Patroller Chats
Join us as we sit down with past and present patrollers, hosts, and friends of the Pacific Northwest Division of the National Ski Patrol to preserve their stories and grow our History Project together. Patroller Chats was started in 2023 for the History Project by Shirley Cummings.
Tune in for fun, informative, inspirational, and occasionally spirited conversations, where we explore traditions deeply rooted in history and full of heart.
Honoring the NSP Creed: Service and Safety since 1938, we’re preserving our legacy and building lasting connections for the future. Join us on Patroller Chats!
Patroller Chats
Avalanche Rescues, Red Jackets and Patrol Evolution. Continuing the "Chat" with Gary Burke & Shirley Cummings!
Join us as we continue our “Chat” with Gary Burke as he shares his impressive legacy in ski patrol and search and rescue operations across the Pacific Northwest, recounting dramatic rescues and the evolution of mountain safety over decades. His stories highlight the dedication required to protect visitors to the slopes and the extraordinary efforts made when emergencies arise. This riveting conversation with both Gary and Shirley takes us back to the early days of avalanche control, search and rescue operations, and the evolution of ski patrol in the Pacific Northwest.
Welcome to Patroller Chats. What began as a way to support the history project, led by our own historian- Shirley Cummings has grown into a fun, informative, and definitely inspiring podcast. We're connecting with patroller's, hosts and more from across the Pacific Northwest. Diving into the stories, traditions, and unique histories of our amazing volunteers, all while having a great time, sharing some laughs, and getting into some spirited, heartfelt conversations. This is Patroller Chats.
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Welcome back to Patroller Chats. As we continue our conversation with Gary Burke and Shirley Cummings, Gary is just about to tell us a little bit more about some of those achievements he's attained over the years. Do you recall your Snoqualmie Pass Avalanche?
Speaker 2:Which one?
Speaker 1:There's probably, unfortunately, there's probably more than one oh there is.
Speaker 2:You've received a Yellow Merit Star. What year was that?
Speaker 1:1980. One, uh, you've received a yellow merit star. What year was that? 1980? That you got the yellow merit star? I don't know for sure what year it occurred. Sometimes those are delayed a couple years we had so many of them.
Speaker 2:Uh, there I don't know if this is a one down on the east side of Snowshed, sandy March, lane Price. We went down there and there were three or four cars that got buried in the avalanche and I think that might have been that one. We had to dig them out. It was so ironic, these people they were in their cars and I'll never forget Sandy March I believe it was Sandy Was taking a probe pole and he he was probing and he hit something and we knew it was a car and all of a sudden Sandy said the probe pole's moving and he let go of it and the probe pole's going up and down. He had poked through the windshield of the car. People down there were so excited they didn't want to let go of it, so they were moving the pole up and down to let them know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah we're down there wow, how many feet, would you think that was about?
Speaker 2:well, the pro poles were were what? Well, depending on which ones, we had 12, 15 feet long to be, you know, probably 10 feet down, uh, 8, 10 feet, something like that. But the highway department came down with a snowblower and started blowing the snow, grinding it up and kicking it out, and then we had to dig from the backside in to get to the car to get them out, and it's just one of those things. We had a lot of avalanches up there that happened. Some of them caught people, some of them didn't. It was just fortunate. We had a lot of issues on Snoqualmie Pass, as Shirley knows.
Speaker 1:Wow, that is because I noticed that in your information there's a lot listed here as far as with your work with search and rescue, besides ski patrolling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got involved with search and rescue quite a bit and I was the delegate to the King County Search and Rescue Association, which is the King County Police.
Speaker 2:At that time King County Sheriff's Department had a rescue organization I think there was 14 groups and SPART was one of them and I was the delegate.
Speaker 2:Sandy March also was a delegate, I think Blaine Price was a delegate to that and I got so involved with it.
Speaker 2:I got elected chairman of my organization, which was a whole other issue, and that ended up putting me in with the King County Council to get money, because we had many rescues within King County that they were out on, which required Red Cross to come out and feed us, oh my.
Speaker 2:So they had a food truck and all sorts of things like that. So we had to get donations by the sheriff's department to provide these, because that food had to be bought by King County police, King County Sheriff, to put into the trucks to beat the various groups that came out, and sometimes you're talking, you know it could be 25 to 125 people at some of these rescues we had. So I got involved in that and then I got involved with the Washington State Search and Rescue Council Because I was chairman of the King County Association, I ended up on the board of the Washington State Search and Rescue Council, Washington State Civil Defense, which was in charge of all search and rescue in the state of Washington under the 38.52 law, which requires that all the sheriff's departments are responsible in their various jurisdictions, and I just kept getting deeper and deeper involved in this thing.
