Packwood Search and Rescue Team Teaches Younger Members Tricks of the Trade

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Ron Blankenship and Gene Seiber, members of the self-described “old guard” of the Packwood Search and Rescue team, have a lot of stories.

There was the time Blankenship hung 200 feet down a rope and lowered another volunteer 200 more feet to rescue a stranded hunter. It was nighttime, and a snowstorm was raging.

“Then we had cougar guy,” said Seiber.

He bestowed the odd nickname to an elk hunter who claimed to be attacked by a mountain lion while out in the wilderness. A more trained eye would recognize that his tattered coveralls were shredded from the bottom to the top. A mountain lion brings down its paw from the top to the bottom, Seiber noted.

The only way this guy was attacked by a cougar, said Seiber, a retired Lewis County Sheriff’s Office detective, is if he was standing on his head.

They’ve rescued hikers, hunters, boy scouts and more. They’ve come upon grisly scenes where the lost person had been long dead before the SAR was brought on to search.

But an accumulation of stories is evidence of a lot of time gone by, and Blankenship and Seiber are aware of something pretty simple: They’ve been at this for a while, and need to teach the next generation what they’ve learned.

Blankenship, for his part, has been a member of the Packwood SAR since the 1970s. Most of the group, he said, have been members for three to four decades. Before SAR, Blankenship got his start in emergency services in 1969 at what was then called High Valley Fire Department in Packwood.

Not quite out of his teens, Blankenship said the average age of the other members was in the 70s. They had lessons to teach him, and he had the energy to make it happen. Lately, he’s found himself in the same boat, and he’s added a new role to his job description: Teacher.

“That’s probably about where I am now. People taught me. To me, it’s my job to teach the younger people to do these things, because I’ll be 65 next month. That doesn’t mean I’m going to quit, that means I’m gonna be limited to what I can do. But (Seiber’s) knowledge and my knowledge, if we don’t share it with somebody it’s going to be wasted,” said Blankenship.

Around three and a half years ago, Blankenship became a double-amputee. That was when he lost his second leg to complication from diabetes. He lost his first eight years ago, and for the same reason. With prosthetics starting just below the knee, Blankenship said it was a learning curve, but not an overly strenuous one. The hardest part was likely the downtime for recovery — Blankenship isn’t one for sitting still, he said.

He recalled when a doctor told him his second foot was looking pretty bad.

“She said, ‘Well, I can probably take three toes off, but I’ll guarantee you’ll lose the rest of the foot within a year.’ I said, ‘Just take the leg off, and I’ll get back to what I’m doing.’”

He added later: “I don’t do things as fast as I used to, but I don’t think it’s all in my legs, I think I’m getting older, too. But the thing is, the Search and Rescue isn’t about me. It isn’t about Gene. It’s about everybody getting the job done.”

And that job, said Seiber, is a different ball game than when he got his start in 1990.

Modern technology allows for a lot more “rescue” and a lot less “search.”

In the 1990s, there was an average of 55 missions per year, and most of them were hunters who got turned around. Blankenship and Seiber described tracking expeditions that spanned two, three days. Their lead tracker, Blankenship said, can “track you across that rug.”

“In a matter of, say, seven weeks — between deer season and elk season — we’d do 35 missions. And multiple times during the year, we’d actually do two missions at the same time,” said Seiber.

These days, they’re down to about a dozen missions per year, thanks to personal locator beacons hikers carry that eliminate much of the tracking. Usually, calls center around someone with an injury stranded out on a trail. A majority of their rescue missions stem from a hiker not being prepared with proper equipment or not knowing the terrain.

Some get turned around after literally walking in circles. Blankenship explained that particular phenomenon — a common trope for wandering movie characters. When approaching a tree, he said, hikers have a tendency to veer slightly to either the left or the right — depending on their dominant side — without correcting their path. They do this repeatedly until completing a large loop.

A decreasing mission load isn’t to say the job has become simple. Often times, they require extensive communications between entities. Some missions may require a team on all-terrain vehicles. Some are better suited for horses. Sometimes, helicopters.

When SAR receives a call, the team coordinator evaluates what sort of resources will be needed, what they can offer and what they still need. Anything they need, such as a helicopter, for example, would be requested through the state Emergency Management Division.

Teamwork is essential — not just for the Packwood SAR’s 28 members — but among all organizations involved.

It’s also about noting where individual talents lie, said Blankenship, and not taking on too big a task on your own.

“It ain’t that I have to do this. It’s that it has to get done,” he said.

That’s something he’s had to evaluate on his own, after his years of volunteerism crawl into the decades and after losing both legs.

During a time when Blankenship was working with one leg, someone posed to him the idea of retirement.

“People, when they sit on their butts, they retire and they die. As long as people remain active, do what they can and help out, usually people live a long life. And I wasn’t ready to die yet,” he said.