Mountains, Rescues, and Risks - EMF 2026

Hello everyone. All right, as mentioned, I'm Andrew Godwin. Um I have been helping out with EMS since 2018. I started just doing a few shifts in the info tent, and now I have been in this field since last Wednesday. I have been building this festival. It's very nice to have you all turned up. It's also very weird. It's been quite an empty field for a week. So, it's wonderful to have you all here. Um in other related things, I have been doing mountain rescue um since 2023. I started doing much more field work last year in 2025. Um and as somewhat of a related note to this, I do live in Denver, Colorado, and so we have a few mountains around there, as you may understand from your knowledge of Colorado. Before we go any further, I want to give you a content warning. This wasn't in the schedule, but I should reinforce it. I'm going to discuss death and severe injury, but in abstract terms and no specific details. This is all throughout the talk. There is no specific section I'll warn you about, just so you know this is in here. All right, let's start with a little what is mountain rescue. Uh people often have very Hollywood sort of enabled visions of what mountain rescue is. There's people dramatically swooping in by helicopter, dropping on ropes, plucking people off the side of mountains. That happens very occasionally, but it's mostly not what it is, and we'll get to that. As a background to where I volunteer, I uh work with Alpine Rescue Team. We're based just west of Denver, Colorado, along the I-70 corridor, covering three different counties in that area. Uh we are one of the busiest mountain rescue teams in the United States. I'm not sure there's a ranking thing, like the Washington teams definitely beat us, but we're pretty busy, generally 150 or more missions per year, um which is a quite a decent mission load. The team has been going since 1959, so we are closing in on in a little bit here like you know, some very significant milestones. The team is approximately 70 people who are field active. But in general does vary quite a lot and is entirely volunteer run. No one on the team is paid. However, the team is all professionals. It is a very strict level of training as we'll talk about and so we refer to ourselves as volunteer professionals. Now, search and rescue specifically or mountain rescue is actually composed of three things. You may hear backcountry rescue, mountain rescue, search and rescue. There is a third element not often talked about. So firstly, there is search. Search is finding people who are lost. Sometimes they have called us or somehow otherwise got in touch with us maybe by satellite messenger and said, "Help, I'm lost." Often it is friends or family or hiking partners or similar reporting, "Hey, this person was due back and it's been so many hours since I last saw them. I don't know where they are." There is of course rescue. Rescue is once you know where a person is, how you get them out of the field because often they can't do this themselves. It can be medical reasons, it can be a number of things, but often you know, they are just unable to walk themselves out either due to their own personal situation or due to the terrain and technical access involved. And then finally, the part we don't talk about a lot publicly is recovery. If someone does die in the field, we do not leave them there. We will make every effort we can to get them back out of the field and back to their family. We don't do all recoveries. Recoveries are obviously a lower priority than rescue. There's a couple of people who are just so difficult to get that it would place too many people's lives at risk, but generally we'll get everyone out. Um, as you can imagine, a search often leads into a rescue or recovery, but both can also start independently. Um, and as we'll talk later in the talk, um, these days we get more and more of rescue and recovery straight away without the search element. Also, it's very warm in this tent. My goodness. All right, let's talk about the terrain we're working in. There's roughly three categorizations of terrain. Um, these are not strict. One of the favorite phrases in mountain rescue is it depends. And I've put some degree things in here. These are just examples. The actual truth is it depends. Um, but sort of the context and the consequences we'll talk about is what matters. So, flatland rescues we think flatlands are anything under about 15°. Um, while Eastnor here is hilly, it's considered flatland. Um, generally what this means is there is no need for a rope system for any kind of safety aspect. We may use one to pull someone. So, we have a thing called a litter, which is basically a structure with a wheel on the bottom. Uh, we will often just have an extra rope on the front and put someone on that to hold it along. But generally you're not relying on the rope system for safety. Um, it's generally reasonably easy reasonably easy to navigate. You can still have hazards like water crossings and shale and sort of slippery ground underneath. Low angle is what you consider sort of a moderate slope. Um, this is places where we need rope systems for safety, but they're not taking full body weight. A general example is like, you know, quite a steep hill. If we've got someone on this wheel litter, often the wheel comes off for this bit, coming down that slope, we're going to want to have a rope on there because it would be pretty bad if that any part of that system or that person was not attached. Like they'd go a decent way down the hill. Um, they would probably stop, but it's not a great thing. High angle is anything where the rope is supporting someone's full body weight. This is very high consequence. At this point, if the rope breaks, it is very very bad. Generally, as you can imagine, the risk increases as you go further down this scale. Now, there are other elements to mountain rescue. Um we do have helicopters in Colorado, where I volunteer, we have the wonderful Flight for Life in their distinctive