Speaker 3:Why did National I mean for a long time SPART was a ski patrol organization why did National not allow that anymore?
Speaker 2:The first part of the question I'm sorry to say again.
Speaker 3:I mean for a while that ski patrol was a, it was, it was SPART was a part of the Ski Patrol and then National, I think, said you couldn't use any of the the SPART missions or the SPART stuff because it was separate from Ski Patrol it was separate from ski patrol.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that was a. I remember we were involved in an interpretation of liability at that point and I think they were worried about exposure et cetera, etc. The thing that corrected that was our state law, because the Ski Patrol comes under the jurisdiction of Search and Rescue and Sheriff's Department in Kinnitas and King at Snoqualmie Pass. We then became part of helping King County Search and Rescue, spart being part of that, that put us in under the state law of 38.52, which was the law that actually governed all search and rescue in the state of Washington, and then Kittitas County, because that's right next to Snoqualmie Pass, king County. That was a potpourri, because Hayek's in Kittitas County, skiacres is in Kittitas County, snoqualmie and Alpental's in King County, and so running right down the middle of these four areas is the line. So here becomes an issue and another problem.
Speaker 2:Well, we finally decided we had to get together and create what they call the Greater Snoqualmie Pass Search and Rescue, which was a jurisdiction between Kittitas County and King County.
Speaker 2:Both departments had to sign off, giving the authority to Ken White of the US Forest Service, who was a federal employee, and so he became responsible for both sides of the pass, including Kittitas and King on behalf of the sheriffs, and they really appreciated that, because they didn't have the manpower. At two o'clock on Sunday morning, saturday morning or whatever it was, we got somebody buried at Hayek or Alpental. You got to send a deputy. We got no deputy to send up there. What are you going to do? Somebody's got to take over. And that's what kind of led to the start of the Ski Patrol rescue team, which then became the short name was SPART, and that thing kind of grew into its own self and then National finally realized you know, hey, this is a group of people within the ski patrol that are stepping out of the ski patrol to go do this thing called search and rescue, under the jurisdiction of the county, which is under the jurisdiction of the state of Washington law that took care of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am amazed, gary, at your. You just roll these numbers, these law or regulations right off your tongue. I mean I'm impressed you haven't been involved with that for how many years Wow.
Speaker 2:Just a few. I guess I retired in 1990, but I've been somewhat involved with it and, you know, still been doing it off and on. But once it gets in your blood it's kind of like, you know you, you just can't get it out. You wake up in the middle of the night and you think about something and you know we had the biggest rescue in the state of Washington that ever happened was the Philip Hawes missing skier at Alpintol. Tell us about that. Well, philip Hawes went skiing at Alpintol and he decided he wanted to go out of area off into the wilderness, and he got up in an area that was really very steep and he went off a cliff and disappeared. And when it happened the Ski Patrol and Alcantara obviously immediately went out of area to find it, couldn't realize that they were in big trouble. So then they started calling the other areas. That activated SPART because SPART was, you know, kind of within the area. So all those guys went first and that happened, I believe, on a Saturday afternoon, and he disappeared. We never found him.
Speaker 2:So that thing went on, I don't remember how long, but we had to activate the Explorer search and rescue. We activated Mountain Rescue search and rescue. We had to activate the military from Fort Lewis to send a CH-46 helicopter up, and George Sainsbury from MRC and I. We flew in that helicopter, scanning the ridges and the forest up there on a Sunday looking for any signs, tracks, debris, anything that would tell us Couldn't find him. The search was called off. We didn't find him for some time later. When his body finally got exposed, it was avalanche. Well, after he went off the cliff, it created an avalanche over the top of him. Oh, he was buried period.
Speaker 3:And he had a broken femur.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then on top of that he had some injuries and it was at that time the largest King County search and rescue effort in terms of manpower, cost of manpower and the groups that were pulled together to search. It was something else.
Speaker 1:About what year was that Ballpark?
Speaker 2:I got to look this up.
Speaker 1:You said, this happened where Alpintol, alpintol, okay.
Speaker 2:Alpintol. This was.
Speaker 1:Paws was the gentleman's name. Yeah, alpenteau this was. Hawes was the gentleman's name. Yeah, like the dog paw, philip Hawes.
Speaker 4:Hawes like H-A-A-S.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, very good, Murphy.
Speaker 2:I don't remember what year that was, that's okay, but uh, yeah, that was on everybody's lips for a long time. Because you know, you just don't disappear like that. You can't find him and we had a multitude of people, ski Patrol, looked for him for hours and days. It went on for a long time and skiers were sent up there when the weather was nice to go try to see if they could find any sign of him.
Speaker 4:They didn't do it for a long time and you say he just fell off a cliff landed, broke his femur.
