By Sara Jean Green
The Seattle Times
NORTH BEND, Wash. — Headlamp lights bobbed through the trees as volunteer rescuers descended from the dirt path off Mount Teneriffe into the trailhead parking lot, delivering a 14-year-old girl to safety in a collapsible litter, cradled on top of a thick bicycle tire.
It was just before 10 p.m. when the girl’s two-hour ride down the mountain came to an end outside a trailer serving as a command post for the rescue effort. EMTs unwound white bandages from her right wrist and ankle. They joked that she was now “magically healed” as they pushed aside blankets and helped her to her feet.
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The mock mission to find and rescue an injured hiker somewhere among Teneriffe’s meadows and second-growth forest on a Friday night in July also served as a training session for teams of riggers, search dogs, ATV drivers and drone operators — all volunteers with at least one of the seven units that make up the King County Search and Rescue Association.
From teenagers to retirees, these volunteers train for hundreds of hours each year and pay for gear and specialized vehicles out of their own pockets.
They look for people, conduct rescues and recover human remains in urban, rural and backcountry environments. They help police search for evidence and transport people and supplies during natural disasters. All free to the public.
And while giving back to their community is a key motivator, many of King County’s search-and-rescue volunteers say the camaraderie, the sense of family and the intellectual and physical challenge involved in saving lives and seeing people safe is an addiction they don’t want to kick.
The current count of 556 active volunteers includes married couples who met through the nonprofit and generations of family members who’ve followed at least one parent’s footsteps into unpaid outdoor service, no matter the weather or terrain. While their ranks include an abundance of medical professionals and military, law enforcement and firefighting veterans, volunteers bring with them a vast array of skills, from computer science to tow truck driving.
The majority of Washington’s counties have their own search-and-rescue units and King County “is pretty reliably our busiest jurisdiction,” said Amy Allbritton , the search-and-rescue coordinator for the Washington Emergency Management Division.
Last year, King County search-and-rescue units responded to 164 missions, with units in Snohomish County coming in second with 119, Allbritton said. Skamania and Whatcom counties tied for third with 80 missions apiece.
“Even though search and rescue is conducted by volunteers, the service they provide is truly at a professional level because of the time and dedication the volunteers put into it,” Allbritton said.
King County Search and Rescue’s seven member units
Each of the seven member units do their own recruiting and training but also come together for cross-training. They are:
Explorer Search & Rescue, the primary ground search and rescue team. kcesar.org
Seattle Mountain Rescue, primary first responders in mountainous and hazardous terrain. seattlemountainrescue.org
King County 4X4 Search & Rescue helps with transport and logistics by using four-wheel-drive vehicles to negotiate tough terrain. kc4x4sar.org
Ski Patrol Rescue Team provides year-round emergency medical and trauma care in alpine and wilderness environments. kcspart.org
King County Search Dogs consists of teams of dogs and handlers and can trail a specific person, with many also trained in human remains detection. kcsearchdogs.org
King County Incident Support Team, responsible for administrative work in field command centers including incident management, planning, logistics, mapping and communications. kcist.org
Regional Special Vehicles Unit members drive personally owned ATVs, snowmobiles or dual-sport motorcycles on backcountry trails to search and transport subjects and move ground searchers. rsvu.org
The King County Search and Rescue Association, founded over 60 years ago, has an annual budget of $650,000, with $200,000 a year since 2020 coming from a parks levy and the remainder from grants and donations. In 2024, the association hired Carrie Lee Gagnon as its executive director, the only paid search-and-rescue position — aside from Allbritton’s job — in the state.
“We’re growing from a community nonprofit to, really, a professional nonprofit for public benefit,” Gagnon said.
Gagnon has assembled an advisory board that is looking for ways to establish sustained funding and eventually find a permanent home base for the volunteers who view their roles as second jobs.
“Search and rescue isn’t just backcountry,” she said. “… They plug and play in a lot of different areas” and provide mutual aid to other counties when needed.
For instance, volunteers provided logistical and drone support and helped transport people and gear during the December floods in South King County. They also search crime scenes, “which in a way brings closure to families and brings loved ones home,” Gagnon said.
Some volunteers dedicate much of their time outside of work to search and rescue. Sheriff Patricia Cole-Tindall said one person, who was recognized in 2024 at the annual sheriff’s award banquet, had logged more than 1,000 missions and 3,000 hours of training.
Reliable aid for law enforcement
Of the seven member units, King County Explorer Search & Rescue — known as E-SAR — has the largest membership and its redshirted “ground troops” work closely with the sheriff’s air support unit.
Cole-Tindall said volunteers will often be the first to reach a lost, injured or “cliffed-out” person — someone stuck on a cliff — then coordinate with sheriff’s officials to decide if that person can be walked out or needs to be hoisted into one of the two military-surplus Hueys in the air support unit’s fleet of helicopters.
