SAR Day 0

My Facebook friend Lee uses the application Snowbook to track the number of days he goes skiing in a year. This has the effect of making me extremely jealous because he racks up an astounding number of days (60 this season so far). Another example of this is the web site http://www.turns-all-year.com/ where skiers try to rack up the highest number of consecutive skiing months. This usually involves carting skis mid summer to a glaciated area or a shady north facing snowpatch, linking 10 turns, and then heading home.

I could go off on the obsessive nature of tracking this kind of thing, and the competitive nature of seeing who can rack up the most days, but I won’t.

Bragging rights. Dedication. Obsessiveness. All fine attributes of the modern mountaineer, and traits I share. I look at these expressions of crazy and I think to myself “I could do that”. I could ski for 292 consecutive months (that’s 24 years, the current record). If I started NOW and lived to 63. I actually want to compete, and hence the tinge of jealousy when I read of  Lee’s exploits, and turns all year.

Why, I ask myself, can I not do the same? Do I not have the same level of dedication? Obsessiveness? Craziness?

And then I realized that I’ve been doing something for the last 10 years that is just as crazy, obsessive, futile and reeking of dedication. The thing that resulted in my recent Olympic Gig. The thing that I do that interferes with my competitiveness in racking up those show/dirt/rock/ice days. The thing that makes be get out of bed at 2 AM, and head off into the rain for the next 12 hours.

Search and Rescue

I’ve been a SAR volunteer for about 10 years now. In that time I’ve lost track of the number of searches I’ve been on, the number of courses I’ve taken and helped to teach, and the number of hours I’ve spent training. These are the hours I suppose I could have spent catching up on those 200 or so consecutive ski months.

Except, I don’t have a Facebook application to track those days.

Well, I do have a blog.

So, for the next year I’m going to post every single SAR-related thing I end up doing. I know I don’t have many readers, so hopefully those that are following me don’t get too annoyed with the updates (you can always unsubscribe). I will tag these post “SARDay”.

My goal: to provide a view into what it takes to be a SAR volunteer in the Province of British Columbia from my point of view. I’ll log training, administrative work, and tasks. Hopefully readers can get an insight into the work of the SAR volunteers of BC through my eyes. It will be mundane, it will be boring, and sometimes it will be exciting.

To the 5000 or so SAR volunteers in BC, this is for you.