Speaker 2:Other stuff avalanche.
Speaker 4:Where was that? Was that out in your international or Nash?
Speaker 3:The other side, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:The other side, wasn't it? Yeah, I think when you're in the area and the slope was on the left, it was clear up on beyond International.
Speaker 4:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Over on the other side in an area where he shouldn't have been. He should not have been up there. I've skied up in that area, but not that far out.
Speaker 4:Not that far out of whack, right? Yeah, well, that's where you see those avalanches coming. I mean anything, what's the magic number like a 30 grade on that slope is, uh, where you have a really high percentage chance of getting a natural avalanche to break free.
Speaker 2:That's well, yeah, I mean ken white used to have to shoot that up there. Uh, you know, every single morning that the public was skiing, he shot the whole mountain and uh, some of that stuff in the back country was even steeper than even want to think about going up there. I mean, I'm surprised that the guy went up there when he did.
Speaker 4:That makes me want to ask a question Did they ever use a recoilless rifle to shoot avalanches up there, or did they always just, you know, make up the bombs and chuck them off the top? Well, I think it was a what is it?
Speaker 2:Alpintal side? I think it was a 55. What is it? A 55mm howitzer they used, which Alpintal had mounted on a concrete elevated system there. He shot the hill up there all the time. I can tell you a funny story. Ken unfortunately has passed on so I can tell a funny story about shooting. I'll never forget one weekend because we used to carry a Forest Service radio and he and I would talk all the time and I get this radio call and he says could you report to the summit at the Forest Service? He said I've got to tell you about a slight problem. So I got in my car and I went up there. I said what happened. He says well, I went to shoot the main gun at Alpintol which shoots up to the ridge. And if you're familiar with the ridge of Alpintol, on the other side of the ridge is I-90.
Speaker 2:Right the highway Yep On the other side of the ridge is I-90. Right the highway, yep. Well, unbeknownst to Kim, the snow and the pack had slightly shifted the concrete facility where the 55 was on the top. And he didn't know it, because this thing gets set before the winter to make absolutely sure that it's sighted in that when you shoot it it goes there. And he shot that morning and it normally hits the ridge up there and if there's something that's been built up it'll low. And he said it didn't hit the ridge, it went over the top of the ridge, uh-oh, and he was panicked.
Speaker 2:And so what happened was this thing went over the ridge and it came down and it landed right next to I-90. And there was a fella coming up I-90 with his kids and this shell lands and explodes next to I-90. The guy was so shook up he came up to the Forest Service building and he came in. He wanted to report that there was an explosion down on the side up there and he described this thing. And Ken said the guy was physically shaking because he was an ex-Vietnam Marine that had Marine over there and he says this was just like they used to have when they were blowing stuff up at us.
Speaker 2:Ken said it came so close to hitting this car that could have been driving up the road and this guy totally says well, we have a little problem. This shell went over the top of the mountain that came down there and you know is everything okay, he and his kids. But the ironic part of it was that the doggone thing had shifted the sighting of this 55 howitzer. And I couldn't believe it. I mean this, you hear something like that, it's like really. And that tower, that thing had to be like 10 feet up in the air, built with these blocks and had all this stuff around it, and it still shifted just enough to throw that siding off to go up and over the top of that mountain.
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness that's a pause for the cause.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so do they still use a howitzer to do avalanche mitigation up there?
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, say again.
Speaker 4:Do they still use a howitzer to do avalanche mitigation?
Speaker 2:I can't answer that. I don't know.
Speaker 4:Wow.
Speaker 2:No, surely Are they still shooting.
Speaker 3:They shoot. I don't know what they're used. You think that would be?
Speaker 4:the National Guard that would do that.
Speaker 2:Those guns are left there and then in the summertime they take them down. But they had to shoot Alpental because there were areas you couldn't get to by ski, to throw the dynamite, the package of dynamites, in there.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 1:My goodness, holy Toledo.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Incoming of dynamites in there right. My goodness holy toledo.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, incoming. Oh my goodness, that could be a real something else. When we used to talk about that for many years in the beginning, it wasn't, it wasn't funny. But no as years wore off. We'd laugh about it and say you know, remember that car coming up the highway when all of a sudden you hear the shh 55 going off next to I-90 down there.
Speaker 3:Was it true that national or certain divisions wanted to not have avalanche as one of the programs because they didn't think it applied to the majority of patrols in the US?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think that was one of the philosophical problems that came up, because that would then indicate that maybe your area might not be so safe. But these areas that come in under the US Forest Service jurisdiction, they have no choice. If the Forest Service says you're going to have a snow ranger and you're going to control Ken White every single day, that any area opened on Snoqualmie Pass and ran a chairlift, he would go safety check that chairlift every single day and in some cases he would even ride it to the top and then ski down. And he did that for all the years that he was up there and sometimes I would even go up and meet him so we would talk about how the weekend was going to go and stuff like that. He was very safety conscious and when they brought him in as a snow ranger out of oregon, um, it was really a.
