There are no heroes in mountain rescues, only team members, as LAURENCE MACKINdiscovers on a day with the Kerry Mountain Rescue Team
‘IN KERRY WE certainly have no heroes on the team.” Tim Murphy is standing on a raw Kerry hillside, high above the rough road leading to the Gap of Dunloe. Amid sporadic bursts of rain and wind, roughly 25 members of the Kerry Mountain Rescue Team (KMRT) are training for the next moment when another hillwalker finds trouble in the Killarney hills.
“People who join the team are not trying to be heroes,” explains Murphy. “We never name members that are out on the hill because it’s a team. It’s about mountain rescue, it’s not about notoriety or TV appearances.”
Ropes and belays are elegantly lashed to boulders, bolt holes and cracks in the rock. Rescuers mill about the hillside in harness, checking each others’ work, glanc- ing up at the sky and relentlessly trading insults. “You have to have a lot of banter because the night is long enough and tough enough without having some sort of craic. It doesn’t detract from our commitment to the job,” says Murphy.
He is typical of the team; a mountaineer, he has spent the last 24 years volunteering as a member of the KMRT. With a full-flowing Kerry accent that rattles out at a rate of knots, his enthusiasm for the mountains is matched only by a wit as quick as a whip, one of the chief tools for mountain rescue. Those not from Kerry bear the brunt of it. Tralee gets an ear-bashing from Killarney, and there are irrevocable differences between Fossa folk and Beaufort. Though generally it comes back to Cork. “We rescue a lot of Cork people. I think they get charged, actually,” jokes Richard Stack, the team’s coordinator.
The team prepares a stretcher as part of a training exercise, which is to be lowered about 150m down the cliffside, and I’m picked to play the victim. It’s an oddly peaceful sensation, strapped immobile to a platform that sways in the breeze, while the abseiling rescuer’s radio crackles and the rope buzzes through belays and bolts. For a few moments, the slagging ceases for the serious job at hand.
STACK’S ROLE IS perhaps the most onerous within the team. He takes calls, via the emergency services, and decides whether to scramble members, summon a helicopter from Shannon, or try and talk the caller down from the mountain, assuming they are in contact by mobile phone. “A lot of the time people will be positive where they are,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘We’re in the Hag’s Glen’, and we drive in with lights flashing. They won’t be able to see us because they are on the other side of the mountain.”
The Macgillycuddy’s Reeks, which is the KMRT’s main area of operations, might be low by European standards, but trails tend to be unmarked. “I’ve got lost, everybody gets lost, everybody has to turn back,” says Gerry Christie, the chairman of KMRT and PRO with the Irish Mountain Rescue Association. “I think a lot of people head up the mountains as if they are half a step more challenging than the Furry Glen in the Phoenix Park.” Christie admits, though, that he wasn’t always so philosophical about making ill-advised pushes for the top. “You don’t conquer any mountain. If it’s a rotten day you can turn back. There’s no shame in it. When I was young, the last thing I would do is turn back or publicly own up to turning back. Now it wouldn’t cost me a thought.”
Every call-out is regarded as a rescue and even when talking about operations involving fatalities, team members discuss the “rescue” or, at worst, the “recovery”. Ann Fitzpatrick was until recently team leader of the Glen of Imaal Red Cross Mountain Rescue Team (the position is rotated every three years) whose theatre of operations takes in Glendalough and the surrounding Wicklow hills.
“We had an awful tragedy last October when an aircraft went down on Corriebrack mountain. We highly suspected that it was going to be a recovery. Although it wasn’t a good outcome for those families, the fact was we could somehow alleviate their pain and angst. It was traumatic for a lot of people involved but we did our best. We have since met with some of the families and they’re extremely grateful for the work we did. In itself that can be very rewarding.”
This was a particularly horrific case that involved the team having to recover four bodies from the wreckage. The casualties were a couple, their son and a family friend from Gloucester in England. When it comes to dealing with the psychological effects of working in such conditions, team members are reluctant to discuss it beyond their own private circles. “We have a facility for critical incident stress debriefing afterwards, and most teams would have that. In my experience, most people don’t use that,” says Fitzpatrick. “We certainly promote the culture that people should avail of this, because the psychological health of anyone on a team is just as important as the physical health.
