Follow No Leader | Outside Online

Outside Magazine February 2002

[The Volunteer]
Follow No Leader
Chuck Demarest and his colleagues won't take orders, don't wear uniforms, and each year handle more missions than any other volunteer SAR squad in America

By Peter Heller


	On Call: Demarest monitors the rescue radio traffic

WHEN CHUCK DEMAREST'S pager goes off on an Indian Summer Sunday afternoon in Boulder, Colorado, he happens to be at a barbecue with 40 other members of the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group. All around Demarest, beepers start beeping, like a scourge of electronic locusts. Plates of potato salad and bratwurst are set down, and men and women dressed in running shoes and T-shirts smile at one another as they trot down the flagstone steps and hop into their vehicles.

The call is no surprise—RMR, which completes roughly 80 missions a year in and around Boulder County, is one of the busiest volunteer mountain-rescue squads in the nation. But the scene is still a little bizarre. For one thing, none of the rescuers looks like the character played by Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger, the 1993 movie about a mountain-rescue team not-so-coincidentally named Rocky Mountain Rescue. More than half the people at the party are engineers; most others are researchers and computer programmers. No matter their age—most of the 63 members hover somewhere between 25 and 30—they all look, well, wonkish. Sixty-four-year-old Bill May, for instance, the barbecue host, is rail-thin, sports big metal-framed glasses, and is a retired engineer who wrote the essential book on wilderness rescue, Mountain Search and Rescue Techniques. Dave Hibl, a 49-year-old orthodontist who's helped develop much of the group's gear, including its litters and winches, displays the conservative haircut and mild-mannered earnestness of Clark Kent. And Jenny Paddock, 39, a serious, compact woman with cropped graying hair, happens to be a Boulder police officer and one of the most highly respected search-and-rescue dog handlers in the state. Pre-verbal Italian stallions they're not.

Even more unnerving is the fact that no one is wearing a uniform, or even a patch, and no one seems to be in charge. There's none of that militarized protocol so common in the crack emergency teams Hollywood loves to confect. "We're all-volunteer," says Demarest, clearing up the uniform matter. "We don't like to take orders, and we don't need direction. We're like well-ordered ants."

I follow Demarest to his car. At 58, he's strongly built, with steady blue eyes and a sandy mustache going gray. But even as RMR's longest-term active field member, he doesn't seem to fit the preconception of a rescue jock. A Princeton alum who did graduate work at the University of Colorado in nuclear physics and has trained in classical piano all his life, Demarest is a director of a venture-capital firm that's investing in a treatment for Parkinson's disease. As we pile into his car, a sedate Subaru sedan with a cracked windshield, he hits the VHF public-safety radio, which is already crackling with information about an incident in the foothills above town. A hiker has been mauled by a bear but is talking to authorities on his cell phone.

Like everything else about Demarest, the Subaru runs counter to what one might expect, but it serves its purpose well. "I've got everything I need for a couple of days in the mountains," he says as we pull out. This includes boots, headlamps, ice axes, a bivy bag, sets of maps, granola bars, radio, and GPS. "I've even got the directions for the GPS, in case I get stupid," he says. Fat chance. Rescue attempts in any season are completely second nature to Demarest. He's been on more than a thousand missions, and he's seen almost every imaginable scenario. He's found downed aircraft in the middle of the night during the dead of winter, and he's down-climbed at dusk onto a ledge above timberline to spend the night with three half-starved and terrified hikers. He stands ready to get pulled away from job or family, day or night, on a moment's notice. "Our motto is 'Join RMR and see Colorado by headlamp,'" he says. "It's true, but it's a tremendous service and a great way to give back."

Demarest hits Broadway, one of Boulder's main thoroughfares, and turns north, jockeying through the weekend traffic. He listens to the radio as the hiker's description of his surroundings is updated. The hiker is walking out under his own power but can't say exactly which trail he's on. Rescuers have deployed to the head of the Bear Canyon Trail, but Demarest decides to drive farther south to Lower Skunk Canyon. "I've got a hunch," he says.

Pressed about the unsettling lack of a command structure, Demarest just grins: "The truth is, we're so darned experienced we don't need it." History backs him up. The weekend before, for instance, a climber fell off a rocky outcrop near Elephant Buttress up in Boulder Canyon. The victim called in the accident on his cell phone, the 911 dispatch paged RMR, and five minutes later the first rescuer was at the base of the climb. Within a half-hour, 20 more volunteers and the group's four-by-four van—a Swiss Army knife of a vehicle—arrived with enough rescue, first-aid, and computer mapping equipment to outfit an expedition. Two rescuers scrambled up to the ledge with a first-aid pack, and one stabilized the victim, who had a head injury, while the other scouted an evac route and radioed for a litter and oxygen. Above and below, RMR members fixed ropes, a litter team swiftly assembled, and the injured climber was strapped in, lowered 300 feet, and carried through Boulder Creek a quarter-mile to an ambulance. All told, the victim was evacuated in less than 90 minutes.

While they specialize in high-angle evacs, over the years RMR has found hundreds of lost hikers and led the country in locating wrecked planes. In 54 years of technical operations it has incurred only one serious injury among its rescuers—a broken leg. "Our most common worker's comp claim," Demarest jokes, "is poison ivy."

Demarest turns on a winding paved road up into the broad tawny meadows at the base of Boulder's Flatirons, beautiful jagged slabs of upthrust sandstone. He jogs up a dirt trail behind some high-end redwood-sided mountain homes. Sure enough, here comes the hiker, looking dazed, his shirt in shreds. But Demarest is too late—the hiker is already being helped by two RMR rescuers who have somehow beaten Demarest up the trail. The man is shaken up, they say, but unbloodied. He was lucky: A black bear sow had shoved him onto the ground after he'd gotten too close to her cub, looked him in the eyes, and hustled away. "You see," Demarest beams. "They know. Nobody needs to order anybody anywhere."