Speaker 4:We had a really excellent snow rangers just get assigned randomly to different areas, or is that something—and I'm assuming they're federal, not state?
Speaker 2:right, oh yeah, this is federal.
Speaker 4:US Forest Service snow rangers, and they're, I thought, and correct me if I'm wrong I thought the parks department was the one who ran snow rangers and all that happiness out in the no no, no, if it was federal, the snow ranger had jurisdiction yeah, but the federal parks department there are some areas that are in state forest and in those particular areas they wouldn't come under the state forest service guide okay, but
Speaker 4:if it's on federal land where that forest service has jurisdiction, then the snow ranger is a federal officer okay, and so here's the other question I have is how does it get determined where you know you've got a bureau of Management, you've got Forest Service and then you've got parks, right, are any ski areas adjoining or you know, on like multiple jurisdiction land, or does the federal government have like bureau of land management, or most of them are forest service land, so you know you get your ski area and it goes on forest service land. You are under the jurisdiction of the federal government, right in that area.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, the fence take precedence and I do think we do have some areas that are on federal land and maybe even private land or state land, but federal takes jurisdiction and so they may not have a snow ranger there, but wherever the nearest forester's district is, that would come under their district.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 2:And then they would, if wanted to, they would assign a snow ranger.
Speaker 4:Yeah, because at Crystal, one of our boundaries on the backside is with the park service, and so we get a park service person to come in on a regular basis and talk to us about the interrelationship between our area and the parks department. And we get a lecture on the white bark pine tree, which I was laughing one time going what the heck is this dead tree? Well, apparently it's not a dead tree, it's a tree that is endangered and they are really trying to protect this thing. And so she gave a came and gave us a big rundown on what we can do, how we let or how the parks department actually lets people ski around the backside of the King so that they can get over and do some skiing over there. It was, yeah, interesting.
Speaker 4:And they said this is a fine balance where really we could shut you off. But we're not going to. You know, if you have people that actually mind their P's and Q's is, they're on that state land, not chucking garbage, not doing all this other stuff, which just boggles my mind in the first place that you have to have that conversation. But you know that relationship winds up being really important and you can shut down some skiers if you don't get, uh, don't get buying from those people.
Speaker 1:So a little historical uh reference for you the winter recreation under the united states forest service, underneath the us department of agriculture, in the 1920s and 30s there were 60 ski areas that had been developed and half of those were on national forest land, and which started for the Pacific Northwest with the earliest one of Cooper Spurt, 1927, along with Mount Hood Ski Patrol Not patrol ski area.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 1:So I put in the chat a little link for you. That's actually from the uh pacific north. Uh, the pacific northwest ski area is a representation of uh nsaa. But um, I I mean, I've heard of some of this, I didn't know of all of it, but it is interesting how much more, like they said that between 45 and 59, 1959, another hundred ski areas have been opened across the country, 30 of those on national forests. But, and that's, and then you get into. You mentioned crystal mountain and then in the sixties and seventies another hundred plus ski areas opened in the US. So it kept growing. And then, underneath Pacific Northwest Crystal was 1964. So there's your quiz of the day. All right, now you know, let's see. How is it? Paul Harvey? Now you know the rest of the story.
Speaker 2:Bill Sabry would enjoy that one.
Speaker 1:I love listening to Paul Harvey. So what did you guys do to promote safety when you were patrolling?
Speaker 2:Say again safe ski.
Speaker 1:To promote safety, general safety? Did you do any things to try to help with the general public or with patrollers? Did you ever have events? How did you guys try to emphasize safety?
Speaker 2:Well, I remember the Edmonds School District was probably the biggest one we had at HIAC and I used to talk to them. I can't remember the guy and the gal who were the directors of it, but they would show up with multiple buses.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Early days. I mean multiple buses, I mean 10, 15 buses, yellow buses loaded with kids, and I used to talk to them on the phone because once in a while they would call and ask what the protocol was for people getting hurt. And that would lead into a discussion about, well, how do we keep people safe? And when they come, have they got the proper equipment and the boots and the poles, and you know, and come up there and try not to get hurt, but if you get hurt we're there to help you and this is what we're going to do. So we used to do that with the ski schools. Other than that, I don't think that we did any events that I recall or we would do any advertising or stuff like that. We just didn't have the wherewithal. Once in a while, mike Wine and I would come up with an article to put in the Seattle Times, because he was the night editor and he would write an article and sign my name and make it look good for the ski patrol and we'd talk. You know about something?
