Late on Friday night (July 30), Dave Steers and Pemberton’s Search and Rescue (SAR) team got a call around 11:30 p.m. A hiker in a T-shirt and shorts had climbed up and away from his group at Upper Joffre Lake, seeking to touch the glacier above, but the onset of darkness stranded him. When members of his party lost sight of him, they wound up seeking help.

Steers, a search manager for the all-volunteer Pemberton SAR team, spoke with the RCMP and stayed up for several hours while a course of action was determined. As hiking in with SAR team members would have had them arriving on the scene at around 4 a.m., on a relatively good night with few threats for an adult male, the decision was made to wait until daybreak and fly in with a less exhausted crew.

After a few hours of restless sleep, troubled by what-if questions, Steers and several Pemberton SAR team members were out of bed around 5 a.m. on Saturday (July 31) to fly with an RCMP officer to the spot where the hiker’s friends last saw him. In short order after their helicopter landed, they found the 26-year-old man from Langley safe and sound, as a more experienced hiker had climbed up around 11 p.m. and guided him down to the camp.

Members of Pemberton’s SAR team were called upon again the very next night: They were asked to prepare to respond to Saturday’s crash of an air tanker near Lytton that took the lives of two pilots. The Pemberton searchers were staged at their base for three hours, waiting to hear whether they would be needed to travel all the way to the fiery site.

SAR team members and Pemberton doctors Rebecca Lindley and Jel Coward cut short their Saturday hiking and camping around Garibaldi Lake, a rare excursion without their kids, in order to come back and answer the call. But in the end, Pemberton’s SAR team members wound up standing down that night.

“This is what people are doing for absolutely no payment except the satisfaction,” Steers said of the approximately 20 active members of Pemberton’s 100 per cent volunteer SAR team. “It’s a group of people that want to contribute something to their community.”

Summer and fall tend to be the busiest times for the Pemberton SAR team, Steers said, possibly due to the higher numbers and/or greater inexperience of people heading into the backcountry in the warmer months compared to winter adventurers.

While neighbouring Whistler deals with more calls relating to skiers and snowboarders going out of bounds, Pemberton’s SAR team members seem to get more recreational incidents and do a number of medical evacuations, Steers said. In the last five years Pemberton’s SAR team has tended to handle about 25 calls per year.

Over the past decade or so, Steers said, SAR officials in the Sea to Sky corridor have noted that “call volume has actually gone down, although this year it has rebounded… If it continues on this pace, we’ll be back up to historical levels.”

He said there hasn’t been a compelling rationale devised for the decline in calls.

Steers was there for the forging of the Pemberton SAR team around 1994, along with fellow current team members Russell McNolty, also a search manager, and Kevin Sibbald, a Level 2 avalanche technician.

McNolty, who grew up in Pemberton, said it’s been rewarding to see how the group has developed with a lot of work, growing out of its origins with an old van and hand-held radios to a solid team that’s part of a strong provincial resource.

While knocking on wood, he said he thinks that in recent years it “seems almost that people are being a little more responsible.”

Good news for the Pemberton group, which has a huge area to cover. It’s bounded by the Green River crossing and down to Harrison Lake to the south, by the coast to the west and by an unknown boundary to the north — Steers said they’ve been up to the Chilcotins for calls. They also serve around Lillooet and the Fraser River.

“Our terrain would yield basically about any kind of call you can get,” Steers said. The group has to be prepared to stage a swiftwater rescue in January or address an avalanche in August. “It’s almost like there is no seasonality.”

“It’s a lot to contemplate, that’s for sure,” McNolty said.

Pemberton’s SAR team is one of about 87 sanctioned SAR units across the province. B.C. Search and Rescue Association figures say the groups handle more than 900 incidents per year, with 2,500 volunteers giving more than 100,000 hours of their time on calls in 2008-’09.

For the Pemberton SAR volunteers, their reasons for wanting to help in this way — covering a vast area full of challenging terrain and variable conditions in occasionally odd and long hours of volunteer work — are varied but heartfelt.

The rationale includes a desire to share their skills, knowledge and love for the outdoors in a way that can help others in the backcountry, a commitment to the other individuals on the SAR team, the satisfaction that comes from successful searches, and, most of all, the desire to contribute to their community.

Coward said he and Lindley looked at each other briefly when Saturday night’s call came in, but didn’t hesitate to answer. He said the team members are a “great bunch of people” of hugely varied backgrounds and strengths, all driven by the unifying need “to do some good” as volunteers.

For those heading out in the backcountry this summer and fall, Steers stressed the importance of understanding exactly what you’ll be doing, being properly equipped for it, and making sure you clearly leave your travel plans with people who are on the same page.