The Backcountry Rescue Squad at America’s Busiest National Park

“Every year, the park logs more than twelve million visits, some of which go poorly,” writes Paige Williams in introducing us to the myriad misadventures that befall lazy, clueless, and sometimes just plain unlucky people who get injured in US national parks and the highly trained volunteers who risk their own lives to rescue them. Read this piece and you may be suspicious of the wind in a forest forever after.

A fifteen-year-old boy jumped between rocks at a scenic overlook and fell five hundred feet. Lightning struck near where a man lay reading in his tent; the charge “welded” him to the ground for at least ten seconds. A cyclist hit a deer and flew over the handlebars. A hundred and seventy-five feet deep in a cave, two spelunkers ran out of rope. A child got separated from his family and wound up at the base of a cliff. Hikers discovered a man freezing on the Appalachian Trail, seventy-four miles of which pass through the park; he didn’t have a coat, and had wrapped his feet in underwear and duct tape. A fisherman was stung more than a hundred times by yellow jackets. Three stranded backpackers, unable to figure out how to build a proper fire, even with a small blowtorch, burned their clothes. A kid tried to cross a flooding river after his friends warned him not to, and was swept downstream. An inner tuber fell into a river and got trapped between submerged rocks. “The river will take you,” John Sharbel, a veteran white-water rafter, told me the other day.

Herrington was two years into his “new chapter of life” when he started missing search-and-rescue work. He approached his former boss, Steve Kloster, the Smokies’ chief ranger at the time, with a proposal to support the national park by creating an independent “all hazards” emergency-response team of élite outdoors athletes who were willing to step away from their jobs and families in, say, the middle of the night, or on a holiday, and in weather that you wouldn’t let your dog out in, to save the life of a stranger. They would train for the gnarliest missions: swift-water rescue, long-distance carry-outs, winter rescue, and technical rescue, which involves complex systems of ropes, pulleys, and carabiners. Herrington wanted to name the team BUSAR, for Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue.