County officials moonlight in search and rescue roles

Key Takeaways

There’s the life-changing service Matt Jensen offers to Delta County, Mich. as a commissioner every month in meetings as he helps guide his county’s governance. Then there’s the life-saving service that gets a little more frequent this time of year.

Jensen volunteers his time as an ice rescue team member, willing to wade into the frigid waters of Lake Michigan to bring residents and visitors alike back to solid ground when they’ve fallen through the ice.

“If your head doesn’t go underwater, we can get you easy enough and you have a really strong probability of survival,” he said. “Most people don’t pass away from hypothermia, they end up drowning.”

In that case, Jensen added, it wouldn’t be a terrible thing if someone’s beard were to freeze to the ice, helping keep their head above water.

The ice rescue task force is composed of volunteers, all of whom are trained ice rescue technicians. 

And they need them all. Last year, the county received three calls for service from three locations within five minutes of each other.

He’s helping hunting parties, ice fishing expeditions, snowmobile riders and everyday explorers who misjudge the strength of the ice on Little Bay de Noc and Big Bay de Noc.

“People think the ice is thicker than it is,” Jensen said. “At the beginning of the fall or later in the spring, people can get a little overconfident about it, or maybe they just aren’t familiar with the area and when it’s safe to go out.

“Most of our rescues come a little after dark or just before dawn.”

Drones help with initial reconnaissance and airboats, the kind that are more associated with swamp tours, reach rescue sites faster, but then there’s the matter of getting into the mostly frozen bay. Jensen and his colleagues are never exactly jumping into the cold water. 

Wearing a dry suit with insulated liners, they gently slide into the water and gain enough buoyancy that two adults can grab on and float along with the rescuer.

That airboat that rushed them to the scene can cut an hour from the trip to the hospital, depending on where the rescue happens along the county’s craggy shoreline.

“The turnout we have is a testament to our community in Delta County,” Jensen said. “The bays bring people out, but what really stands out is that we have residents who want to make sure it’s safe for our neighbors or our visitors to go out on the ice.”

That’s a thought process that goes through Jerry Taylor’s mind. In Garfield County, Utah, Taylor has received his share of late-night phone calls. He’s a county commissioner and chair of NACo’s Public Lands Policy Steering Committee, and he’s been doing search and rescue operations in his vast county for nearly 20 years. 

Although every rescue is different, the circumstances seem to follow a trend for volunteers.

“I came home late one night after spending all day fabricating doors,” he said. “I was getting into bed at 2 a.m. and I got a call that a young woman had been missing in the mountains. I was tired, and wanted to go to sleep, but then I thought ‘What if that was my daughter, or my granddaughter, or me and someone else decided not to show up?’”

Taylor and the rest of his team found the woman a few hours later, before dawn broke. 

“You can’t leave stones unturned, and you can’t give up on people,” he said. “You go into each operation knowing it’s either going to be good or bad, and as time goes on, the chances of it being bad get a little higher. You just have to push through and keep going.”

Jensen and his colleagues have a narrowly defined area in which they perform their rescues, but most of Garfield County’s 5,000 mountainous square miles is federally owned. 

While rangers from the three national parks in the county help out within their boundaries, when it comes to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, including the massive Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, the county is often on its own finding hikers because of a significant staffing disparity between national parks and national monuments. There just isn’t adequate BLM staffing, Taylor said.

Although Taylor has enjoyed working with fellow search and rescue volunteers, he worries about refreshing their ranks with younger residents.

“I’m in my 60s and I’m not sure how much longer I should be doing this,” he said. “It can be hard carrying people out of some of these places.”

“It’s a blessing to have all of this federal land that draws people here and they help support our businesses; we could use better staffing from the BLM to help out, because it can be hard to find people who are able to leave work at a moment’s notice to search for people.”