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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. Living in a state and region with so much forest and wilderness within easy reach is a true paradise for anyone who loves to hike, camp, ski, boat, hunt or fish. And in addition to these amazing recreation opportunities, our wild spaces offer a great opportunity for people to rejuvenate and find themselves. Unfortunately, they also offer an opportunity for people to get lost. That's when the Lane County Sheriff's Search and Rescue team leaps into action. Today on the show, you'll meet the new leader of this largely volunteer organization within the sheriff's department and learn what they do, how they do it, and how they deploy unpaid staff to go out in some of the worst conditions our wilderness areas have to offer in an effort to both save the living and recover the dead.
Full disclosure: I recently became a member of the Lane County Sheriff's Search and Rescue team. We're a largely volunteer organization that goes out to find the missing, hurt and even deceased in our communities. By relying on volunteers, a department that serves a massive county can deploy a lot of people without costing taxpayers a massive amount.
Today on the show, you'll meet the new leader of SAR and hear how some of your friends and neighbors help bring people back from the brink. Lt. Tim Wallace is the coordinator and leader of the Lane County Sheriff's Search and Rescue program. Tim, it's great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Tim Wallace: Yeah, thanks for having me, Michael.
Dunne: You know, why did you want this job? You were previously with the sheriff's department as their public information officer. Why make the switch?
Wallace: Yeah, so I started my career with the sheriff's office back in 2011 as a search and rescue volunteer. I had been in the National Guard and was ending that time in my life, and I really wanted to serve my community closer to home. I had a lot of outdoor experience. I grew up in Scouts, backpacking, camping, rafting, all that stuff. So I really wanted to find a way to serve my community but still get to do some of the things I was good at and enjoyed. I didn't have search and rescue experience per se, but it seemed like probably the thing, so I started doing some research and asking around, discovered search and rescue, and went through Search and Rescue 101. You start going on missions as a volunteer, and then inevitably you have one where you save somebody's life, and that's something you just can't replicate. That SAR drive is part of the reason I wanted to stay here and stay with the sheriff's office. So when this opportunity came up, it really, I mean, it was my dream job that I didn't think I would ever get to do. They're rare positions to come up.
Dunne: Well, for folks who, I always think of SAR, or search and rescue, as something everybody has a certain understanding of, but tell people about the moving parts, because ground SAR is sort of the entry-level part, but there are whole other divisions within search and rescue. Talk about that. You're leading a very large group, but it's an unpaid workforce, it's all volunteers. Talk about all the pieces that make up what I understand to be one of the busiest search and rescue programs in the entire state.
Wallace: In Oregon, state law mandates that every sheriff provide search and rescue to their county. What that looks like, there's a bit of leeway there, so every county does it a little differently. The Oregon State Sheriffs' Association sets standards, so there's a standard in the state for all of our volunteers, and then we have our own policies, procedures and ways of doing things. In Lane County, we have about 160 volunteers across all of our programs, a ton of people. They're all volunteers, so they're here because they want to be here. They want to provide this service to the county, and they want to do the cool stuff. Something I really value about our program is our volunteers are highly motivated to provide a professional service. They may be unpaid, but they're internally driven to serve our county in the best way that they can. The number of hours our volunteers put in was almost 20,000 hours last year on about 141 missions, so we're one of the busiest counties in the state, and there's simply no way we could have paid staff do what our volunteers do.
Those different teams, the way we're structured, and again, it's unique in every county, there's history that plays into it, which I think is really cool. Almost every volunteer starts in ground search and rescue, which is its own nonprofit under the sheriff's office. That's our bread and butter: ground searchers. That's the bulk of our missions, the core of what we do. Those are the people who go out looking for your lost mushroom pickers, a little kid who goes missing from home, an Alzheimer's walkaway, even in the city. We're responsible for search and rescue in the entire county, so we'll work with our other law enforcement partners. When city police departments have an Alzheimer's walkaway, we get our volunteers there to assist. Those are the people who do the bulk of our work, and they also possess the core set of skills you need to move into other programs. So everybody starts in ground search and rescue and has to meet those requirements and go through our SAR 101 training, and then it typically just depends on experience as far as when they might move on to another program.
