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Mountain Rescue Association Conference brings camaraderie and skill sharing to Juneau
- Ellie Ruel
- Jun 17
- 6 min read
Multiple days of training and panels fill schedule with preconference training block and two days of breakout sessions
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
Mountain search-and-rescue personnel from across the country and Canada took a small break from the terrain to test new techniques and technologies — sometimes in real-life scenarios — for the annual Mountain Rescue Association conference last week. It was hosted by Juneau Mountain Rescue at the University of Alaska Southeast Recreation Center.
A vendor’s bionic leg extensions were tested during a search-and-rescue call on the Mount Roberts trail Friday night. Brent Wittmer, a JMR volunteer, said the injured hiker was not mobile and couldn’t be transported down the tram due to an extended closure, and a helicopter rescue attempt was unsuccessful. Capital City Fire/Rescue and JMR personnel performed a carry down the mountain with a litter equipped with a tire, which Wittmer relieved while wearing the braces he described as a little “space age.”
“We have a vendor here who has them for us to demo, and because we were here and they were here, we sort of were like, ‘Let's go give it a try.’ And so, yeah, I was able to zoom up there with my bionic legs. It was cool,” he said. “You've got these little electric motors at your hip. It's strapped around your hip and right above your knee, you’ve got these little electric motors that engage as you step, so it sort of lifts your leg and then helps it press down.”
Wittmer said the leg braces could be useful on future missions rescuing hypothermic patients or those with muscle cramps to give them a mobility boost.
“Every year, a different team that's part of the Mountain Rescue Association hosts the conference,” said Jackie Ebert, director of operations for JMR. “People start planning years and years in advance. So about three or four years ago, we just decided that collectively we wanted to bring the conference back to Alaska, and so we're co-hosting with the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group out of Anchorage.”
Panelists from an urban avalanche response discussion on the nuances of legal and technical ramifications of urban versus backcountry disasters joked that much of the conference was planned while shoveling roofs this winter. Topics ranged from how to safely recover people and plan for operation center locations to the legal aspects of evacuation advisories and how to coordinate with law enforcement in high-stress situations, using examples from prior events in Anchorage and Juneau.
For instance, following record-breaking snowfall in January, residents were asked to evacuate all known slide paths and multiple avalanches were observed.
Mike Janes, an avalanche forecaster for Alaska Electric Light and Power Company, who also works with Southeast Alaska Dogs Organized for Ground Search, used possible outcomes from that event to illustrate a potential high-stress scenario.
“In Juneau, we have this corridor of Behrends Avenue, the Glacier Highway corridor, where we have, it's like our old power artery, right?” Janes said.. “And so if we have an urban avalanche that's big enough to damage houses, it's probably most certainly going to take power out and that complicates things.”
About 250 participants from 70 mainly northwestern SAR teams attended training and talks at the Rec Center, and did field demonstrations in the surrounding areas Friday and Saturday. A wildlife cruise and other events preceded the conference Thursday.
“We spend a lot of time with people from our team,” said Dean Knapp, a volunteer with the Alaska Mountain Rescue Group from Anchorage. “How often do you interact with someone from Pennsylvania County, North Carolina?”
Knapp has been with the team for 27 years. He said a first responder stress roundtable focused on mental health was particularly poignant to him. That roundtable was part of a three-day lineup of panels and field sessions on everything from hypothermia care to topographical maps and litter carries, as well as discussions focused on team building and management.
“It’s most important because we get very promising 20-year-old, 24-year-old volunteers, and if they get a bad call early on, we lose them. It’s stress. It's not what they really want to be doing,” Knapp said.
For Wittmer, who’s a membership coordinator for JMR, ensuring the right people join and want to stay is a focus.
“We go to have some of those discussions with other teams, they’re all different, but that have dealt with the same challenges, or have challenges that we don't have,” he said.
He said much of that is translating skills like climbing and backpacking to rescue missions by helping them speak the language and feel supported.
“Every unit of energy going into our people needs to come out as a unit of effectiveness as a mission,” Wittmer said. “And seeing what other teams have done is really impressive and inspiring.”
Sometimes the specific technical advice isn’t applicable across different terrains. Wittmer said Alaska is unique because many of the teams respond to a broader geographic area.
“If you have a conversation with someone about the way they do things, you can't just say, ‘OK, we should do that,’ because of geography, even down to the makeup of the ground,” he said. “If somebody's in a sandstone environment that has different implications for how they're going to respond, what equipment they're gonna use, than for us who are in scree and shale and mud.”
A more common, but somewhat novel, search-and-rescue tool heavily discussed at the conference was drones. Sessions about everything from sUAS (small unmanned aircraft system) search-and-rescue theory to advanced avalanche techniques were scattered on the weekend schedule and in pre-conference panels.
Andrew Dyke, a drone operator and volunteer with JMR, said that drone usage in search-and-rescue applications is new in Alaska due to recent regulatory changes and that Juneau is at the forefront of using the technology.
“One of the classic responses is we either don't know where they are or we need more information on the subject. So what we'll do is we'll fly either looking for that person or fly and find out what situation they're in and what they need,” Dyke explained. “There was one mission in particular where it was a steep-angle mission, and it was in the middle of the night. The team was basically repelling into the darkness, into the unknown, looking for this person. And we were able to locate them with the drone, and a different location than we expected, and able to wrap that mission up so much faster and get to the person so much faster.”
He said the conference provided an opportunity to showcase what JMR is doing as well as learn from other teams.
“It's been really cool because one of the things that's been really interesting to me is that every team has their own little specialties that I didn't expect,” Dyke said.
Jared Carlson is a volunteer with Seattle Mountain Rescue and also focused on drone operations.
“The drone team here has just also really, really interesting and cool stuff that I’ll be able to bring back to my own team,” he said. “Details about how they run their team here.”
He noted drones can be used not only for monitoring, but also to perform technical tasks like stringing lead lines across a canyon or river.
This isn’t his first MRA conference, but he said he was able to attend a talk from the creator of CalTopo, an online mapping program he estimated about 90% of SAR teams use across the country.
“I use it a lot, and consider myself to be like ‘OK, I know how to use this,’ and he was even throwing things out there where I was like ‘Whoa, OK, that’s super high speed,” Carlson said. “Mapping challenges and all that stuff are just an accepted part of mountain rescue, and I’ve got some cool solutions from other companies here, but that’s sort of the main player as far as topographical mapping.”
Ebert said the conference was made possible by the community coming together.
“We are all volunteers that are volunteering our time to work on a conference and volunteers that fly from around the U.S. and Canada to come to the conference,” Ebert said. “So I'm just super grateful for everyone involved.”
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