Speaker 4:Wait a minute. You used to write articles for the Seattle Times about ski patrol.
Speaker 2:Mike Wine, who was a patroller at. Snoqualmie, who was also my PR advisor.
Speaker 4:Wait a minute. The ski patrol had a PR advisor.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 4:The ski patrol had a PR advisor.
Speaker 2:We sure did you still do? Yeah, we still do. Each patrol has one and the region had one and Mike Wine, like Shirley, was with me. From the patrol level to the region level, to the division level. They were all kept together. Mike was at the Seattle Times as the night editor and when we would write articles for skiing and anything to do with safety, he would write the article and sign my name as the division director or region director Made me look good.
Speaker 4:And that got published in the paper.
Speaker 2:Yeah, show up in the Seattle Times.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, think about it, it's just been in the last 20 years that we really had social media, where you've had this sort of more instant. And you know it's so hard now to find any microfilm or older editions. And you try to go to the Internet and unless you've copied it or it's been documented on an archive website, it's so hard to find history and I mean, I miss being able to with the papers of being able. Well, granted, it was hard, you had to go through the microfilm and going and through it, but at least it's there right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but you got to appreciate that in the 80s, even the 90s, we had no way of disseminating information, so that you might want to do a special on no safety straps on your skis or something. But how are you going to reach, you know, a poster. You just couldn't reach a lot of people, and so I think National would give us, or we'd buy from them, little stickers that we could use for fundraising, and they always had some kind of a. You know, keep your bottom in the chair and not in the air. I mean, there were different ones through the years, I like that one.
Speaker 1:I like that. What are some of those sayings?
Speaker 3:Keep your bottom in the chair. Oh God, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Do you remember some of the other ones? I like it.
Speaker 3:I don't think they'll use it again. I have a feeling.
Speaker 2:Or we'd have to go to the ski shops where people would leave stuff and post bulletins and talk about ski safety. Other than that, you know, there was really nothing that could be done.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Wow, wow I think we had a word of mouth a lot of times, like one of the guys who was an investor in Hayek. His wife was sitting on the porch of the ski shop one day and somebody fell and they didn't have a safety strap on their ski and that ski traveled all the way down the mountain and it ran into her leg and she broke her leg. Oh so you know that was a big production by the time, but everybody wanting to know what happened. That was one of the cases where we, I remember saying do you have safety straps? Yes, I mean a lot of people did not, those Arlberg things that wrapped around and around and around Speaking of equipment.
Speaker 2:I think we got to a point too where some of the areas if somebody got on a chairlift, if they didn't have a safety strap on, they couldn't go up.
Speaker 3:Because it became a health issue and that was a big deal.
Speaker 2:Runaway skis then started to become very serious because, boy, you could get hurt bad. Definitely Is that before ski breaks, Because now you have the ski breaks which then started to become very serious, because boy you could get hurt.
Speaker 1:Bad yeah, definitely.
Speaker 4:Definitely Is that before ski breaks, because now you have the ski breaks, which don't always work that well, but they do help.
Speaker 3:Yeah, before.
Speaker 4:Okay, because I know snowboards. Last year or this past season at Crystal, we started keeping track of snowboards that would just roll down the mountain. Yeah, I mean, and they were all over the place You'd have to go. You know, search for this snowboard, search for that snowboard snowboard hit somebody on the way down and it's. You know, I thought they were supposed to be strapped and they used to be, but apparently that's not really enforced like it used to be.
Speaker 1:Apparently that's not really enforced like it used to be. That's hard to say, gary, what kind of jacket did you start off wearing, color-wise, you mean for Ski?
Speaker 2:Patrol. Yes, color-wise. Well, color-wise, the official color for the Ski Patrol is called Rainier Red, which was developed by White Stag Harold Hirsch down there. And when I came along and got involved in the Ski Patrol and then I joined the company that my dad had started, then I approached the Ski Patrol with Ski Patrol patrol jackets and that's what I started wearing. I had my own custom made jacket made for me that was on a down because I used to be cold all the time. So I had. I had a jacket that I think is hanging in my daughter's closet now.
Speaker 3:But uh, don't you remember your whole basement of of a sportcaster. If you needed a new jacket, you went to the basement of sportcaster, where gary always happened to have seconds. Oh, do you need a jacket? Well, we have some over here. Well, what's wrong with it if it's a second? Well, there's nothing wrong with it, we just call them seconds. And so the price to ski patrol was like 15, $20. Whoa.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, wait a minute. When did the rusty Parker parka?
Speaker 3:That is the rest parka.
Speaker 2:That's a rainier red. The rainier red. Okay, it got coined as the rust parka, but the official color of rust is called Rainier Red, oh.
