When the rubber meets the road..

While the primary raison d'etre for the Old Rag Mountain Steward program is to provide "mountain stewardship", promoting sound outdoor practices and ethics (like Leave No Trace) and trying to provide mountain education and safety awareness (our orange tee-shirts are an effort to make us very visible to hikers who may have a question or need assistance)...

..more often than not, our presence on Old Rag is most often realized in the event of an emergency: hiker illness or injury or separated parties.

Every weekend we have training on a very wide range of topics (see the previous post) so that regardless of the situation, be it a first time hiker's bear encounter or a traumatic injury we are prepared to respond appropriately.








This past weekend was no exception, except this was not training. A hiker experienced a severe lower leg injury (from short-cutting a trail, I might add. ..something that we actively discourage in our LNT role) and required a helicopter medevac.








As always.. training pays off! The joint NPS-ORMS team was able to effect a very smooth and rapid rescue from a very remote and inaccessible part of the mountain....

..now if they had just stayed on the trail in the first place...

(All images courtesy of Silver Spring Wanderer... one of our key ORMS members.)