“If it’s somebody you know it hits more. If it’s a tragedy of a climber, somebody doing something that you associate with, that’s tough to deal with. You have to form a box in your mind to disassociate yourself from things.”
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this work is that, similar to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the mountain rescue service is staffed entirely by volunteers, and the various teams don’t charge call-out fees. Nor are the teams keen to see the service entirely funded by the State.
For Fitzpatrick, the frustration is that the team spends a lot of time fundraising, rather than concentrating on the core business of training and saving lives. The State pays for roughly 30 to 40 per cent of the larger mountain-rescue teams’ budgets, with the remainder raised through flag days, donations from those rescued, local businesses and hill-walking clubs.
“You couldn’t pay people to do it, you couldn’t do a manual handling course to tell you how to lift that bag,” says Richard Stack, pointing to an enormous canvas sack contain dozens of metres of rope and climbing equipment. “You’re in the mountains to do what you love and if you can help mountain rescue, you’ll do it, but you shouldn’t be sitting around waiting for call-outs. If that’s your approach, you’re in a bad place,” says Fitzpatrick. “You don’t want to be paid, it would ruin the ethos of mountain rescue. The spirit of the mountains is ingrained in the teams.”
For every team, the local community is essential to the work of mountain rescue. “We’re very well supported by the local community in Kerry,” says Stack. “It’s not only that we get money off them but we actually don’t have to pay for a lot of stuff. We’d have call-outs and go down to Kate’s [Kate Kearney’s, a pub and restaurant at the entrance to the Gap of Dunloe] and Mary [Coffey, co-owner of the pub] sometimes won’t even give us the bill. If we’re out very late, boxes of sandwiches will arrive. The women in the Black Valley are great at it.”
RESCUING PEOPLE from a cliff is perhaps a more glamorous task then combing the hills for a lost soul, and rescue teams work within a scientific data regime that profiles what certain people, such as Alzheimer’s patients or possible cases of people taking their own lives, will do in specific situations. This information, coupled with data culled from the Garda, family and medical records, allows the teams to build up possible scenarios, rated from most to least likely.
There is a particular call-out that the KMRT remembers as one of its most difficult. A Swedish man disappeared just four days after getting married. “He had a really ambitious route picked out,” says Gerry Christie. “He got up at 2.30am, left, and was never heard of again. We believe he looked at the compass and made a 180-degree error, which is easy to do. He walked the wrong way and off a cliff. The helicopter searched that area and he couldn’t be seen. Eighteen months later, heavy rains washed down some soil that a farmer noticed and he found boots and bones in the soil.”
This, though, is one of the few sad stories, and for every fatality there are dozens of rescues where people have found themselves in dire trouble and, thanks to the teams’ intervention, have gotten off the hill with little worse than broken bones, cuts and scrapes or bruised egos.
There are no heroes on this mountainside. Just people, brimming with banter and decades of experience, doing a job with startling dexterity and a quiet, confident pride that, hopefully, no hill will blunt.
For information on mountain rescue in Ireland, see mountainrescue.ie. KMRT’s website kerrymountain rescue.ie. The Glen of Imaal team is fundraising for a new centre. See wicklowmountainrescue.ie
So you want to join the team?
Different mountain rescue teams have different entry requirements.
For Kerry Mountain Rescue Team, personality and local knowledge are the key assets. "If you had moved down here and had a brilliant climbing CV, had climbed Everest and said you wanted to join, we would tell you to do a bit of walking in Kerry, get to know the places and come back to us," says Gerry Christie. "We have turned people down because they have had a reputation of not being team players." New recruits are on probation for two full years.
The Glen of Imaal Mountain Rescue Team advertises its vacancies in local newspapers and climbing magazines. "We ask people to come in at a certain standard and then fit into our normal training regime," says Ann Fitzpatrick. "We have a training log that's broken into 14 core competencies that you need . . . you must learn those skills in the first year."