they graduate. Ellie is the daughter of Justin Kanaber, an adult who has been leading the team for many years, and she says joining the team is a family tradition. Her father joined when he was a teenager, and so did her older brother. As Ellie grew up, she saw people do amazing things on the team, things that shaped their futures. She appreciated that, but she wasn’t sure she would like it. She didn’t want to join just to uphold a tradition.
After a lot of thinking, she made the decision for herself. She joined the team, eventually became a sergeant, and loves it now. She’s only 16 years old and helps to save lives in the backcountry – what an incredible experience for someone that age.
When asked if there were any “aha” moments in which she realized joining was the right decision, she tells the story of a recent, high profile search. Two hunters went missing in Conejos County, Colorado in September of 2025. A group of ARP rescuers responded to the mutual aid call and made the five-hour drive to help out. The search was unusual in that many civilians were searching, in addition to professional volunteer searchers from Colorado and New Mexico teams.
Ellie was assigned to a team that had three civilians on it, two of whom were friends and roommates of the missing hunters. While they searched, the news came in that the hunters had been found. Ellie knew they had been found tragically deceased, but she couldn’t tell the roommates; she simply had to tell them that the team had orders to return to command.
“But I could see from their faces that they knew,” she says. Back at the command post, as Ellie waited for the rest of her teammates to come out of the field, she saw one of the roommates getting in his truck to leave. She knocked on the window and said, “I just wanted to check on you and make sure you’re OK to drive.” The man rolled his window back up, got out of the truck, and gave Ellie a massive hug.
“It was a small moment that made a big impact on me,” she says.
Hannah Gallagher
Hannah has always done a lot of volunteering related to outdoor recreation, so it wasn’t unusual when she joined Alpine Rescue Team in 2019. She loved being a rescuer and seeing the incredible triumph of human survival against the odds. When people didn’t survive, she could at least be part of bringing them home to their families.
A few years later, she and her husband moved their family to Leadville and Hannah joined Lake County Search and Rescue (LCSAR), a smaller team. LCSAR handled fewer calls overall but she found the experience to be just as impactful. She tells the story of one particularly memorable search, in July of 2024, for an elderly woman with suspected dementia who had wandered away from her Airbnb. She and her family were visiting Leadville from Florida, and her family was terribly worried. LCSAR, working with the CSAR state coordinators, were deep in the trenches of pulling together one of the first complex multi-agency searches Lake County had led in recent history. There were thirty-five ground searchers and several ATVs from Arapahoe Rescue Patrol; ground searchers and a drone from neighboring Chaffee County SAR North; searchers from Summit County Rescue Group; and five search dog teams, with both air scent and trailing dogs, from Search and Rescue Dogs of Colorado and Front Range Rescue Dogs.
On the night of the second day of the search, the woman was found, unexpectedly alive and well. She was sitting on railroad tracks, which she had improbably followed uphill, wearing only flipflops on her feet.
When the news came in via radio from the field teams to the people at command, a huge cheer rang out. Hannah was crying. The family was crying. “We just couldn’t believe it,” Hannah says. “No one thought she could have survived through the night.”
Heather Davis:
It was 2016, and Heather and her friend Lisa had been hiking together for several years when they decided to hike Sentinel Point in Teller County. They pulled up an AllTrails map during their planning process and saw that while the popular hike was an out-and-back, the map showed another trail that could be connected to make a loop. Wearing yoga pants and tennis shoes, with a dog outfitted in booties to navigate the boulder scrambling, they set off one fall afternoon. When they got to the top, they didn’t see the other trail. They pulled out their phones, on which they had neglected to download maps, and the app showed them repeatedly crossing a trail that didn’t exist. They were confused, but confident, so they kept going in what they knew was the right direction. Eventually they could see their vehicle below. Five or six times, they descended a rock face but had to climb back up. They were not rock climbers, and didn’t have the necessary gear even if they’d had the skills.
It was getting late in the afternoon and they began to panic, wondering if they would need to call for search and rescue. Heather’s two kids, in 6th and 9th grades, were going to be out of school in 30 minutes and her husband was out of the country. Lisa’s husband was away too. And they didn’t have cell service anyway, so what could they do? They were getting tired, and it would be dark soon.
Heather finally got one bar of service and managed to get a text out to her daughter and a neighborhood friend, arranging for the friend to pick up both kids and get them home. Then they found a very steep slope they thought they might be able to descend. It was too steep to walk down, so they slid on their butts, ripping holes in their yoga pants. Throughout the ordeal, they pledged to each other that if they got home safely, they would volunteer for their local BSAR team, Teller County Search and Rescue (TCSAR). They would learn better map reading skills and have the chance to help people like themselves, people who “thought they could do anything.”
They got back to their car just as the sun was setting. A few months later they were training to join TCSAR, and today, both of them are mission coordinators for the team. Heather was recently elected as the team’s president, a role she will begin in January of 2026.
Matt Hage:
Matt is one of Summit County Rescue Group’s mission coordinators, and has been with the team since he was only 19 years old. He tells the story of a major incident that left an indelible mark on him.
It was 1996, and Matt had been on the team for only a year. A call went out for a 4×4 accident on Elliot’s Ridge, a remote area on the Grand County line. A group of friends in several vehicles were four-wheeling when one vehicle, a truck with two male occupants, lost control. It plunged down an embankment, rolling about 2000 feet and ejecting one of the men, before it hit a tree and exploded into flames.
In 1996, emergency services in Summit County were low-tech. There were no pagers yet, just a phone tree. The firefighters who were called along with SCRG were all volunteers. When Matt arrived on scene that evening, it was pure chaos. A tree was on fire and firefighters were running everywhere. Some of Matt’s more veteran teammates still recall the sight of Matt trying to put his climbing harness on while he was running. Rescuers set up a low angle uphaul system for the one survivor, the man who was ejected from the truck.
It was a dramatic evacuation. The survivor was in critical condition, hanging by a thread, and as the team uphauled him in a litter, they had to stop every 50 feet for the paramedic to give CPR. Matt felt like he was in the center of something important, and when the patient made it to the ambulance alive, it gave him an incredible sense of accomplishment. The ambulance drove to a waiting Flight for Life helicopter, which flew the patient to Denver.
The firefighters were still putting out the fire from the truck explosion, but up on the top of the ridge, everything calmed down for a few minutes. Matt and the other SCRG volunteers rested, thinking their role was finished. They were proud of their successful efforts to save a life.
Then the firefighters came back up to the top of the ridge. One of them said, “OK, the fire is out. You guys can go recover the body.” Everyone looked at each other. Matt thought, what? He had never done anything like that. But he didn’t hesitate, nor did the other rescuers.
Throughout the recovery operation for a badly burned body, Matt was in the zone. He recognized the tragedy and the horror, but at the same time, he was thriving in the chaos, in his ability to be part of a team making a difference. “I can do this,” he told himself. And he could.
The team uphauled the body to just below the top of the ridge, where a massive crowd waited under floodlights, including friends and family of the two men. Then command radio’d for them to stop. “Wait there until we clear the scene,” the mission coordinator told them.
Matt remembers having a sudden epiphany in that moment. While he was feeling pride and excitement in his accomplishments there were people on scene having the worst day of their lives. Was that OK? How could both of those things co-exist? Did someone have to have a really bad day in order for him to have this sense of purpose? He came to understand that he must find a balance between the quality of his experience and his empathy for those who were affected by tragedy.
He says now, “It’s OK for you to feel good even when you’re interacting with people who are devastated. You can’t do this job otherwise. You have to be able to separate these two contradictory things, and to manage them, and that takes some work. But it’s worth it in the end.”
