Litter Haul Pecos Wilderness – Mission 105

4:30 p.m. Sunday August 16th finds four members of the Brigade Search and Rescue team heading to the Pecos Wilderness to help extract a patient. Arriving at Incident Base we are teamed up with members of Santa Fe SAR and instructed to head up the Windsor trail and meet up with the teams already on site with the patient. Our patient, although it wasn’t clear, had been living in the wilderness for tens of days and hadn’t eaten in seven. Obviously he wasn’t capable of walking out on his own. However, his condition wasn’t immediately life threatening so a helicopter hoist by the New Mexico Air National Guard was out of the question. Hence the litter haul. While we were awaiting further instructions from the Strike Team Leader the team with the patient suggested Classic Air’s helicopter could possibly land in a nearby clearing and extract our patient avoiding a litter haul. With dark rapidly approaching, Classic Air circled the area and decided they would not have enough lift to take off from the small clearing with the added weight of the patient. We were back to the litter as Classic Air headed home. The Brigade’s initial task was to be the haul team. The first few hundred yards of the extraction involved a low to medium high technical litter raise. The haul team’s job is to pull on the rope that raises the litter via a mechanical advantage system.

After the low angle raise to the Windsor trail the Brigade team’s job changed to helping on the litter and carrying rope gear. Hauling a patient laden litter two and half miles down the rough and rocky Windsor trail is an exhausting effort but the evening was wonderfully cool and with many hands we made good time to Incident Base where we transferred the subject to an ambulance for a ride to the hospital. On the Trail video is from Matt Holmes and photos are from Steven Howard. Be sure to scroll all the way to the end…

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