Don’t forget; the meetings this month are March 9th for the Board
and March 11th for the General Meeting.

SNOW RESCUE TRAINING REPORT

We had 15 people show up which made for two good, separate teams. I was surprised so many arrived without snowshoes. Two members had snowshoes from the Squad building, I loaned out two pair from Bill, and two more new personal pair that were brought to Pine by Ryan MacNeal. Additionally, I loaned out my own pair and went in with my overshoes. Even with all that, two squad members went in with only hiking boots. The point being, the purchase of more for the squad this week was a very good decision. Fortunately the several day old crust on top of the snow made it a lot easier. Maybe even too easy for a real training but at least everyone got the idea that it could get tough.

We used both the SKED and the Stokes with the plastic rock skid on the bottom. We went in about 0.4 mile going over a hill, down steeply into a ravine and up another hill before loading the subjects. The SKED worked slightly better, but the Stokes did work well enough. The SKED would clearly be better than the Stokes in deep powder. Another benefit of the SKED is that it is in a bag designed to be carried as a backpack with shoulder and waist straps. It was easy to transport in (according to me, but Ted was carrying it). Although we used foam camping pads and a blanket, it was obvious that with both subjects we should have had more blankets or sleeping bags for padding and warmth. The SKED does not protect the subject's bottom side as well as the Stokes and if there were rocks under thin snow it could become very uncomfortable. We were on two to four feet of snow and did not have a problem.

We used front haulers, rear "brakeman" and side pullers all with ropes or straps tied to the litter. It worked very effectively and both subjects reported being comfortable and unafraid during the transport. The retrieval of the subjects, even across the challenging terrain was relatively quick. One lesson to remember is that if a front hauler is too close to the litter, their snowshoes will kick up a lot of snow onto the face of the subject when pulling up hill. Another lesson learned (fortunately not the hard way) was to watch out for sticks and branches sticking out of the snow at the face level of the subject. On the team I was on, we quickly assigned the brakeman to watch out and warn of hazards. Several haulers fell from time to time, with the reason appearing to be simply learning to walk on snowshoes in close quarters with others, or stepping on their own snowshoes. Especially for this reason, I recommend we have loaded litter haul training more often when good snow conditions occur.

All present felt it was a very good and useful training.

GCSO Deputy John France was there to observe.

Hal Baas #559

Photos by Mary Smith

Click pictures for larger versions

Photos By Morris Brown

You will be seeing a few changes to our Calendar in the next few weeks. We are putting in the UTM coordinates along with the other info. Hopefully this will help those that wish to practice more with their GPS.

March 2010 Training Schedule