I’ve always loved outdoor activities like backcountry skiing, climbing and hiking. Being part of North Shore Rescue gets me doing that on a regular basis. The biggest requirement for being on the team is the time commitment. We average 500 hours a year, a couple of calls a week. Sometimes we have to spend the night out with people because the local helicopter companies won’t fly in the mountains at night. There have been many times when I’ve come to work at seven in the morning not having gone to bed. We get lots of injured and lost hikers. You can break an ankle stepping off of a curb and it’s no big deal because the ambulance can drive up; if you do the same thing six hours off the beaten track, it can become serious very quickly because you’re dealing with the cold and you can go into shock.
The calls come at the most inconvenient times. It’s like Murphy’s Law: we’ll be in the middle of a dinner party with a turkey in the oven and the pager will go off. There have been times when I’ve been lifting off in a helicopter cancelling dentist appointments and meetings and sending emails to my partners telling them I don’t know when I’m coming back. But it doesn’t matter what I’m doing: when I get that call I just have to drop everything and go.