Youth in Linn County are helping with vital search and rescue missions

The warmth and sunshine of summer makes it an especially ideal time in Oregon to recreate outdoors and experience the state’s bounty of hiking trails, rivers, mountain peaks and other scenic attractions. But that spike in outdoor recreation can also lead to more calls for potentially life-saving search and rescue missions by law enforcement in remote locations. Linn County is one of the many counties in the state that have well-established search and rescue programs that rely heavily on unpaid volunteers, including youth as young as 14 years old.

The Linn County Sheriff’s Office has been operating a youth search and rescue program for more than 30 years. The bootcamp-style training academy is open to youth ages 14 to 18 years old who are taught first aid, shelter and fire building, navigation using compasses and maps and learning how to search for and gather evidence of possible crimes in wilderness areas. The majority of the personnel responding to search and rescue missions in Linn County are youth volunteers, who age out of the program when they turn 21.

Ric Lentz, emergency manager and search and rescue coordinator for the Linn County Sheriff’s Office, and Drew Funk, a 19-year-old volunteer who has been with the county’s youth SAR program for four years, join us to share the critical role youth play in SAR missions and describe how that role has evolved in recent years.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. If you get lost in the middle of Middle Santiam Wilderness in Linn County or need rescuing while climbing Mount Jefferson, there is a real chance that young volunteers are going to be on the team that comes to save you. Linn County has a well-established search and rescue program that relies heavily on unpaid volunteers, including people as young as 14 years old.

Ric Lentz is the emergency manager and search and rescue coordinator for the Linn County Sheriff’s Office. Drew Funk is 19 years old, and now a volunteer, who’s been with the county’s youth search and rescue [SAR] program for four years. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Ric Lentz: Yeah, thank you for having us.

Miller: Ric, can you give us a sense for the kinds of calls that you get in Linn County?

Lentz: This is a good question because we’ve seen a shift in the types of calls. You go back five or 10 years and it was mainly a lot of lost hiker searches. Search and rescue, it’s in the name ...

Miller: Someone says, “I was expecting my husband back 10 hours ago and I haven’t heard from him?”

Lentz: Yep. Absolutely. With the increases in technology, and probably a little bit to do with social media, people are trying things that they’re seeing online. And they’re getting hurt. And we know where they are now because of different satellite tech and things. So we’ve really seen the shift from searching to rescue – a lot of traumatic injuries and things like that. It’s forced us, as a search and rescue team, to change a little bit in how we go about things.

Miller: So it was search and rescue, and now it’s much more get to and rescue.

Lentz: Correct. There’s a lot more of a medical component, a technical component – technical meaning rope rescue. Yeah, it’s changing right now.

Miller: So less mystery, but a different set of challenges?

Lentz: Correct.

Miller: What role do youth play in search and rescue operations in Linn County?

Lentz: Our youth team is the backbone of our search and rescue team, and they have been for over 30 years. They are probably the most available when we have a call out. They make up most of the bodies that are gonna go out there and help. And they can fill a lot of different roles. I don’t want to speak too much for Drew over here, but Drew’s 19 years old and he’s also an EMT. He’ll help with the medical role as a youth volunteer as much as he’ll help with hauling gear in or searching for people. They’re really kind of a jack-of-all-trades.

Miller: Is that unusual in Oregon? I gotta say, we’ve talked to search and rescue volunteers and members before, but never to a 14-, 15-, 19-year-old. And I guess I didn’t realize that any county relied so heavily on teenagers?

Lentz: I wouldn’t say it’s normal across all 50 states that you see youth programs. But there are several teams that have youth programs. Washington County here I believe has one, Multnomah County, Lane County. Marin County in California has a really good youth program. So it’s out there in the search and rescue world, but I think you’re right, most people think it’s more of an adult volunteer thing. But it doesn’t have to be.

Miller: Drew, I mentioned you’re 19 but you’ve been doing this for four years. So why did you want to sign up for it when you turned 15?

Drew Funk: So it started as a spur of the moment thing. My friend called me and was super enthusiastic about this thing he heard about. And I was kind of skeptical at first. He always tried to pull me into shenanigans. So I talked with my dad.

Miller: [Laughs] Shenanigans seems like what leads you to need to be sought out and rescued. This is more intense than shenanigans to me.

Funk: So I talked with my dad who’s a deputy with the Linn County Sheriff’s Office and he called some of his friends who had some involvement. And the more I heard about it, the more it kind of called to me. So I went to the first recruitment meeting. They played this video of all these teenagers getting yelled at and for some reason I just was like, I want to do that.

Miller: That is what got you? Not seeing heroic teens rescuing people?

Funk: They had this 10-year-old news broadcast video about their academy. And I saw it and for some reason just couldn’t stop smiling. I was like I want to be at that academy and I wanna do that.

Miller: I’ve heard this described as a kind of boot camp?

Funk: Very much so.

Miller: What was it like when you first got there?

Funk: It’s really scary because you’re with this group of kids that you don’t know in an area that you don’t know, with a lot of people yelling at you. It’s very stressful. The first few days, it almost feels like you can’t do anything right. You’re dropping all your gear, you’re forgetting things. And as it progresses you just kind of fall into line with your group. You go through all these hard things together and you go from strangers to a family in 10 days. And it’s really kind of awesome to see.

Miller: Were there times when you thought you couldn’t do it?

