Jon Bateman is an old friend of Singletrack, and a member of Scarborough and Ryedale Mountain Rescue Team, whose operational area includes Dalby Forest and the southern North York Moors. Here he’s written an introduction to what the team does, and how they do it – as well as why he personally decided to get involved.
Fear, pain and confusion – that was what I saw in the young racer’s eyes. I could see he’d gone from big-ringed, race-leading, head down flight to a tangle of broken and bent bike and body in a split second. So quick he barely knew what had happened. As I carefully helped extract his leg from his spoke-stripped front wheel the training kicked in and the gears of teamwork clicked and whirred around me, with the one aim to quell that fear, pain and confusion.
This was where it had started for me, my foray into the whirlpool of Mountain Rescue – a whirlpool because it sucks you in. These were my home trails, intimately familiar after ten years of incessant riding. At some point in those ten years someone suggested I might find the local mountain rescue team interesting. I’ve always ridden, walked, climbed. I know my way around a map. I know these trails, this bit of the patch, like the back of my hand. Maybe I could put all those years of messing about outdoors to some sort of use.
Running with a heavy medical bag on my back, and more kit in each hand, I was relieved I still manage to ride regularly. My already adrenalin-spiked pulse seemed to be bouncing off the limiter, but quickly eased back under control in the bubble of calm we created around the rider. The doc was doing his calm doctor thing and we were busily anticipating each other’s needs, trying to make the route from here to safety and comfort as quick and smooth as possible.
All mountain rescue teams are different, but in essence they’re clubs with a purpose. I’ve never liked clubs and have always been irrationally suspicious of those who join them. As an inveterate lone-rider the question ‘Why on earth would you join a club to ride when you can ride on your own?’ has always governed my relationship, or rather my lack of a relationship, with cycling clubs. So applying to join this group of strangers took a bit of cajoling from my wife (I bet she regrets that now) and a couple of friends in the team. I figured that at least the motivations for joining mountain rescue were shared and everyone would be pulling in the same direction.
It took a while to navigate my way around the team landscape, to locate friends, colleagues and others. What appeared to me was, perhaps surprisingly given the disparate pile of people that make it up, a strong team. Tolerant of anyone willing to give their time and effort, yet witheringly and amusingly harsh on any and all of your minor mistakes. Sarcastic, yet completely caring at those raw moments when care is needed most. It’s a fine line that the team seems to walk communally.
I’m always interested in why people do things, as much as the how, but the team has shown me that personal motivations, which are wide and ranging, don’t really matter much if someone’s turned out with you at 2am to fruitlessly search fields and ditches in sub-zero conditions, the only reward a self-lukewarming meal handed out from a police van. Why you’re there doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as simply being there.
I knew all the people in that bubble of calm. I knew their motivations and I knew they mattered not a jot as all we were focussed on was doing the job right. I’d seen riders fall to this entirely innocuous section of slug-trail singletrack before. Straight, fast, damp, and slick enough for there to be no get out if one of the little kicking humps along its length took you by surprise. One of those linking trails, after the techy downhill and before the climb, when the mind switches off enough to allow wrong to creep in and bite. The rider was calmer, but it was clear he didn’t know which hurt to worry about most. With the speed and energy involved we were worried about his pelvis, so took no chances in packaging him up and gave him the full mountain rescue casualty experience – collar, vacuum stretcher and a gentle carry to the waiting Land Rover.
Nobody likes being a casualty, for real or in play. Getting encased in a vacuum stretcher, wrapped in a big bag and strapped down to the stretcher, with your nose close to the Land Rover roof lining, isn’t good for anyone with even a hint of claustrophobia. The immediate removal of control is disconcerting to the healthy person playing a ‘body’, but actual hurt people do tend to accept the whole process with much more good grace. It signals that help is here, and you’ve started the journey back to somewhere more comforting, somewhere safe.
By the time I was driving him back to the start area the ongoing radio chatter had brought a few other services into play – the air ambulance was on its way (whether he needed it or not) and a road ambulance would be following not long after. I piloted our little bubble through the finished and preparing racers to the small camp we’d set up. Once hidden away in a tent the team doctors present began good-humoured prodding and poking whilst I made cycling small talk. “It’s your first mountain bike race? Really? But you won your ‘cross series this year, which one? Oh… right…” He was clearly fast, faster than me for sure. But that club skinsuit’s days were numbered.
I’m always surprised at how willing people are to let you cut their clothes from their bashed about bodies. I’m not sure I’d be so cooperative, in fact I know I wasn’t when I was faced with the choice. ‘Do you know how much these shorts cost? No, I’m sure I can get them off… I’ll just wriggle this way’, hardly ever happens. Wave a pair of Tuff Cuts in front of someone (a casualty I hasten to add) and you briefly see a resigned look flit across their face before they say “Yes, get them off”, and lie back to the accompaniment of ripping lycra.
The thing about the bubble is that it is see-through, people barely notice it. People are acting calm, so onlookers assume everything is fine. That’s a harder pretence to maintain when a helicopter turns up and interrupts a race start. Thankfully we were getting to the happy point of deciding that our racer had escaped the more serious damage that a full-speed body slam might have inflicted, so no sooner had the helicopter landed than it was off again, to be replaced by a more pedestrian yellow and green Sprinter. Always a disappointing moment for a casualty. Any ambulance journey throws a logistical spanner in the works for most people. Thankfully the rider’s team mates were on hand to notify family and reassure that everything would sort itself out in the end. He was likely to be racing again, probably before his bruises had faded.
I’d been in this situation before. A few years ago, less than 100 yards away, I’d been loaded into a similar ambulance, hurriedly thrusting my car keys into my mates hands so he could get home and break the news to my pregnant wife that I wouldn’t be home for tea, probably not today or tomorrow. That crash, when a great ride went bad in an instance, definitely helped steer me towards mountain rescue. I crashed on a Saturday morning, riding with a friend, and I knew exactly where to send him to get a signal. If it had happened when I was riding the same trail alone, in the dark, as I had two days before, then it would have been a significantly more uncomfortable experience. I’m pretty sure the people in red jackets would have been involved. This is a place I feel is home, these trails are my intimate friends, in the back of my mind I think I felt that I should be there helping if someone needed help on these trails.
Being part of this team has made a much larger area feel like home to me. The people and the place are linked in what we do. They reinforce one another, shared personal geographies, building a communal landscape, knitted together by stories of rescues, searches, jokes, mistakes. My team mates might say I should be writing about our skills in rope rescue, casualty extraction, pre-hospital care, search management, swift water and flood rescue and all the other things we train so hard to do well, but although you need them, the skills don’t make the team – that’s the people.
Mountain rescue teams are volunteer run and rely entirely on donations to meet their operating costs. Consider supporting them – it might be you they’re rescuing one day.
srmrt.org.uk