helicopters. Um we do not always get helicopters. They are fickle beasts. They like things like no clouds and no high winds. And also, uh I'm sure many of you are aware, Colorado is very high elevation. The highest peaks in Colorado are 14,000 ft or 4,200 m. Um that is very close to the design ceiling of helicopters. Like this is a very small medical helicopter. Most of the ones you're probably just seeing in cities in in Europe are much bigger. They're turbine-based. We have these ones because they can just about make it up those top peaks. But in the summer, as the air gets hotter and less dense, density altitude kicks in, sometimes they can't make it. We have We have other options I'll talk about later when talk about some missions. The overall thing, though, is that backcountry rescue has many different fields. Mountain rescue is one aspect of it. There are many other pla- parts of the planet that are also inaccessible, unhospitable, or otherwise. Um there's a general set of rescue teams with each specialty. For example, there is desert rescue, there is canyon rescue, there's ice crevasse and and glacier rescue, which we actually do due to our terrain. Um there is cave rescue and a bunch more. Generally, all these fields overlap. Um for example, in Colorado, we have a lot of old gold mines. If someone is trapped in a gold mine, we will not enter, but we'll call cave rescue team to come help. And also, we have a couple of cave rescuers on our team who have sort of been back and forth. But in general, it's very multifaceted. Teams tend to specialize. You wouldn't want, for example, a mountain rescue team going to do a big search in the big flat because it's a desert. They're not equipped for it, but they can probably help out at least to some basic level. However, all of these are risky places. And so, let's talk about risk. Um what is risk? Right? Like it's kind of an abstract concept to most people, but I want to really try and like clarify in this talk in a couple of ways. So, the main way I think about risk is on two axes. This is a classic risk matrix. You may well have seen this before, but essentially we have consequence and likelihood. And the combination of these inform how risky something is. If something is of low consequence, that means if it happens, the outcome is not going to be too disabling or too bad to you. Even if it's very likely, it's at most probably going to be a a medium risk, right? Like a lot of things are like this. And probably the physical planning is like this, too. It's like, "Well, this might well happen, but the outcome is not very bad." On the opposite end, if something is very, very severe consequence, and I think in this case we're talking about, for example, death or major disablement by breaking a limb or other body part, um that is very, very difficult to manage. Even at a very low likelihood, that's still a medium risk because the consequence is so severe. As you can probably imagine, mountain rescue is a pretty high consequence thing, especially in high angle as I talked about earlier. Um you are in situations where a single rope can be suspending one or two or maybe a few more people. Um and for reference, mountain rescue is also often weight constrained. We hike all the gear in from the base of the trailhead all the way up to the person in the situation. And so, we cannot afford in some cases to carry extra ropes or safety gear or redundancy. Um people who work in, for example, urban rescue would carry many more ropes and do much more safe systems. We just can't carry all that stuff up. So, we do work closer to our safety margins on rope. The safety margins are still very, very generous, but we are a lot less than some other people in other situations would do cuz they have the flexibility of having basically infinite weight capacity and vehicles. Now, we can't really control the consequence. The terrain is the terrain, the access is the access. As technology has improved, it's improved a little bit as we'll talk about, but we can control is the likelihood. If you can't control one of those two axes, you control the other. And this is true of most risks. Generally, likelihood is the thing you are able to control. Not all of them, but most of them. And so, we really focus, given we have a naturally high consequence situation, on making the likelihood as low as possible to manage that risk as best as we can. Some of the key things here I'm going to call out. First of all, obviously a very strong safety culture. And this comes in a few different aspects. So, first of all, we do not rush. We do not run towards things. If you encounter a mountain rescue team prepping to go on something, you may think they're being rather slow and not being very urgent. That is very deliberate. They are doing things in a predictable fashion cuz as the phrase goes, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. If you rush, you will miss things. If you miss things, you are adding to your likelihood of getting into a high consequence scenario. That's not good. The other thing, um much like for example places like aviation and flight deck management, um we have a very strong culture where anyone can say stop and we will stop. It could be the most junior member on the team. Um I joined uh the field side last year with a group of well, no, 15 other people. Um two of us have called stops probably in the first 6 months. Uh one of them was not needed, but the point is you stop cuz stopping is safe. And so, we proceed at a very reasonable rate. We always have the ability to stop. That is a big part of our safety culture. um and that is really enforced in a lot of mountain rescue teams around the US and honestly internationally as well around the world. Training is also very important as it mentions here. You don't want the first time you do something for a while to be in the field on a real mission. We do more training roughly per hour than we probably do missions. I It's probably close, and but we train a lot. We have a training every week in the classroom. We have