When an emergency happens deep in the fells – we immediately turn to mountain rescue.
It doesn’t matter if the Lake District’s valleys and hills are covered in thick snow or being battered by high winds or heavy rain, when a call out comes in, out the teams go.
Cumbria is home to 10 rescue teams that are manned by hundreds of volunteers who all come from different walks of life and go above and beyond to get lost, injured and scared people back home in one piece.
Unlike police, ambulance and fire services, mountain rescue teams aren’t on a payroll. Instead, teams are entirely made up of people willing to give up their time to save others from often dire and distressing situations.
While it’s a role full of the highs of saving lives and helping people, it’s also incredibly physically – and psychologically – demanding in its nature.
And as the number of call outs continues to rise year on year, the pressure on team members rises with it.
Penny Kirby has been involved with mountain rescue for over 40 years and received an MBE for her dedication in 2023. She has taken on several roles in that time covering the Wasdale area including team member, search dog handler and now team leader.
Despite being involved with over 1,200 rescues over the course of her time spent with the Wasdale team, Penny said the same emotions still come up every time a call out comes in.
She said: “You always feel a degree of apprehension and a sense of responsibility too, from my perspective as a team leader it’s that feeling of it being on your shoulders.
“We always start with getting as much information on the situation as we can, so we figure out if the casualty is on their own, if they’re experienced and equipped, if they have any medical conditions and what the terrain and weather is like where they are.
“But we don’t always know what we’re going to or what the state the casualty is in, so it’s always an emergency when we go out.
“Especially if we’re going out on a search, where we don’t know if they’ve found somewhere to keep warm or if they’ve had a really nasty accident, so there’s that feeling of not knowing too.
“In a way that makes it difficult to prepare for it mentally, you get more accustomed to it, but I don’t know if you ever get used to it.”
Call outs can range from a few hours in length to a full 10-hour long rescue effort or a multi-day search.
Searches require a huge organisational effort to work quickly and efficiently and teams do all they can to find a casualty, but it’s far from a straightforward task.
Terrain, weather conditions and time of day can have a huge impact on the team’s chance of finding someone on the first try and teams also have to prioritise looking after volunteers too.
Teams have to continuously swap out volunteers to make sure they’re well rested and on top form and very rarely poor weather can also force teams to turn back and stop searching until it is safe for them to continue.
Penny added: “When we’re out there, we look after each other and if one person is struggling, they will come off the hill if they absolutely need to.
“Searching is a slow process, you’re constantly stopping and turning and looking around and if you’re going up in bad weather, you think to yourself about how you’re going to cope and you end up much more limited in terms of what you can do while out searching.
“You also have to carry more equipment to keep warm in bad weather, so it’s physically and mentally draining.
“You’re only effective for around four to six hours and then you have to come off the hill and people organising the search in the meantime organise ‘fresh legs’ as we call them.
“The chances of finding someone on the first attempt are 50 per cent and that’s hard for family and friends to understand who aren’t in the area and don’t know the terrain.
“If it turns into a big search that lasts multiple days, we call in people from other teams and up to 70 people at a time can be on the hill, which is a lot of organising and looking after each other.
“But because we’re volunteers, we can only give a couple of days before we’re forced to go back to work or normal life and you get very jaded.”
An overwhelming majority of rescues teams attend end well, with the injured or stranded person being warmed up and taken home in one piece or taken to hospital for care.
But sometimes, the teams have to face death in the hills.
Penny said: “We go out and we have a lot invested in it. Depending on the information we’ve got to start with we always go out with an optimistic frame of mind, but very often searches take place at night and if it goes on into the next day, we keep our optimism.
“But as the search goes into day three or four, we start to prepare ourselves for what might be a poor outcome.
“When that happens, disappointed doesn’t really cut it for how you feel, but we keep hoping as long as we possibly can.
“We did have a call out a few years ago where we thought the man couldn’t possibly have survived, but on the third search day in bad conditions he was alive, so that was a real boost because he confounded medical expectations surviving such low temperatures.”
Penny added that these days, there are different layers of support available for team members who are involved with fatalities or difficult rescues – but she said that it all begins with looking out for one another.
Newer team members are also under no obligation to get up close and personal with casualties until they feel ready absolutely ready to do so.
She said: “If it’s a poor outcome in the end, I think what gets us through is the mutual support and knowledge that we’ve done the absolute best we can in that situation.
“At the time of the call out, we get on with it, but what gets difficult is when someone hasn’t survived and we’re bringing them off the hill and then we walk down any friends or family that were with them and that can be difficult, because it can be quite a long time and they’re obviously in a bad state themselves.
“The Langdale team last year they had two fatalities within the space of a week and we had two on the same day, so it does get really heavy then.
“But we do what we need to do to get them off the hill and afterwards to get through.”
Penny said that finding ways to process difficult call outs is something that comes with time.
She said: “It has a cumulative effect, you might go to something today that reminds you of something from years ago, so I don’t think you ever get used to it, you just get better at dealing with it.
“I personally don’t do anything consciously, but it is the usual things of talking to others and finding support that way. Sometimes I will go back to the spot where it happened and just sit for a while and think about it.
“What does help is occasionally we will have contact with the family afterwards and many people, even if it was a poor outcome, thank us.
“Even if we the outcome is bad, we bring the person down and the thank yous and appreciation we get makes a great difference.”
The number of call outs mountain rescue receives has been growing every year and it’s an increase that means teams are always in need of new members and donations to keep them afloat.
But the growing number of incidents isn’t just tough on team members – it’s also tough on their family, friends and personal lives.
Following the death of mountain rescue team member Chris Lewis, who died while on a call out during the Covid lockdown, teams are also working on offering different kinds of support to those related to volunteers.
Penny said: “Very often we don’t hear someone is overdue until it’s well into the evening. Information gathering takes around an hour to half an hour and that helps us decided where our resources go, as they are finite.
“Then people have to get out of bed, get dressed, get food organised and drive down into the valley. It’s not an ideal time to get up and out and just that can be disruptive to your home life.
“Its juggling job, family and social life and it can be difficult to find a balance. Richard (a fellow team member) always puts it very clearly that if you go, you feel guilty leaving family behind on the call outs but if you don’t go, you feel guilty you’re letting the team down. Managing that is hard.
“We’ve actually got a support leaflet for families and we’ve just started doing a group for partners to get together if they want to in a kind of support group.
“In some ways I think for the people sat at home their minds can wander and they can think what’s going on is worse than it actually is.
“We’re lucky in a way that we have Sellafield, who are largely really accommodating, but some team members are self-employed and call outs mean they’re letting customers down and they have to make up time for the lost money and things like that.
“We do have high standards for how many call outs we ask team members to attend, and if people need to get back to work or family commitments, we have to accommodate that.”
But Penny said above all, their love of the fells, and drive to help people who find themselves in distressing situations, keeps them going.
She said: “The one thing that gets you through is the knowledge that someone is out there in a worst state than you.
“I think we do it because we get so much out of going into the hills, and even when a rescue goes wrong, you’re still helping. You’re still doing an essential job and the team spirit and friendships and being in a group of likeminded people helps too.
“It is rewarding, but it’s like a battery, you have to get enough out of it to keep putting more in.”
How can I stay safe in the fells?
Rescue teams across the Lake District are asking people heading outdoors to use their #BeAdventureSmart service.
Every person going outdoors in the Lake District should ask themselves three questions before doing so:
- Am I confident I have the knowledge and skills for the day?
- Do I know what the weather will be like?
- Do I have the right gear?
You can find out more about Adventure Smart and ways to stay safe by clicking here.