Speaker 4:So if I go into a Pantone color chart, they're going to have Rainier Red.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, rainier Red is not open to the public. The dying people, dupont. When Harold Hirsch, the president of White Stag, developed a color, he went to the DuPont people and the nylon people nylon that makes all our stuff and they developed this color, which was rust. The official color is rainier red and so White Stag was going to do it and they passed it off to us and we picked up and started making all the jackets for them. So everybody had to wear Rainier Red or Rust Color. Jacket is what they called it, navy blue pants and navy blue pants.
Speaker 3:Yeah, everybody looked alike and the only thing you could do for your individuality was to wear a different hat. And boy, we had some interesting hats before him like what, oh, gary had a hat with the big ears.
Speaker 2:Remember the big ear muffs that was my Russian Cossack hat.
Speaker 3:It was warm.
Speaker 4:Comrade.
Speaker 1:Burke? Oh my goodness, that is hysterical. And did you what did you? Where did you keep your equipment like first aid supplies? In the jacket, or did you have a fanny pack backpack?
Speaker 2:Everybody had a fanny pack of some kind. Yeah, yes.
Speaker 3:And they were all fanny packs. Nobody wore a vest or a backpack or a side pack.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, several different kinds of fanny packs then showed up on the market and then the fanny packs had to get a little bit bigger because more stuff was being put in them and you couldn't get it all in to zip it around, to get it on. But yeah, fanny packs were the thing then.
Speaker 1:I know when I joined it was amazing to me all the different variations of fanny packs and stuff like that and the creativity of stashing that in the pack.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But you know you mentioned several things about your rescues, whether it's search and rescue and in general, whether it's search and rescue and in general sort of more of a I guess a movement trying to have more awareness is being told not told but trying to be explained is about wellness and mental health and how this can be very hard on people and didn't know if you had any thoughts in general on that that you've seen or observed, or do you feel that we lost a lot of people? Or back then was there a closer-knit group that people sort of naturally looked at each other, or was it more of an attitude of just deal with it and if you can't, there's the door?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the latter. I think in the beginning search and rescue kind of became a started off and became something small and then started to grow.
Speaker 2:I think today, when you stop and you look about various things that you see on the internet, one of them I just saw here in the last couple of days is this choking thing. If you'll recall, we had the Heimlich method you grab them and you pop them out. Today there's at least two or three and I say that because I've got them where you put it over your mask and you pull it out and it pops it out. You don't grab them around the chest anymore, and so various things have been developed to help people continue to live. Stop bleeding is another one. You can bleed to death, but nowadays you can open up a pack and throw something on the pack. If you know how to put on a pressure point, a digital point, a tourniquet or a pressure something there, a digital point, a tourniquet or a pressure something there to stop the bleeding, or you take a pack of this stuff, break it open and you pour it on there, then you're going to have a stop bleed.
Speaker 2:I think this thing has evolved into much more awareness and people. I think you'll find in your car you'll have something to break the glass out in case you're in water so you can get out of your car. How many people I've seen so many people with first aid kits now in your car, extinguishers and all this stuff. What we started with back in the 50s and 60s and 70s and where we are today is night and day, and at home people have got first aid kits and they've learned how to do stuff, and defibrillators. You go down to a restaurant they're hanging on a wall now and the defibrillators talk to you, whereas before they didn't talk to you.
Speaker 2:So it's become quite quite more significant in the world of awareness as to how to keep our friends and our family and neighbors alive from whatever they might be doing.
Speaker 1:Oh, definitely, definitely. Do you feel that you might have? I mean as far as the culture?
Speaker 2:I mean as far as the culture, sort of a cultural part of following up with people after they've had a rough call or being that this is not something that's done on an everyday basis for them, or how they would deal with it and process it. Well, when I was patrol director I did the accidents. I used to call up people that went through our first aid room that we did reports on. I would call them up and ask for follow-up to see how they were doing. That's nice and I would say 50% of the time it produced a donation for us and they would come in on another visit, excuse me. And they would say we're coming up to ski and, by the way, we appreciate what the patrol did for us with little Johnny Brokey's leg and we'd like to make a $100 donation, so they'd donate money to us. I think that helps.
Speaker 1:What about the?
Speaker 2:patrollers? Do they follow up with stuff like that?
Speaker 1:Did you guys? We can't anymore, because I hear them no no, what about patrollers as far as how they felt being on a rescue, just like you mentioned how hard it was with finding the body of that younger girl in the avalanche, sort of the mental health.
