Joining the Red Rock SAR technical ropes team

Red Rock Search and Rescue is a volunteer team in southern Nevada. I joined the technical ropes side, which takes the calls where someone is somewhere a helicopter cannot reach and a ground crew cannot walk to.

The first training day was rope work. Knots, anchors, systems, and the vocabulary for saying them out loud so that five people building one thing all build the same thing. Most of it I knew from climbing. Almost none of it I knew to the standard they wanted, which is that it works in the dark, in the cold, with a person’s weight on it, the first time.

The all day exercise is where that gets tested. You build a raise. You build a lower. You take turns as the litter attendant, and you find out how much slower everything moves when the load on the end of the rope is a person instead of a pack.

What I did not expect was how much of it is administrative. Radios, sign in, tracking who is where. A search is mostly organisation with some rope in it.

I keep going back.