Funk: There were moments where I definitely wanted to stop moving and fall out of line. But there was always just a little voice in the back of my head that told me that I couldn’t, that I could take a few more steps or make it to the top of that hill, or at least to the tree 5 feet away. [There was] always something just keeping me going. But there were a lot of times where I, working off of two hours of sleep, tired, and that’s just a reality in search and rescue. Those are real situations I find myself in constantly.

Miller: Ric, what are some of the physical skills that you have to teach people like Drew?

Lentz: A lot of what I’ll say with our youth academy and in the search and rescue starts with a positive mental attitude. Especially the first two days, it’s just a lot of physical challenges, and making sure that they understand that this is gonna be hard and no different than if we were going up Mount Jefferson to rescue someone. It’s gonna be hard to go up there.

So with that, we followed the Oregon State Sheriff’s Association search and rescue curriculum in our academy. We follow all the skill sets in there: how to package a patient, how to treat for hypothermia, how to navigate in the woods using a compass or a GPS, some basic knots and rescue skill sets, different equipment that we go through. A lot of times we’ll work with detectives helping search for evidence. So they learn, “hey what’s my role if I’m on a crime scene, how do I mark evidence, who do I talk to,” things like that. So there’s a variety of skills that they get taught.

Miller: Drew, after you passed that, you went through those 10 days, you were admitted to the ranks and were an official volunteer of the team, do you remember the first call you went out on?

Funk: I remember it very vividly. It was not only my first call, it was my first monthly meeting, so I showed up and they were teaching us how to pack our packs. I had left my pack at home and I brought a notebook to take notes. All of a sudden, our phones go off and it’s a mountain called Mount Tidbits. A lady was stuck on top of it and needed help down. So I run out to my truck where my dad’s waiting for me and [say,] “We need to go home and get my pack, and we need to be back here in 20 minutes.”

So we sped to Lebanon. I grabbed all my gear and just shoved it all in my pack, and we sped back. I made it in the nick of time to this hike. By the time we got there, it was dark and it was, I think, four miles to the summit. So we just started walking. It was cold, dark, and honestly I just didn’t really know what was going on. The one moment that I remember is I went to drink out of my water spigot thing and it wasn’t working. So I kinda had a mini panic attack. I went to one of my seniors and they just plugged it in. It just wasn’t plugged in all the way. And looking back on it, it was one of the most simple missions I’ve been on. But in the moment, it felt like this grandiose thing.

Miller: Have you been on traumatic search and rescues?

Funk: I’ve seen quite a few, what you’d call traumatic incidents, in my few years. The biggest one would probably be about three years ago. There was a plane crash on the South Center Peak in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness. Our team was the second to make contact, besides the Coast Guard. So the Coast Guard landed, assessed it and figured out that they wouldn’t be able to really handle that situation. So we hiked in and ended up camping there for two days to protect the scene while detectives are working on getting people up there. It’s about a nine-mile hike.

Miller: And am I right that that’s more of a recovery as opposed to rescue?

Funk: Yeah, it ended up being a recovery mission more than anything.

Miller: Ric, do young volunteers get specific training for how to process experiences like that?

Lentz: Yeah, so the adults in the program and the deputies that we work with try to limit their interactions as best we can in those situations. We also work with the Oregon first responder chaplains at Willamette Valley. And they say “chaplains” but if you’re not religious, it doesn’t have to be. They can do critical incident stress management and debriefs, and they’re a resource that’s open to every employee at the sheriff’s office, and that extends to our volunteers. A couple times a year they’ll come to our meeting and talk about how to process that stuff, how to use them as a resource. We’re really big on making sure that they get that and they know that it is a resource for them.

Miller: Drew, how do you think doing this work has changed you?

Funk: I would say that from before SAR to now it’s almost reinvented me. Beforehand, I really didn’t do a whole lot in terms of extracurricular activities outside of school. It took me from that, to being somebody who’s super enthusiastic about being outdoors and hiking. And it’s extended into my professional life, wanting to become a paramedic and help people in any way I can. And it’s made me focus more on physical fitness in my life. That’s become a super big thing, going from not really working out to having to maintain good physical shape in order to do the missions and stuff that we do.

Miller: Ric, the skills that young volunteers like Drew get, how much do you think they are transferable to other careers?

Lentz: Oh, they’re very transferable. I would say, like Drew, we have several people who go into the fire service or emergency medical service. We’ve had people go on to become nurses. We have someone who used to be on our team, she’s a flight nurse now. We have several that have gone into the military. We have several that have gone into law enforcement. [In] search and rescue, you touch a lot of different first responder fields in a lot of ways, like the rescue side, you’re touching the medical component, the rope stuff that you might see with the fire department. On the search side, you’re working alongside detectives for missing person cases or evidence. So really, you get a little taste of everything and you can carry that into what your passion is.

Miller: Drew, do you always have your go-bag close to you at this point?

Funk: Yeah, it’s always in my room or in my car when I’m not at my house and that has my uniform in it. I can switch into it as quick as I can and there’s nowhere I go without it.

Miller: Are you ready right now?

Funk: Just because I drove here with him, I’m not. But I would go in without my pack if we had something right now.

Lentz: I have an extra one in the truck.

Miller: There you are. Hopefully you won’t need that today, but Drew and Ric, thanks very much.

Lentz: Thank you.

Funk: Thank you, of course.

Miller: Drew Funk is a youth SAR volunteer with the Linn County Sheriff’s Office. Ric Lentz is the emergency manager and SAR coordinator with that office.

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