Speaker 2:Well, the people especially within the spark team. They are really super charged to do stuff and when we were out on the missions and then the many missions that we did, I mean these guys are special guys and they would go out even explore, search and rescue which is the younger part of the search and rescue like the Boy Scouts, explorer Scouts, and they would sometimes call up SPART and say we're going on an airplane mission. We'd like to have some of you guys come along and help us because they knew that if something happened we could take care of them and we were the first aid side, plus we were the adult side. That happened many times.
Speaker 2:Grant Smith, who was the director of the ESAR program out of Tacoma we became good friends because of being able to bring our forces together and work together and we started doing things together. If we knew we were going out on a rescue, we'd call him and say we need some of your ISAR kids to come and help us because there's not enough of us type thing. So I think the original question was you know, have we learned something and are the people today question was you know, have we learned something and are the people today? I think people today are more accustomed to being aware of certain injuries and what to do in case something happens to your families and to your workers, and to your neighbors and to people that are around you. I really do believe that they've been forced to do that.
Speaker 1:Right, I really appreciate the insight on that from you, gary. Thank you.
Speaker 4:Well, gary, do you have anything you want to close with on our interview, or any stories or anything else that you can share with us? Any other people that you think we should interview?
Speaker 2:Well, I think you ought to get a hold of Norman Bottenberg from Red Cross and get the historic there, because I think there's a lot of story to that. I think Bill Savory from Crystal Mountain is also a good person to talk to. It's too bad that Ken White isn't alive from the Forest Service, who was a snow ranger on St Solomon Pass, who also was heavily involved with some of the patrols elsewhere when he came from out of Oregon. He would have been nice to talk to to get some ideas.
Speaker 1:Who was the first name that you said? What was it?
Speaker 2:Norm Bottenberg.
Speaker 1:Norm Okay.
Speaker 3:And Norm just moved. That's why he wasn't at the region banquet, but usually he shows up to things.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's one of the things at these region banquets.
Speaker 2:That people like Shirley Cummings and Blaine Price and Sandy March and others that have been so helpful during the years that I spent within the Ski Patrol. Excuse me, Shirley, and I I'll never forget yes, I have a story. I'll never forget. The first time I met Shirley, and I I'll never forget.
Speaker 3:Yes, I have a story.
Speaker 2:I never forget the first time I met Shirley and Gary and that was when I took the patrol Hayek patrol over and I got invited to come up to Shirley's house. And I went to Gary and Shirley's house and the first thing I noticed was that Gary was a great brewer All sorts of whatever it was he was brewing in the back and I was always so impressed about that. I thought that he makes a. He's got to be a good brewmaster. But anyway, we developed quite a relationship through the years and Shirley did a wonderful job and still continues to do it and she came with me from the patrol to the region, to the division and her and Gary Gary was right along with her, right behind her, and whenever we needed help, shirley and I says we got to do this and this. Oh, get Gary, he'll help us out.
Speaker 1:And wait a minute. Were you Gary one or were you Gary 2?
Speaker 2:Well, when she said probably, her Gary is number 1 and I'm number 2, and we were in ski patrol business, I was number 1 and he was number 2. That's when I figured out how she carried us on. Ironically, she was married to a Gary and she ended up with a Gary too.
Speaker 3:But you know, I think you guys can see listening to him talk If there was an area where the ski patrol needed to make some kind of a liaison or be friendly with the organization. He becomes friends with these people and then all of a sudden he's not only in our organization but you know, he's leading their organization and that happened in to the Red Cross, with the SPART, with King County Search and Rescue. He was always getting a new organization that he was in charge of and it's just amazing, the people at the Ski Area Operators Association I mean almost anything that I can think of that had to do with skiing. He made friends with those people so that any conflict that might be in the future was really ironed out or at least it had an avenue to talk. You did an amazing job, gary.
Speaker 4:Hey, one last question that I completely forgot to ask. Are you in the museum that's up at? You know the pass? The skiers museum.
Speaker 3:No, and that's why there are no ski patrol in the museum. And I talked with Holly, who is Deb Armstrong's mother, about putting in a corner and she said it had to be professionally done and that would cost about $2,500. And we were talking about doing that and then Holly died and I've talked to Dave Moffitt since, but he's not as keen. And yet ski instructors, everybody else is represented except the ski patrol and all they have is a Lyle St Louis plaque and that's it.
Speaker 1:So they should be. What year was that that you talked to her about, where she estimated about 2500 ballpark?
Speaker 3:maybe five years now. I think she five years. I think she died the the same year we were talking and I didn't even know she was sick.
Speaker 1:Well, the other thing is, maybe approach is to say hey, why don't you start to compare to what's at government camp on Mount Hood? Because there is dedicated area for ski patrol.
Speaker 3:And it would be nice if somebody at Mount Hood would write their patrol history and somebody at at crystal and I understand crystals a little too. Nobody wants to put it in writing, but you guys, I understand, or what used to be. You have a wonderful display, maybe even pictures. It could be to come here and yet the very people that I could bug to keep doing it are already so busy that you feel guilty.
