Rising number of hoist rescues in Colorado has experts thinking

CBS News

4 days ago

The call last weekend was another serious one. There was a rockfall and a climber caught up in it, who had tumbled down part of the face of 14,041-foot Little Bear Peak southeast of the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado.
"It was Sunday morning, 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning, I'm playing with the kids, and the phone goes off," said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Daniel Bentley of the Colorado Army National Guard. Bentley is with Detachment 1 of Charlie Company 1-168th, part of the General Support Aviation Battalion. He loves the missions. He's a buttoned-up pilot who flies missions to pluck people from some of Colorado's highest peaks.
None of the missions are easy, but he loves it. It's part of why he's with the Guard, not the Army.
"We do a lot of training in the Army, in the military, but here this is a real mission that we perform quite often," Bentley said.
En route, he's doing math problems.
"We're doing fuel burn calculations. I'm looking for temperature, the pressure altitudes that we can assume are at the site, so I can start doing my power calculations," he said. Power in the Blackhawk and Lakota helicopters is precious.
"You know they're 12, 13, 14,000 feet. We are at the edge of our power margins," he explains. Pilots will fly over a scene repeatedly before the rescue. All of the calculations have to add up. Winds in the high mountains can help or hurt.
"If they're on the leeward side of a ridgeline and I have winds and I have power coming over the top, it could require more power than I have available to hover, so winds absolutely play a factor in whether I perform the hoist or not," Bentley said.
On Little Bear Peak, the helicopter was able to get two rescue techs down to the injured man. Most of the helicopters are staffed by the Colorado Army National Guard. Rescue techs are the only civilians on the missions. They're Colorado Search and Rescue volunteers like Drew Hildner.
"It is an exciting thing to do, and no one would say it isn't fun. But it also comes with its risks and difficulties," he said. "The relationship building between the different agencies, specifically between CSAR, the sheriff, the local teams, and then the rescue techs and the National Guard. And those relationships are very important."
Among them all, there's discussion about the rising number of requests for hoist rescue missions.
"I think that goes just hand in hand with the increasing number of calls for search and rescue in the mountains and backcountry," Hildner said. Sending a helicopter is a big decision with input from the local sheriffs, search and rescue teams, Colorado Army National Guard, and ultimately, the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center has to approve it. That takes time.
There's a litmus test. Risk to life, limb, or vision of the person in need of rescue. Or extreme risk to ground-based rescuers.
The rising number of requests may simply be about greater awareness of the resources available, Hildner says.
Some people are also asking for helicopters.
"We've certainly had people that were trying to call a helicopter because they were tired or didn't have life-threatening injuries or were frustrated with how quick the response (of ground rescuers) was," Hildner said. "I think that just comes with the lack of knowledge of how rescue works, because it takes hours for us to get to you."
"So between the time that someone gets injured and a helicopter is overhead and starting to perform the rescue is anywhere from three-and-a-half to six hours," Hildner explained.
People should be prepared to wait that long, he added.
"We're not a quick reaction force. Right, so it's not like medevac; go to war, we launch within fifteen minutes, we're already staged, ready to go," Bentley, the pilot, said. "We're all driving from our homes."
There's a realization that more missions mean more risk. Neither Hildner nor Bentley is concerned that they're overwhelmed. They believe the heroic rescues are being handled safely, and difficult decisions about not flying are still being made.
When Bentley and other Army National Guard crew members get called in, they don't immediately lift off: "We've got to get in and pre-flight the aircraft and make sure everything's working, get all of our gear, and then we launch."
They'll pick up the rescue techs. Sometimes they'll let some people off the aircraft if they need to reduce weight. Sometimes they burn off fuel. Everyone working on the rescue knows about the calculations Bentley is going through.
"If the rescue techs hear me say 'I can only give you 10, 15 minutes, they'll do it within 10, 15 minutes, and we don't have any issues there," he said.
On Little Bear Peak, they were able to lower two rescue techs. The techs put the injured man in what's called a "stable flight bag." The hoist operator, at one point, had about 270 feet of cable out, Bentley said. He was overhead, but in recent years, helicopters have hovered less, a change in tactics under the current Colorado Army National Guard leadership. It's harder to maintain a hover than keep moving.
"Instead of kind of coming over and holding a hover for minutes at a time where you don't have as good a flight profile, so higher risk from a flight standpoint, and also kind of all that rotor wash potentially causing rockfall events or increased danger for people on the ground," Bentley said of the reasons.
The techs clipped the basket in, and a tech and the victim lifted off. Bentley pulled away as the hoist operator lifted.
They met a medical helicopter below and delivered the patient, who was flown to a hospital.
No further information on the man's condition was available Friday.