As 17 men and women bored into the cement-like snow, even using chainsaws to grind into the ice, an avalanche released behind them, burying their exit road.
“That really showed us how reactive the snowpack was – just riddled with uncertainty and you really just didn’t know,” said Leo Lloyd, a 36-year veteran of La Plata County Search and Rescue who joined his San Juan County colleagues on a grim mission last month to recover the bodies of three men buried in an avalanche near Ophir Pass.
It took two more days of digging to recover the men. Six weeks earlier, and a few hundred yards away, the team had recovered the bodies of two skiers killed in an avalanche.
“Even if you’ve been doing this a long time, it’s still difficult,” Lloyd said. “You get good at putting that image in the back of your head, but all that never goes away. We have some psychological support and we work to get help to our people. But sometimes, it’s hard to admit when you need some help.”
Rescuers in San Juan County have had a challenging winter. That’s following an extraordinarily busy summer and fall.
Most of the state’s 2,800 search and rescue volunteers know that weariness. Teams across Colorado were exceptionally busy last summer as Colorado’s hills crawled with campers, hikers, bikers and paddlers finding respite from the pandemic in the backcountry.
When winter backcountry gear sales exploded in the fall alongside resorts announcing capacity limits and restrictions at ski areas, high-country search and rescue teams braced themselves.
The COVID restrictions and capacity caps at ski areas were “a perfect storm of bad formula,” said Kimmet Holland, a 40-year veteran of emergency services who directs Silverton’s Emergency Medical Services crew, all of whom are certified in avalanche safety and high-alpine rescue skills.
That storm worsened with a spectacularly sketchy snowpack that began shedding large avalanches with every new snowfall. “The worst snow conditions in Colorado in the last 10 years,” Holland said.
The largest worry heading into the 2020-21 season was about a flood of newcomers to avalanche terrain. A host of state agencies joined search and rescue teams to promote avalanche awareness and backcountry safety. But the 11 men killed in Colorado avalanches so far this season have been older, most of them with years of backcountry experience.
The 2020-21 season has been particularly deadly for backcountry travelers. Across the U.S, 33 have died in avalanches, with 26 skiers, snowmobilers and climbers killed in February alone, marking the darkest month for avalanche fatalities in more than a century.
“And we still have a lot of winter left,” said Jim Donovan, the emergency manager for San Juan County and director of Silverton Avalanche School.
Donovan’s San Juan County Search and Rescue team was ready for a busy winter. A few close calls in the area last season, including a complicated rescue of a snowboarder near Telluride in March 2020, left the San Juan team on edge. After the hectic summer and the recovery of five men – two beloved Durango locals and three influential men from Eagle – they still are.
“The impact to the team was definitely real,” Donovan said.
Search and rescue team members can be the overlooked patients in a traumatic mission, said Laura McGladrey.
She’s with CU Anschutz Medical School’s Stress Trauma Adversity Research and Treatment Center, working with cops, emergency service providers, search-and-rescue teams as well as guide services and ski patrols.
Stress accumulation from exposure to traumatic missions can build up like a snowpack, McGladrey said. It starts gradually and following a big event, people can break in an avalanche of anguish.
Search and rescue teams have all sorts of protocols and plans for physical injuries. But McGladrey tells rescuers the most likely injury they will suffer is psychological from the stress of traumatic events.
“And no one really prepares them for that kind of injury,” she said. “From my standpoint this exposure-type injury of stress accumulation and the impact of watching people die and seeing grieving families starts to build up over time.
“You already have the fatigue and exhaustion of a busy year,” she said, “and then a big event comes up. It sets the stage for people to get overwhelmed.”
Rescuers often internalize the trauma of their volunteer work and think it’s just them when they lose their zeal or fall into funk, McGladrey said. After more than 20 years in emergency medicine, she said the “worst stuff I’ve ever seen” was as a volunteer for Chaffee County Search and Rescue in the 1990s. When she works with longtime rescuers and asks about events that stand out, almost all of them, she said, talk about a victim’s family “that they just can’t get out of their head.”
In the early days of search and rescue in Colorado, “people just toughed it out,” Donovan said, “but the mental health of first responders, from dispatch to law enforcement to volunteers, cannot be underestimated.”
“There’s just a cascade of people who are impacted by these calls,” Donovan said.
Each reaction to traumatic exposure can be helped with specific strategies. McGladrey has an operational-stress guide she follows, part of a military program. She checks in with rescuers three days, three weeks and three months after a traumatic event, like recovering bodies from an avalanche. Are they losing sleep, are they having nightmares, are they depressed or feeling out of control?
“Laura is helping us get better about being aware and thinking like ‘Hmm, are you OK with what we just saw, because that was pretty gruesome and it’s OK to not be OK, you know?’” said Dawn Wilson with the Alpine Rescue Team. “Laura does an amazing job at making us more aware and being less machine and being able to talk about things we have seen.”
“She is vital to the future of how we keep rescuers safe,” said Jeff Sparhawk, the president of the Colorado Search and Rescue Association.
San Juan Search and Rescue’s critical-incident stress debrief” after the grueling recovery of Seth Bossung, Andy Jessen and Adam Palmer, the Eagle men killed near Silverton, included a therapist who worked with team members.
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