Finding the Right Balance

My pager goes off for a hiker who has called for help along the Pacific Crest Trail. The page comes in around 8PM and the general location of the hiker is about 5 to 8 miles in. I'm immediately compelled to go and begin making a check list of things I might need in my pack. I also consider the possibility of being out all night and either being late for work and non-functional or missing work all together because of the unknown injuries of the hiker. At work, we are busy working to release a product and it is crunch time.

As I'm changing clothes my wife looks at me and asks about the call. Then tells me about something going on in her day or something about the kids. My mind is only focused on my packing list and what I might encounter on the trail. Then it dawns on me that I've been on a lot of rescues lately (August is busy for our team) and haven't spent much time with family. When I call the in-town operations leader for our team to tell him I can't go on the mission, I feel a sting of guilt for leaving my teamates to do all of the work. My feelings of guilt are enhanced when I learn that we have a low turnout for this mission. I briefly reconsider going, but realize that family is far more important and work plays into the mix because I need my job to help support the family.

My ultimate rationalization is that while I am a member of a SAR unit and need to be available to respond to untimely missions, I need to take care of myself first, my SAR teamates second and lastly the subject needing help.

Also, by turning down a mission, maybe it will lessen the blow over the weekend when I look at my wife and say, "there's a mission, do you mind that I bail on whatever we have planned for this weekend."

Keeping the same radio frequency in the field

I was recently on a SAR mission where base was getting inteferring radio traffic on our "dedicated" SAR frequency. We had several teams in the field and the plan was to have each team change frequency and report in. Unfortunately, my team did not have the new frequency.  In theory we all should have picked another universal frequency, unfortunately, base moved each team to the new frequency which we didn't have and kept us on the old frequency. While base has the capability to monitor multiple frequencies, our team felt quite alone.

Once we reached the search area, coordinating with the other teams became a nightmare as we had to contact base to get each team's location and assignment. Eventually, our team caught another team and borrowed one of their radios but the confusion and leaving one team essentially in the dark seemed a bit of poor form.

On the up side though, we had a nice hike and were not bombarded with a bunch of radio traffic. The good news too was that this area is well known and frequently traveled by both myself and my teammate so we were not too concerned about our location or progress moving up the 4 mile 3,500ft elevation gain mountain side.