Being part of this rescue team could ‘change your life.’ These volunteers are saving others, and you can help

POCATELLO – When Tamra Bassett woke up, she found herself at the bottom of a ravine, and she couldn’t remember how she got there.

What Bassett did remember was that she had driven her UTV up Gibson Jack at around 5 p.m. that day, Aug. 12. Rather than having a passenger with her, she had put her water bottle and phone on the seat next to her.

Bassett also remembered that before she left for the trail, her husband had gone to work for the evening.

Even if he had been at home, it wasn’t irregular for her to leave and spend time outdoors in the evening, thanks to the longer light hours during the summer.

“Nobody’s going to know where I am,” Bassett realized.

Bassett quickly found that she was too injured to hike back up the ravine when she tried to get back to her crashed UTV.

“This is not the day that I die.”

“I fell down and I hit my head and started bleeding, and I rolled back down the hill,” Bassett said.

She thought that getting back to her vehicle would be the easiest way to be found, so she resorted to army crawling up the ravine.

She made it around 30 to 40 feet. The problem was that she had rolled at least 100 feet down the hill, and her UTV had crashed far enough from the trail that it wouldn’t be easy to spot.

As Bassett watched the sunset, she prayed that someone would realize that she was gone.

Bassett remembers thinking to herself, “You’re tougher than this. You’re going to be fine. You just have to wait.”

And so Bassett waited. As the hours passed, rain drizzled on her, and there were moments when she felt she could have “chosen to give up,” but she reminded herself, “This is not the day that I die.”

Bassett woke up again in the early morning hours of Aug. 13, still in the ravine, but this time, she could hear a “clicking, staticky” sound. She realized that it was a megaphone, and there was a voice.

The Backcountry Rescue Team had found her.

The Backcountry Rescue Team

This team had responded to its first emergency call on June 24, 50 days before rescuing Bassett. Made up of 11 volunteers, each with a strong background in the outdoors and wilderness first aid, the team works alongside the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office and Search and Rescue.

The idea to form a team of people who could specialize in rescuing people from the backcountry started a few years ago, while the pandemic prompted a surge in people exploring the outdoors. Recognizing the need, Pebble Creek Ski Area formed a formal branch of the ski patrol to respond to backcountry accidents nearby.

Some of the members of this team, as well as other community members, started to see a need to have a group that could respond to accidents in the backcountry year round. Two of them were Luke Nelson, who has worked on the Pebble Creek Ski Patrol for 15 years, and Ed Gygli, who has served on the ski patrol for ten years.

The two of them scheduled a meeting with the sheriff’s office and pitched their idea for a team “that could get into the mountains, into technical terrain way out there, where maybe an ATV or motorized vehicle couldn’t get to,” Nelson said.

Upon hearing the idea, Bannock County Sheriff Tony Manu also recognized the need and officially started organizing the Backcountry Rescue Team in fall 2023.

When the Backcountry Rescue Team is needed for an emergency, they put the call out to all of their members, and around half of the team responds. The responding members then work alongside the sheriff’s office as well as any available members of the Search and Rescue team to coordinate a rescue effort.

Not only do all 11 of the members of the team have an extensive background in navigating the backcountry and are equipped to render wilderness first aid, several also have advanced medicine training.

“As far as immediately responding and stabilizing somebody who’s hurt really badly, we’re ready and prepared to do so,” Nelson said.

As volunteers with their own jobs and personal lives, Nelson said that sometimes they have to take time off work to go on a rescue. To him, this speaks to how dedicated the members of the team are to serving their community.

“At times, we’re taking our time off of work,” Nelson said. “Team members might be taking their vacation time to work on serving the community, which is pretty special, to find a group of people that are that committed to serving that they’re willing to do that.”

Although some of the calls the Backcountry Rescue Team have responded to have only taken an hour or two to resolve, there are other situations that have lasted all the way into the next day. Even then, that’s a relatively quick timeframe to find someone, Nelson said.

“Looking for people in the mountains is just like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Nelson said. “If you’re going to cover a large area, you can do a hasty search where you’re searching the most common places, like on trails or roads, and you might be able to cover 40 or 50 miles of trail relatively quickly. But if the person’s not on the trail, and they’re somewhere else, it could take days.”

So far, the team hasn’t found themselves in the position where members who initially responded had to step away from the mission, but Nelson said that’s a reality they could find themselves in at some point.

