A vital stretcher box – used by volunteer Lake District mountain rescue teams – has been ransacked by vandals.
The box at Mickledore, between Scafell and Scafell Pike, was broken into over the bank holiday weekend, Some of the kit has gone missing and contents have been scattered across the area.
Volunteers also found a used disposable barbecue, food waste and rubbish.
Wasdale Mountain Rescue volunteers have already been up to sort out the mess left behind and make sure that the rescue kit was in working order.
The vandalism comes as the team – and the other volunteer rescuers in the Lake District are experiencing a sharp rise in callouts.
The team also added a sign to the box to help point hikers in the right direction in bad weather, and hopefully reduce callouts from lost walkers.
Penny Kirby, one of the team leaders, said: “We have seen a surge of callouts this year since Easter. May has been especially busy, perhaps due to a combination of three bank holidays, people holidaying more at home due to the costs of overseas holidays and the rising cost of living in general.
“The last thing our team of volunteers really want to be doing to is repairing rescue kit and cleaning up disposable barbecue rubbish. We are very concerned about the impact so many callouts are having on our team members, their families, and their work.”
Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team has already had 70 callouts this year, 27 of them in May. This compares to 42 callouts by the end of May in 2022, and only five in the
month of May itself.
In 2021, the team dealt with 19 callouts up until the end of May and five in May.
Penny added: “We made a decision recently, in consultation with the Lake District National Park Authority and the National Trust, to add some signage to the Mickledore stretcher box to try and help lost walkers find their way safely down the fells and reduce callout numbers.
“Roughly 60 per cent of our callouts in the Wasdale Team are on Scafell Pike and in recent years around 60 per cent of those are for lost or missing walkers. Anything we can do to help them self-rescue and reduce the number of times we are called out is worth a try.”
The region as whole is also seeing significantly higher callouts, the Lake District Search and Mountain Rescue Association said.
The highest year on record for callouts across the region was 2021 which saw 681 callouts in total across the year – 141 of those by the end of May.
So far this year that figure for callouts by the end of May is 261 – an 85 per cent increase on 2021.