Our high-angle technical rescue team is Eugene Mountain Rescue. One of our other teams that does a lot of work, especially in the winter, is our Special Vehicles Group. That's essentially mostly big Jeeps, but there are also some other pretty cool vehicles, Subarus that could probably do just about anything a Jeep would do, even though that might upset some people when I say it like that. But the members in that group outfit their vehicles, and because of the special role they do, they get some special communications equipment. A lot of what they do are winter stuck-vehicle rescues, and over the years, a lot of work when we've had natural disasters and snowstorms. They have vehicles that can get places, and more importantly, they have the skills to get in and out safely and assist people in doing that.
We also have Mounted SAR, which is separate from the sheriff's posse. The posse is more of the parade stuff, the stuff you see at the fair. All of our members currently are in both programs, although you don't have to be. Mounted SAR is exactly what it sounds like: mounted search and rescue. That's people who have those Search and Rescue 101 ground skills, and they just do it on a horse, which can go farther, longer, faster. They're really great when we have a PCT hiker who doesn't need to be brought out on a stretcher but also can't hike out on their own. Being able to put that person on a horse and get them out in half the time is way better for the patient and our volunteers.
Dunne: Yeah, and there are some other four-legged components as well, right?
Wallace: Yeah. The canines are a team that I love, if only because I love dogs. They're great coworkers. When they show up on a search, they lift everybody's morale, but more importantly, they have incredible abilities. We have canines trained across a variety of skills. Without getting into what those are, they're trained and certified at the state level, just like our human volunteers. There's a standard they have to meet, and over the years, our canines have found a lot of people, a lot of live people. We also have canines specifically trained to find deceased people, even just bones, and we've had canines over the years that have made finds like that. Oftentimes it's stuff we can't talk about because it might be related to a case or something like that. But they train for that at least monthly, and oftentimes they'll be out almost every week training around the county to keep their skills up and meet those certification requirements.
Dunne: Tim, there's another R in search and rescue that maybe people don't realize: recovery. You alluded to it a little bit. Obviously there are times when people go into the woods and don't come back, or don't come back alive, and part of the job is to go find those people. You and I have been on a mission where somebody was deceased. I guess my question for you is, what I've found amazing is that everybody loves the idea of finding a lost hiker and saving their life and bringing them back, but talk about the importance of finding somebody who passed away, and what that means to you, to the volunteers, and, of course, to the people they leave behind.
Wallace: Yeah, that's interesting. With that professionalism that our teams exhibit, there's an interesting connection that always happens. You have to maintain that professionalism, but you spend several days looking for a lost loved one of someone, and you get personally invested, especially our volunteers. They're putting their whole lives on hold to go look for this person. The time they put in doesn't go unnoticed by the families. Our volunteers, myself and our other paid staff, we frequently will have missions where we locate someone who's deceased and bring closure for that family, and they'll invite us to the funeral because they're so grateful for the work our team has put in, and they recognize that these are volunteers giving their own time and resources to bring that family closure. It's never fun when you're looking for somebody, hoping to find them alive, and you don't. It's hard on the family and friends, and that's often an area where deputies, myself included, will have that contact and conversation. But it's hard on our volunteers too. The goal is always the rescue, that is always the goal, and when it turns into a recovery, there are a lot of emotions that go along with that, a lot of frustration. We often will have debriefs so our volunteers get a full picture of how the search went, and part of that is our own volunteers having closure, knowing they did their assignments. Sometimes, unfortunately, that's just how it works out, and oftentimes the person may have even been deceased before we went into the field, so there's nothing our volunteers could have done differently that would have changed the outcome.