“We may have to stage our rescuers using part of the team for half a day, 14 hours, 18 hours, and then switch out to other parts of the team,” Nelson said. “So far, we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to execute all of our search and rescue operations in a time frame where the responding team has been able to see it through.”

One of those operations that Nelson and the rest of the responding members were able to see through was the rescue of Tamra Bassett.

To the rescue

The Backcountry Rescue Team began to search for Bassett after her family placed an emergency call at 12:30 a.m. Her family had found her truck and trailer at the Gibson Jack trailhead and searched for her on foot but had found no other sign of her.

The team responded alongside Sheriff’s deputies and Search and Rescue. The responders drove ATVs, 4-wheelers and e-bikes. They even called in the Portneuf Air Rescue helicopter to join the search.

After searching for her through the night, Nelson feared the worst.

“We might not be searching for an alive human anymore,” Nelson thought.

But as the sun was rising, one of the rescuers heard Bassett’s distant voice calling out. She had waited until she was sure they weren’t speaking into the megaphone, and then called out as loud as her injured chest and lungs would allow her.

The rescuers found her down the hill in “deep, thick scrub oak on a near-vertical slope,” Nelson described.

Using a little bit of creativity and a lot of rope, the team loaded her into a transport basket.

“We were able to, with a bit of hard work, get her pulled up out of the conundrum that she was in, back to a trail where then we could easily bring her back down to a waiting ambulance,” Nelson said.

Upon receiving medical treatment, she discovered that she had ribs broken in 27 places, including two that had broken off of her sternum and her spine. Plus, a “rectangle shape had actually come out of the ribs and kind of collapsed in on my lung,” Bassett described.

“You look at someone who spends an entire night out in the mountains, not prepared to camp, just wearing shorts and a T-shirt. It’s cold and it’s raining, and it’s been a long time, and she had serious injuries. Well, she shouldn’t have made it,” Nelson said.

Doctors performed surgery on Bassett, and she spent around a month in the hospital. The doctors put titanium in her ribs to stop them from collapsing. And shortly after she left the hospital, she had to go back due to blood clots forming in her lungs.

Although the injuries she suffered were severe, Bassett sees it as a miracle that she didn’t receive serious injuries to her neck or spine.

“All of these things that could have had happened didn’t happen,” Bassett said.

When she looks back to her time stuck in that ravine, Bassett doesn’t think she could have gone on much longer, especially due to the condition of her lungs.

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“I genuinely believe I would have died. I’m not sure I could have gone on a whole bunch longer, especially the way my lungs were,” Bassett said.

The Backcountry Rescue Team has gotten to the point where they need a larger team.

“We found that our call volume was much higher than we anticipated it to be, and so we are on an always-accepting-applications timeline,” Nelson said.

“I definitely think that had (the team) not been there to rescue me, I would have died on that mountain.”

Although the team doesn’t have a strict list of qualifications new members need, it’s looking for people who are physically fit, with good instincts and enough time to devote towards training out in the mountains. Applicants should highlight skills they have and ways that they know how to move through the mountains, such as by rock climbing, on skis or on a dirtbike or ATV.

“We aren’t going to have one person that does all of those things. There’s very few of us that do. But people who have those different skill sets is super helpful,” Nelson said.

The team actively trains its members, so they’re interested in finding individuals who are dedicated and able to put time towards training.

“If they have a bunch of time and are available to respond to calls day and night, that might be the right skill set if they’re motivated,” Nelson said.

The team is “picky” with who they allow to join, and Nelson said that’s for good reason.

“When we look at people in a rescue scenario, the team members that I have may be also saving my life,” Nelson said.

If someone doesn’t have the time or the skill set to be a member of the team, they can still support the team by donating to help them meet its equipment needs. Nelson said the best way to do this and to apply is to contact the Sheriff’s Office.

Ever since helping form the Backcountry Rescue Team, Nelson has been grateful that he gets the chance to assist in rescuing people like Bassett.

“How beautiful it was (that) she was found alive, and we could play a role in helping get her back. That’ll change your life,” Nelson said.

Now that Bassett is getting back on her feet, she plans to spend time raising money for the Backcountry Rescue Team, and she anticipates that it will be a “lifelong project.”

“I’m so incredibly grateful to the Backcountry Rescue Team. I definitely think that had they not been there to rescue me, I would have died on that mountain,” Bassett said.