Seeking some info about typical SAR jobs in Colorado

Hi there. Based in Colorado.  Team typically gets briefed at a staging location on scene.  Not sure what you mean by your second question. I'm assuming you mean groups of people that we typically rescue? In my area, it's usually hikers/tourists who make bad decisions.  People call 911 and dispatch alerts us. We reach out to the reporting party and get more details. If it truly needs us, we mobilize.  VHF and 800s radios are used to maintain communication. Several people on the team have Garmin GPS devices. Not sure if anyone brings an inReach into the field.  Feel free to PM for more specifics. 

Based in Rocky Mountains, so not Colorado specific but perhaps similar environment.

One thing to note: you mention SAR jobs, so I want to clarify that SAR is typically a volunteer-run organization in the US. There are some exceptions, like the military and NPS, and our area sometimes deploys firefighters and police to assist on missions. But by and large, the vast majority of SAR is volunteer. Many of us are fitting in SAR around our full-time jobs and lives.

The use of GPS apps on phones has greatly reduced the number of people actually getting lost. It still happens, but the majority of our missions are bringing out injured subjects or doing a body search/recovery. Frequent issues we encounter are hypothermia, altitude sickness (we are at high altitude, which is the same for Colorado), and mountain biking injuries.

Speaking of GPS apps, we actually use a GPS app on missions to coordinate routes and tracking. You can download it to your phone so you don't need cell service. We also carry radios to communicate in the field. I personally have a Garmin InReach, its encourged but not required, and many folks dont bother. All of our members are also trained in map + compass orienteering.

We are based at a local firehouse and store all of our mission gear there, so we usually meet there before heading out to missions and then carpool to the staging area where we are debriefed. Missions are organized by an incident commander (a trained volunteer) and the state police.

We have a UTV team, a ski rescue team, and a K-9 team. There is also a group in our region that specializes in technical rescue.

Briefings are usually done at the staging location, unless there's something specialized happening, ie, we know where the patient is, and it's a rescue only mission, using only the helicopter, in which case the staging would be the heli base, and we'll brief at the base. I've never briefed at a police station, and only seldom have briefed at the SAR base, and those are more search and recovery planned missions, not search and rescues.

In regards to #2, I'm not in Colorado, but any professional SAR team, be it volunteer or paid will be made up almost completely of hikers. With some exceptions, almost everyone is a hiker. Generally speaking, in every team I've had contact with, it's expected you start as a hiker, and specialize into climbing, or ATV/4WD/Snowmobiles, but the bones of it comes down to hiking. There may be SOME teams with specialized members who bring an ultra specialized skill to the team instead of hiking (think doctor) but this is very rare, and generally speaking not the case. The vast majority of searches rely on those hikers.

Most teams rely on radios for the majority of communications, sometimes if the terrain is really radio-non-conducive (think mountains with blind spots) then inReach and sat phones may get utilized, but given the cost of these, generally they're far fewer in practice, and used only when needed, not on a regular basis.

I can't provide a personal account of Colorado searches, but if you'd like an idea of how the western side of things works, my DMs are open, I'll gladly answer any specific questions

For additional context and info about real taskings, you might enjoy stories from The Fine Line podcast. That's Wyoming, not Colorado, but relatively similar environment, mission and setup, in general (this being the Rockies, Wyoming is Colorado's northern neighbouring state).

https://www.backcountryzero.com/the-fine-line-podcast

I’m in western Colorado. Very close to your mentioned places. 1. We are all paged then briefed at a staging area in the vicinity. Basic information is given during the page for the purpose of gathering the correct teams, numbers etc 2.Not quite sure what you’re asking by over represented. We have various teams for the task at hand (ground, atv, water, ropes, air, posse, snow skippers, etc) and only the needed teams are sortied. Meaning not everyone goes every time. 3. The majority of help requests are initiated by simple phone calls, either from the persons or those related when their loved ones didn’t show up. PLBs have been used but rarely. Most people don’t have them or used in an avalanche/slide type situation. 4. Team Comms is generally 800s and vhf.

Hope this helps.

I write a search and rescue romantic suspense series that takes place in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Just popping in to say hello. This is my most popular series ever, so I would say that the topic is pretty popular.