a training every 2 weeks in the field. The field trainings are often 5 plus hours long. We cover loads of different scenarios, but the point is every member of the team that goes to these trainings should have encountered all the different major kinds of scenarios at some point in the previous 6 months or so. And so when it comes to the real thing, you've got practice, you you know what you're doing, you're not encountering it first time. As we'll discuss, there's always something new for every mission. The point is to try and again bring that likelihood down as fast as you can. Finally, clear command is really important. What we don't want is someone turning up, running into the field, and trying to self-solve things themselves. And in the best case, it's probably duplicate work and there's wasting effort. In the worst case, it could run counter something else we're doing and be dangerous. Mountain rescue, while a volunteer organization, is not a democracy. There is a strong command structure. Um obviously, it's not, you know, dictatorial. Everyone who is at the top of that structure is in really wonderful. They've earned their place. They listen to feedback really well. And outside of the field, we'll debrief, we'll make notes, we'll critique each other. In the field, we have a strong command structure and what is said happens. If you disagree with it, if it's safety-related as I mentioned, you can raise it. If it's a nitpick, you don't say anything, you get on with it. Because debasing the problem for 20 minutes is 20 minutes you could have spent going and helping the person who's currently having a bad day. Now, that's part of it, but a big part of mountain rescue is the people. Um this is somewhat surprising to some people, too. We have a strict priority list in the field of who is your priorities. The number one priority is always you. If you want out of the field at any time, if you have some personal medical problem, you come if you just don't want to respond that day cuz you're having a bad day or there's been, you say, a death in the family, you come first. This may mean that the rest of the team has less people to deal with. That's not a problem. The team is not useful if its people are not useful. The second priority is the team. It is no We are no use to other people if the team is not in good shape. Um if we have to enter a situation that endangers the team to save someone, that is a very, very carefully calculated risk. We will not do it if the danger to the team is too great. Um generally, we always find ways to mitigate it. I've not heard of a case where we just didn't get to someone, but we may take a longer and safer route to someone so so that we mitigate the risk to the team. The subject or the patient then comes third. They are important. It is our job to get them out or to find them, but they are third in the list of priorities and they're not first. And we'll talk about heroics a little bit near the end. Now, obviously, when we go and find someone, or rather rescue someone or recover someone generally, we know the situation is probably dangerous. Because something bad has already happened to them. So, by the nature of the situation, unless it's, you know, maybe they got like altitude or mountain sickness, um which also can happen to anyone, right? Some team members get it occasionally. You are already in an increased risk environment because you are naturally where someone has had something bad happen to them. So, we have to go into the situation with as much knowledge as possible. Generally, um when the we call the RP, the reporting party, which may be the subject as well, calls 911 in the US, um the call taker is taking as many notes as possible. We get all of those out of the system. We'll then often call back and ask for more notes. Generally, our goal is to get as much information about what happened so that we can not encounter the same problem on the way in. Um sometimes we get nothing, but generally we'll get something and we can identify bad terrain and also figure out, for example, oh, like an avalanche is a classic example, like if an avalanche has happened in location, it is paradoxically now safer where the avalanche happened exactly, that slide has released the energy, but everywhere near it and on the way in is likely still very high avalanche risk terrain. And so, navigating that is a big part of the problem. So, I'm going to talk about a few missions we've had um just to illustrate some of these. Um this is, I think, my fourth mission on the team. Uh it's one of the most famous we've had recently. Um there were two people hiking up uh Torreys Peak, which is one of the 14ers in Colorado. That's mountains over 14,000 ft. Um they were lost. They were on the phone with one of our mission coordinators when they were both struck by lightning while on the phone with us. Um Now, what's good about this is this is the fastest I've ever known about someone being hit by lightning, right? We have the immediate notification. Um being hit by lightning is never good. The survival rate's higher than you'd expect, but it can cause rather nasty disabilities. But, these two people, and you'll notice like it's June. June in Colorado means snow on the mountain still. It's not out of out of thing yet. It's cold up there. And so, we embarked on a roughly 8-hour mission to get up there and get them out. Now, this picture, which I think I am the person on the left, if not, I'm slightly left out of shot here. Um It is difficult to get up there. It is terrain that our normal medical helicopters cannot get to. And so, given that, we called the Air National Guard in the US, who have a Black Hawk. Black Hawks can get there, but they are not always able to make it out to us. Like, they're great. [snorts] We We really enjoy working with them, but sometimes other things come up or they can't get the aircraft out to us. And so, we had a plan B, cuz we always have a plan B, and we started hiking five ground teams up to this person from around 10,000 ft to 14,000 ft um in