- Sometimes they’re given a mountain to climb but the trained volunteer rescuers will go the extra mile. Ben Bentley meets Huw Birrell, deputy team leader for North East Wales Search & Rescue, which covers Shropshire.
“Silly climbers” should be reassured that, sitting in a plush, warm council office and miles from the nearest mountain, Huw Birrell is wearing his pager.
Clipped to his belt, this tiny black gadget could, to a mountaineer out of his depth, be the difference between life and death.
Because as deputy team leader for North East Wales Search & Rescue, which covers Shropshire, Huw is the man on call should a person be reported lost and in potential danger out in the remote wilds of our rugged countryside.
But it’s not just climbers the mountain rescue crew brings down safely from the hillsides. Huw and his team were the first on the scene in 1994 when a light aircraft came down on The Wrekin in the dead of night.
“It was dark, bad weather and we just had to go out and search for it on foot,” says Huw.
“It was a fatal plane crash. We found the pilot and handed him over to the RAF.”
In recent weeks the team was called out to look for an elderly man who had been reported missing.
“They found him near Montford Bridge. We went down there and working with the police we pinpointed where we thought he had gone. He was found, believed dead.”
Based at their headquarters at Loggerheads near Mold, the team consists of 40 volunteers, all highly trained in recuse response and on standby with Land Rovers, a Hummer, and with access to RAF and Air Ambulance helicopters and sniffer dogs.
They have the ear of the police and other emergency services with whom they share intelligence. This allows the team to rapidly build up a profile of a person missing to help them pinpoint him or her.
“It’s pure detective work,” says Huw.
“If for example you have someone who you know has Alzheimer’s, it might be that they go missing and gravitate to where they lived as a child. You use that information to build up a pattern.
“We have found people like that. It’s a classic mystery.”
The team increasingly responds to reports of missing people who might be suicidal and a danger to themselves.
“We have seen a rise in people taking overdoses in rural areas, taking to the mountains to do themselves in,” he says.
“They might have gone to Llanberis Pass as a kid, it’s been a favourite place. We might find them there.”
Of course the horrors of what the team encounter during a rescue can be distressing and have a lasting effect on members. Some are still being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder after being deployed in the search mission following the Lockerbie bombing.
And in 1988 the team was involved in the police hunt surrounding the murder of Ellesmere schoolgirl Anna Humphries.
Huw says: “It was a large-scale criminal inquiry where large amounts of evidence was provided by mountain rescue teams.
“Everyone was so saddened by the outcome of that,” he adds.
The team is always on call, always watching out for people in danger.
“We went down to Newtown recently to a lady who was missing, who was found,” he says.
“On the way back we came across a road traffic accident and gave first aid until the ambulance and police arrived.”
Saving lives is the most important thing. But sometimes, just sometimes, there are people out there who could be doing more to save themselves.
But Huw says: “We are not judgmental. We don’t call people ’silly climbers’. Our place is just to rescue them.”
Yet the dangers they are confronted with are sometimes not what the team had bargained for and it would appear that mountain rescue is prone to similarly bizarre human actions as any other emergency service these days.
Huw explains: “We have even had members threatened on a job - farmers who want to know what you are doing on their land.
“Some people have used mobile phones, expected to be carried off the mountain because they are late for a dinner party.”
He adds: “There’s a lot to contend with. But is there anything better than being out on a freezing, wet night, far from home and hungry, and then you find the little kids you are looking for, all huddled together in a tent?”
Despite the dangers, Huw loves his job. As a boy he was in the Scouts and it was here that he learned everything there is to know about moutaineering and survival.
He is not a chap to sit around twiddling his thumbs. Certainly, watching Home and Away does not appeal.
“Sitting in front of the TV does my head in,” he says.
Remember though - this man, like the 39 others in the team, is a volunteer with a normal day job. At home he has a family waiting for him, and each time he is called out on a rescue mission they don’t know whether he will come back in one piece.
For sure, his spare-time role is an added extra and people like Huw do what they do for entirely selfless reasons.
“We don’t have to go out,” he says. “We are a charity so there is no obligation to go out. But we do.
“It’s just what we do and we are the people who do it. There’s no other agency other than mountain rescue trained to search for people the way we are.”
With great distances to cover, time is of the essence where human life is at risk. This year mountain rescue celebrates its 75 anniversary, but back in 1933 when it was established there were no time-saving mobile phones, no satnav systems, no helicopters.
Common sense, a dog-eared map, an old gate and a donkey was the best you could hope for.
“Someone fell off a mountain and if there was another person with you they would trek to the nearest village and the local doctor or police officer would come out and carry him off on an old gate to hospital to have his leg set.”
Needless to say that in 2008 you have more chance of surviving being lost the wilds of Shropshire and Wales than back in 1933.
Today’s crews might have modern equipment at their disposal but good old-fashioned intuition is still a tool that Huw regularly reaches for.
He says: “Things definitely come in threes and I don’t know a member of the emergency services that doesn’t believe in a full moon.”
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