But the closure those recoveries bring for the family is something I've seen over the years that I think is hard for people to wrap their minds around unless they've been in that situation or adjacent to it. It's very difficult to not know where your loved one is, even knowing they're very likely deceased. Just not knowing exactly where they are, and when you're going to know, that's something families have to live with, that not knowing, not getting closure. That's why, unfortunately, in Lane County, which is a big, wild county with a lot of wilderness, there are a fair number of cases we refer to as suspended searches, meaning we're still looking, but we're not putting volunteers in the field 24/7 anymore, which is always a tough decision to make when it gets to that point. But we certainly have some pretty high-profile cases in Oregon that we continue to send volunteers out on, continuing to search, continuing to look at what we've searched, what we might have missed, how we can expand the search area. Those suspended searches are probably the ones we talk about the most: What can we do? Where else can we look?
Dunne: For people listening, this might be very exciting, but they don't want to be on the other side of having search and rescue come get them. So my question for you, having the experience you have, what are better decisions people can make, especially before they head out into the wilderness? Or, on the other side of the coin, what are some decisions they shouldn't make to be safer out in this vast, wild county that is Lane County?
Wallace: Yeah, not everything is 100% preventable, but if we could just do rescues, that would be great. A lot of our recoveries, unfortunately, are because people just weren't prepared, and those are tough. When you're searching for somebody and you discover that's the problem, that's hard.
I'd say first and foremost, especially because it's August, if you're going on the water, wear a life jacket. It doesn't matter if it's moving water or flat water, down in the valley or up high in the mountains: wear a life jacket. We have deaths in our county every year on the water, on the rivers and lakes, and they're almost always preventable with the use of a life jacket. I can't stress that enough. If you don't like the life jacket you have, if the big bulky orange ones aren't great, tubing life jackets aren't great to paddle in, get a comfortable one. They're not crazy expensive, so get a well-fitting life jacket that you'll barely notice is even there.
I'd say too, with water, before I move on to land: If you paddleboard and use a leash, make sure it's a breakaway leash. If it's not, don't use it, throw it away. That's been an interesting trend we've seen across the state: As paddleboarding becomes more popular, we're seeing more deaths related to leashes. Essentially, the leash gets snagged on a tree branch, and the paddleboard stays buoyant. When someone falls off the paddleboard, they're not buoyant, and because they're not wearing a life jacket and they're attached to the board, they're not able to break away or get away from whatever they're snagged on. That's how some people have drowned recently. It's been kind of a statewide trend that we've seen, and we've certainly had incidents in Lane County, so don't use that leash.
As far as land, the most important thing you can do is tell somebody exactly where you're going and when you plan to be home. That at least gives us a starting point of where you might be. If we get a call at search and rescue and it's, ‘Oh, my friend was going mushroom picking in Lane County,’ well, that county is the size of Connecticut, so how can we narrow that down a little bit? Telling somebody who's not going with you that information is very important. And then be prepared to stay out overnight in the conditions for where you're going. Especially as we get into the shoulder season, spring and fall, it might be pretty good weather in the valley, but it might be freezing rain up at elevation in the mountains. Be prepared to stay out overnight, and don't just have the stuff in your car if you're planning to leave your car. If you're going away from your vehicle, whether hiking, hunting or mushroom picking, have that stuff with you. Have a little day pack with the 10 essentials to stay out overnight if you absolutely have to, and be OK with that. You might not be comfortable, but at least you'll be getting a rescue at the end of it.
And I'd add in there a communication device. There's been an interesting trend with search and rescue where a lot of places are doing a lot more rescues than recoveries, and a lot of that actually has to do with technology. Most modern cellphones have some capability of connecting to satellites and sending text messages. That wasn't a thing even just a couple of years ago. If you went out of cellphone range, pretty much if you went east in Lane County, you were out of cellphone range and you were not going to be able to call for help. A lot of cellphones have that capability now, so know how to use it before you need it.
Dunne: Well, good advice, and congratulations. He is Lt. Tim Wallace, the new coordinator and leader for the Lane County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue team. Tim, great to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Wallace: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Eugene-based Holt International is a global adoption organization, but as you'll learn on Monday's show from a Register-Guard reporter, one of those adoptions went horribly wrong, and a lawsuit is pending. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