the winter across hard ice. This is a long process. Uh me and these other teams that were here got to 13,000 ft. That's 4,000 m before the Black Hawk finally turned up. This is me and everybody else watching it land on the peak of the mountain and picking the people up. Um but we had a backup plan. Like, we may well have had to take these people down by ground. That probably would have been a overnight 18 hour slog. Um and we were prepared for it. It wouldn't have been great, but we have to have that optionality. And as I mentioned earlier, right, we often do get air support. Like, they will come out for any injury to life risk to life or limb or sight and the other things is what they go with. Um but there is always a backup plan. We never rely on air support turning up. The mountain weather in Colorado is incredibly variable and risky. It can gust over 70 mph. We don't want to rely on that. Um this mission happened last week when I was here. I'm gutted I missed this cuz I was here building this festival. Um but some people were scaling a wall in Clear Creek Canyon and fell and were stuck on their rappel rope at height on high on the canyon wall. The team had to do I had to go over a river with a rope here as you see, go back around the top of the wall, go down and pick them off. Um this is a very complex mission. It took a lot of people a long time, but it's also exactly the thing we train for. And specifically, so you see here like on the left is what we call Tyrolean, which is a river traverse by rope. On the right you see there is what's called a pick-off, which is someone going down on a rappel with a rope system to rescue someone who's stranded. We practice both of these things separately, but obviously rarely together. But every mission does take a different set of skills. And so it's a very important that when you enter into a mission you don't know what you have. You have to have as much optionality as you can. If your menu of things you can do is bigger, you can generally become a safer and more reasonable approach to things, which is obviously always the goal. The last mission I'll mention here uh directly is uh we had this is a while back. Uh there was a search for uh two members of the Maness family who went missing on Mount Blue Sky, pictured here, um at the time called Mount Evans. Um we did a search for many days. They were not found. A small crew of key men and the search was then called off because the conditions got too difficult and enough time had passed where like we believed they had no chance of making it and at that point they were deceased. Um a small group of people kept searching and then 3 months later they eventually found both of them and got them out of the field. The key thing here though is like this took a huge number of other mountain rescue teams from other local counties, a lot of the local sheriff's office, and five people like a large number of different agencies. Every agency we worked with is fantastic. Like they're all great in different ways. Um I have a lot of specific respect for our firefighters who can both drive a UTV over terrain faster than you can ever imagine, but also are out there right now fighting wildfires in Colorado. Um but everyone involved is really important. One of the difficulties is though that every agency, every group, every organization has its own language, its own phrasing. It's very difficult to overcome acronyms, code words, even codes. One example is uh we have codes for us if people are in need of help or deceased or alive, they are numeric. So, for example, MRA code one, MRA code two. These are different to the US police codes, which mean different things. If you say code four, a mountain rescue person will hear one thing and a police officer will hear another. That is often a problem. So, being specific is very important to avoid risk and confusion. But, let's talk about the overall technology perspective on mountain rescue. So, one of the things I've been talking to a lot of our uh more experienced members about is searches. We do not do a lot of searches anymore. People are getting lost less. Um, most of our missions now are someone rings or satellite 911, we get an exact GPS location. Like, oh, they're exactly here. We go there, find them, and get them out. Um, we do do searches. They happen, of course, but they're far less common than they used to be, at least based on the reports and discussions I've had with various people. Um, a lot of this is down to technology. Everyone out on the mountain now generally has a device that can locate them on a map to exactly where they are. And this helps them find their way out or tell us where they are. But, it can hinder as well. And sometimes it's things like social media. Um, people post Instagram pictures of amazing trails. Like, oh, it's beautiful up here. Come on. And like, actually it's a very technical difficult access route. And so, people are attracted to a a wonderful thing, as they should be, but they maybe are like a little bit in over their head. And so, both of those things mean we do we do less searches, but often we have uh more rescues of people who have a little less experience in the situation they should be in. Though, of course, many rescues are just like someone just had a bad accident, right? We There's no blame culture. People just have a bad time with it. We're here to get them out. Um the technology of rescue is also changing. Um I am the head of drones for our team. Um pictured here in the background is uh one of the the big ones, as I like to call them. Um we are looking into carrying all our supplies in via drone. This we're not quite there yet. It's probably next decade, but there's a future in mountain rescue where we are not hiking all our gear in. We are flying it in 20 mph in a straight line. This will almost certainly change how we approach our safety systems because we can then get stuff in quicker, but much like helicopters, the drones can also not always fly. On the plus side, we can consider a drone more expendable. There