50 Years of providing humanitarian service!
Alpine Rescue Team of Evergreen, Colorado is a mountain search and rescue unit dedicated to saving lives through search, rescue, and mountain safety education. The Team is composed totally of volunteers and is available upon request to help in mountain search and rescue problems anywhere, under the authority of local jurisdiction agencies. The Team is also available to provide information and lectures on mountain safety to interested individuals and groups.
Membership usually ranges from 50 to 70 persons. Applications for membership are accepted at any time, though generally new applicants, as a group, are brought into a formal training program when needed.
The Alpine Rescue Team prides itself on its many years of humanitarian effort, and its reputation of capability and safety. In addition to training extensively in mountaineering skills, search, and rescue techniques, members work diligently to improve their emergency medical capabilities. Most members have emergency care training, and many of the members are Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT).
The Team usually participates in 80 to 100 field missions per year; these are generally divided about equally between rescues and searches. The Team averages 7,000 volunteer-hours per year in field missions, and at least twice that figure in volunteer-hours spent in training.
The headquarters of the Team is located near the Evergreen Parkway exit on I-70 just West of Denver. It houses equipment and serves as a command center for missions as well as training and meeting site. A call for help is relayed quickly by pagers, radio, and telephone. Members respond from home or work from all over the greater Denver area as well as Evergreen and vicinity. While most of our search and rescue activity is in the Front Range west of Denver, the Team has worked in virtually every part of mountainous Colorado, and in the western U.S., as well.
Over the years, the Team has built its skills and accumulated the necessary equipment to become a totally self-supporting field unit capable of providing all of its needs to maintain a field operation lasting several days. The Team’s inventory of mountaineering equipment, medical gear and radios is extensive and was procured over a long period of time and hard work. There is no regular source of funding; the Team is dependent upon contributions from individuals, groups, firms and agencies interested in supporting its work. Constant fund raising efforts are necessary in order to maintain equipment and purchase new gear.
The work is totally volunteer — the members donate their time, money, and transportation and have to purchase their own personal equipment that may exceed $1000 per year. Time spent away from work is often money out of their own pockets.
Our reward? That rare and fulfilling experience of being able to provide direct and much-needed help to someone in trouble in the mountains. The members of the Alpine Rescue Team love the mountains; we want others to enjoy them the way we do — safely.
The Alpine Rescue Team has been a regular member unit of the Mountain Rescue Association (MRA) since 1962. The function of the national association is to provide coordination, education and standardization to member units to promote maximum safety and effectiveness in mountain search and rescue. The association provides member units with information on testing and research of rescue equipment and techniques. It also provides extensive compilation, study and statistical analyses of lost persons and mountain search operations from units throughout the country.
The Team is also an active member of two general rescue organizations. The Colorado Search and Rescue Board (CSRB), is an organization composed of many rescue units of differing disciplines throughout the state. The National Association for Search and Rescue (NASAR) is an organization, which serves as a forum within which search and rescue teams exchange ideas on a national level. Any team or group involved with search and rescue, emergency situations, medical disasters, etc. can be a member of NASAR.