“At a time when there’s lots of things that aren’t positive happening in our world, here’s a group of people who will drop everything to go and answer the call and help their community,” she said. “I love that. That’s true public service right there.”
When someone calls 911 with a report that could trigger a search-and-rescue response, it is first screened by a sheriff’s deputy — most likely Detective Ed Christian , who has spent 35 of his 41 years in the sheriff’s office coordinating volunteers and serving as incident commander on more than 10,000 missions.
“You have to investigate it — 60% of calls, we don’t go to,” Christian said.
That’s because many reports turn out to be inaccurate, involve a crime in progress, or are outside King County’s jurisdiction. Christian can’t tell you how many times Snow Lake near Snoqualmie Pass gets mistaken for the Snow Lakes in Chelan County’s Enchantments, 100 miles east.
A logger’s son who spent summers on his uncle’s ranch, Christian said his lifetime of experience in the woods and wilderness means he knows the trails where “everybody is always late” coming back and that every summer, he’ll get at least one call from a person who thinks they heard someone whistling for help when it’s actually “the marmots in mating season.”
Once Christian determines a call is legit and nails down a location, “then I decide which groups we need to send out.” He might call on search and rescue’s 4X4 group to shut down a road to allow emergency vehicles easier access or E-SAR, which he calls his “infantry,” to bring an injured person down a mountain in a litter. He tags Seattle Mountain Rescue for especially technical, challenging calls. And he constantly checks avalanche and road conditions in the winter, when he’s most likely to call on the mountain rescuers or the Ski Patrol Rescue Team.
“One thing you do is you work with Mother Nature. … You don’t tell her what to do or she smacks the hell out of you,” Christian said. “Everything is weather dependent, Mother Nature dependent, terrain dependent.”
The biggest game changer he’s seen is cellphones.
“Almost everything today is coming in with a GPS location,” he said.
While cellphones and other tech have reduced average mission times from a couple of days to a few hours, Christian said he’s also seen a huge surge in naiveté about the outdoors, with people finding trails or destinations online, “thinking, ‘Oh, that looks pretty,’ ” and heading out without the preparation, physical ability or gear to keep themselves safe.
As for the volunteers he works with, Christian said he knows who his “rocks” are and trusts them to follow the chain of command, prioritize patient care and look out for their teammates to make sure everyone returns from a mission safely.
“We don’t want the heroes who want to be a hero. We want the guys that don’t want to bask in the glory,” he said. “The hardest workers are the ones that (think), ‘I did my job. OK, let’s go to the next, let’s go save somebody else.’”
Practice makes perfect
The mock mission in July started as missions now always do — with a message sent over an app created by Matt Cosand, a software engineer who leads E-SAR’s rigging team. Volunteers use the app to sign in and signal that they’re on their way.
As the rigging team practiced lowering a team member down a 70-foot cliff off the Little Si trail and then hoisting the climber and a patient back up, a command post was being set up a couple miles down the road at the Mount Teneriffe trailhead.
Julie Wartes, an E-SAR operations leader, led a briefing, telling volunteers that the sheriff’s office had received a call from a man whose 14-year-old niece fell while descending the mountain. Their location was uncertain, the girl was in pain and it was about to get dark, Wartes said.
J.Y. Devant, the mission’s operations leader, split the volunteers into six teams, including one that zoomed ahead on ATVs. He warned the teams that — for real — a black bear had been spotted at one end of the parking lot.
“The role here tonight is to organize and execute the mission, establish the command post here and form the teams, ensuring there’s a distribution of experience and rank and that there are EMTs across the teams,” Devant said. “I’m framing the situation in my mind and visualizing it on the map.”
Inside the command trailer, a map of Mount Teneriffe was displayed on a TV screen and showed the trail system and locations of the teams, who each had the same map and software on their phones.
Over the next three hours, Devant and other members of the incident support unit logged the teams’ progress and communicated with them by radio.
While there’s always “the potential for chaos,” Wartes said everyone who showed up for training knows their job and, at some point in a mission, a rhythm unfolds “and then the magic takes over.”
Christine Nelson, a retired Air Force colonel, noted the day’s warm, easy conditions.
“If it was 36 degrees and raining, these same people would be out here,” she said, adding they would be carrying even more gear to make sure whoever they were rescuing would be protected from the elements.
After the teams made it back to the trailhead parking lot, Kaelynn Condron, the 14-year-old “patient” and niece of an E-SAR team leader, said on the trip down, the litter she was in almost tipped over “but they kept it from happening.”
The team member who descended the mountain at Condron’s head kept checking in with her and making small talk, the teenager said.
“I feel if it would’ve been a real injury, it would’ve been comforting,” she said.
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