Speaker 4:Well, we have some inroads now where we've got Bill Savory, where we can talk to him and then kind of go through, you know his history. And then who was it? Steve Rolfe.
Speaker 3:He wound up being a patrol director, so hey, gary, before you go, I wanted to ask you if you, if you, remember when they were trying to do away with with the senior program.
Speaker 2:No no.
Speaker 3:Because I remember that time and how politically charged that was and I remember Jack Ernest up there, you know, waving his fist that they were going to you were going to be able to go just from a patroller to your national appointment automatically after 15 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that went on for some time, but I can't tell you when that was.
Speaker 3:We hear that the senior program and the East Coast is not particularly valued to the same degree that it is out here.
Speaker 2:See, that's the sort of thing that when we got into the national board meetings would break out and it would be a jurisdictional type thing and big arguments. You know, should national drop, should they not drop it, keep it. That's a typical example.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:What do you think of the board being elected now? Elected nationally, not from their own division?
Speaker 2:I think it's okay. I think it's now that they're electing, they're electing. I like the fact when they put out the resumes and you have to, we all have to vote on those people because you can get a chance to look up and see what they're doing, if they put out their resume properly, and even call them up and say, hey, why are you doing this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so who's next on?
Speaker 1:your Well, we've got the the list, but we've got to backtrack now and get the people that we've had.
Speaker 4:We've got to get these interviews fine-tuned, whatever, so we can get those uploaded and then we're going to try and start getting our back to once a week where we can sit down and spend a couple of hours interviewing somebody. So that's going to be helpful, because then we can sit down and spend a couple of hours interviewing somebody. So that's going to be helpful because then we can just pick a day and then you know, interview, get it scheduled. So one a week is what our goal is.
Speaker 2:This is a great project. I really do. I think it's going to. What's the end result going to be? What are you going to? How are you going to transcribe all this stuff? What are you going to do?
Speaker 1:Well, that's a good point.
Speaker 4:Yeah, what we're trying to do is get it put up on the web so people can actually listen to it, because I don't know if you've listened to podcasts, but it's kind of in that same vein.
Speaker 4:And some of these things I really love are I'll just drive around and listen to some people talking about history and it's like, oh my goodness, I had no idea and you get little ideas of you know who to talk to, who you know, like the whole Crystal Mountain thing. I learned so much about my current mountain just from these conversations in the last two days. So I'm going to reach out, see if I can get ahold of some of these people and, you know, maybe get some phone numbers. And you know, see if we can get a hold of some of these people and maybe get some phone numbers and see if we can get some of these people on. But what we're trying to do is at least get a lot of this information recorded, because people are getting older and their memories aren't what they used to be and so having this ability of just for lack of a better term memorializing these conversations, it just pays huge dividends.
Speaker 4:So and I got to say, Gary, I really appreciate you spending this time you guys are doing a great job.
Speaker 2:Oh, appreciate it Great job.
Speaker 1:I'll let Murphy wrap this up, but stay on afterwards because I want to show you on our website and then you can see sort of where we're going.
Speaker 4:We're working on our budget and the budget winds up coming up here in August, but we should be able to have most of these recordings up in August or September of this year.
Speaker 3:Have you interviewed Andy?
Speaker 4:Bechtel?
Speaker 3:Nope, not yet We've got a bunch of people before we get to Probably need to do a good one to put on.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we've got a bunch of people before we actually get to Andy. We just did Shelly, you know there's like Blaine Liz, peter Schwartz, just kind of stepped away from the ski patrol. I want to talk to him before he, you know, before a lot of that institutional knowledge you know for things goes away because he's been connected for so long. There's a bunch of people in Oregon that you know we need to talk to. The list is long.
Speaker 1:Very long, but please keep as you think of them. Let us know how to contact them. Like, one person I wish we could have talked to was Dave Nelson, but unfortunately we got started too late because Dave had an amazing history and also related of different events and stuff like that. But as far as that's concerned, but really super appreciate, gary, and I'll let Murph wrap this up, but hang on afterwards.
Speaker 4:But yeah, just wrapping up, I want to say thanks very much, gary. It was a wonderful opportunity to get a lot of history here from the Pacific Northwest and the Ski Patrol. Shirley, you're always lovely in your memory and things that you can bring up. Oh hey, do you remember that? And I didn't know that you were the right-hand man of Gary for so many years, or right-hand woman, I should probably more politically correct, say but yeah, a lot of the jigsaw pieces are coming together now that we're doing this project. So thank you too for spending the time with us and really sharing a lot of history of the Ski Patrol.