is no human life at risk. They're flying over empty forest, right? It's not a huge problem. Um and we can put gear on them that's not particularly at risk. At worst, it's money lost. Um but this is going to be a big element of how we sort of continue to modify risk. For example, we could also like we could drop supplies at someone if they can't reach them easily. We can buzz over some water, a radio, and some food for them and have them just be a bit more comfortable for another 4 hours as we get there. But there's a There's a lot of this to come. That said, um one of the things about mountain rescue that again I said at the beginning, it's not all helicopters and swinging in and saving the day. A lot of it is waiting around and a lot of it is driving. Generally, you go somewhere, you stage, you send a few teams in, you're doing it slowly. It is not the kind of thing for people who want to go go go and cannot stop. Um we have a very strong filtering process for new applicants. Um there is a motivational speech and then we have a demotivational speech uh to the new applicant classes um which tries to tell you all the bad sides of things. Um, and also a whole interviewing screening process to ensure that someone isn't here for the glory. They're here because they will continue turning out for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. They'll learn their craft, they'll learn the skills, and they will become someone who's got that option of different skills they can do and be able to really make every mission that much safer. The key thing though is it's human nature to ignore risk. Um, we tend to not want to think about things we don't like. That includes risk. Um, it is very important to come and acknowledge it head-on. If you ignore risk, you can't deal with it, you can't reduce the likelihood, you can't manage it. We always talk about risk. One of the things on the the team is very up front about like whenever whenever a near miss or an absolute miss happens, we talk about it. I want to make very clear in our entire history the team has never lost a single person. There've been no deaths of a team member in the field. It's never happened. We have an excellent safety record. Considering what we do, it's incredible. But, we always talk about and especially we talk about near misses. We'll get to that in a second. But, the key thing you have to avoid is heroics. Heroics happen everywhere. It happens in organizations, it happens here at this festival even. I'm I'm guilty of this. People often see [snorts] a problem and push themselves to extremes to overcome the problem. Heroics are sometimes needed, but in doing that, what you are doing is hiding the failure. You have taken a process failure and you have stretched yourself thin. Remember, you come first to try and paper over that failure. And now you've done is you've made you you you've lost information. You've no longer captured the fact that this thing failed, and so we can't prevent it again. And so look, we all occasionally do heroics, obviously. Like they happen occasionally. They are not a thing we ever plan around or rely upon or encourage because they just make the whole thing worse. Like you're just hiding information and preventing us learning. And so I I ask all of you in in general life, if you see someone doing heroics in an organization and making things work, sometimes it's good to let failure happen as long as the failure is of low or medium consequence and propagate upwards. That's how an organization learns. That's how an organization improves its process. Near misses, as I mentioned, are a gift. A near miss is the most perfect thing you can get. You had the failure, you know how the failure happened, but the consequence did not happen. Every time you have a near miss, we have a blame-free debrief. We work out what caused it and we modify our process to match. Um we have had a couple in trainings, in fact, where in the training that exposed a process failure and we got the ability to learn from it without even having a subject or a patient on the line, which is even better. And so every time you near miss, it is an incredible event you should be gloriously happy about and you should never blame the person or the process that did it because almost every failure is a Swiss cheese model where four or five different things aligned and it found that perfect route through all your processes and now you've got the perfect example to make them all better. Finally, one last note, um we always talk about this. In both the US and the UK, mountain rescue is always free. Please call us when you think the problem is starting [snorts] or beginning. Don't call us when it's become night time and things have got worse. This is more of a problem in the US because obviously in the US the perception is that you pay for emergency services. Um ironically, there are places in Europe where you do pay for mountain rescue, but in both uh these countries, you do not pay for it and we would prefer you call us as soon as something seems wrong and like let's say you're like, "Oh, I'm I'm up here without a torch and it's getting a bit dark. Don't wait and then call us 3 hours later when it's very dark and you can't find a way out. Call us soon, and then we can probably talk you out over the phone using landmarks, for example. Um one thing to mention, if you do go to the US, this applies to mountain rescue. This does not apply apply to the ambulance or helicopters, unfortunately. But if you do find yourselves in the US, know that if you are able, you can refuse medical transport, and so search and rescue will kick you out of the field. To an ambulance, you can go, "Thank you very much. I do not want the ambulance. I'm going to go in my friend's car to the hospital." This is a wonderful workaround. Um either way, that is the overall uh view of mountain rescue. Uh if you have more questions, you can find me. I'll be hanging around the tent for a bit. Um but thank you very much for listening to the talk, and I hope you have a great EMF.