In this episode host, Dave Barak, speaks with the volunteer and President of the Board of Denali Rescue Volunteers, Steve Mock. They discuss how Steve got involved in search and rescue in Denali, what it’s like spending weeks on the side of a mountain, how others can volunteer with the park service, and more!

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TRANSCRIPT:

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[intro music] Dave: Welcome to my Park story presented by the National Park Service. People form connections with their favorite national parks and programs, and this parkcast is a place to come together and share those stories. I'm your host, Dave Barrack. Today's guest is Steve Mock, a search and rescue volunteer at Denali National Park and the president of the Board of Denali Rescue Volunteers.

[intro music fades out]

Hello. On today's installment of My Park Story, our guest is volunteer and president of the Board of Denali Rescue Volunteers, Steve Mock. Hey, Steve, how are you?

Steve: I'm doing fine, Dave. Thanks for having me on your show.

Dave: It is a pleasure to have you. Your story is so unique and it's something I think a lot of people are gonna be truly interested in. Tell us, Steve, what's your park story?

Steve: So I saw a National Park for the first time about 40 years ago as a young adult. I think I'd been to a couple of parks before that, but in 1981 we essentially just drove through the Tetons and Yellowstone, and I saw the Grand Tetons for the first time in my life and just knew right away I had to become a climber. So I did learn to climb. I first climbed Grand Teton in 1985 with my brother.

I went on to climb extensively in the Tetons over the next few years. Climbed in Rainier, after that sometime in Yosemite, Fisher National Park, Zion National Park. And then, about 15 years ago, I got involved with the Khumbu Climbing Center program in Nepal, that trained Sherpas how to work on Mount Everest. Some of our instructors were National Park Service climbing Rangers, and I got to know them and spent time with them and got invited onto a Denali patrol in 2014. I got invited back in 2016 and again in 2018 and by invited I mean I begged them to let me go.

So I've been working with them since 2014 and continue as a volunteer mostly at base camp at this point, and then got involved with Denali rescue volunteers as well.

Dave: That is very cool and very unique. And I want to take a moment to let the listeners know that we have volunteers that do just about everything in National Parks. People staff the front desk and help people with their visits to national parks, people staff campgrounds and help to keep the campground safe and clean. There are all sorts of things for volunteers to do. But the reason we're here with you, Mr. Steve Mock, is because your experience is so unique. You've been talking about climbing and that's because your volunteer position is as a search and rescue volunteer at Denali National Park.

Steve: That's correct. It's a fairly unique position during the climbing season, May and June, starting late April and into early July, but essentially May and June, the South District Ranger station out of Talkeetna, Alaska will put Rangers on the mountain, climbing the mountain just the way the climbers do and they'll be on the mountain. Each Ranger will have about an approximately four week, three and a half to four week patrol on the mountain, and it's one Ranger with three or four, sometimes five volunteers. Volunteers they select themselves that have the appropriate skills to help with the Park Service mission, stewardship, education, safety as well as search and rescue, and the personality to get along in a small tent, tight quarter, stressful situations for for weeks at a time.

Dave: Remarkable because I don't want to do much of anything the same for three and a half to four weeks. I don't even want to take vacation that long. And yet, you are a person who thrives and goes on these details to spend all this time, not just doing one activity, but you're doing something that is stressful, that does have temperature extremes, that does have this, this almost claustrophobic feel to it because you're working with the same people, sleeping in the same tents, eating together. What is that like and what are the bonds that you form with the other volunteers and Rangers?

Steve: It's a pretty intense, uh, situation. There's downtime and so, you know, there's time we're playing cards or reading books or taking a nap, but there there's plenty of intense time as well, especially when a rescue is involved. But you develop a very close bond with the with people like that, you may not spend time with them away from the patrol again, you know, just in in your personal life, you might, but you might not, but you always have that sort of special bond that I think is shared from the intensity of the experiences. It does take the right personality to manage that and to do it in a way that other people like to be around them.

Dave: That's great, and I will be the first person to say I can't do what you do. I am an inside Ranger. I call myself an inside cat. I do a lot of administrative work and a lot of education and interpretation, but I definitely don't think I've got the constitution to do what you've done. And since you have this great experience and you've got this great knowledge, let's talk about safety in these environments. These are, by definition, extreme environments. These are places that are potentially quite dangerous. Can you share some ways to be safe when you are embarking on a climb like Denali?

Steve: Number one I think is to really pay attention when you meet with the Ranger for an hour, hour and a half prior to the trip. You get a lot of reading material. You can look online for a lot of information, some of which is very good information. Some of the information on the Internet is suspect information, and we can get fooled.

Dave: (sarcastically) What?! People on the Internet are giving us bad information, things that might not be true?

Steve: Yes, sorry to break that news to you, but during the Ranger briefing that lasts an hour or so, the Rangers go through a lot of details with a lot of good advice, and the advice can be fairly simple. Like, uh, ascend slowly enough that you have time to acclimatize. Be aware of the weather, so that you don't get caught out away from your tent, away from camp in high winds and cold temperatures, blizzard conditions. So, there are there are multiple rescues every year. Most of them are probably avoidable by following that sort of advice, but I think people get impatient. They think it's a little bit more of a sprint rather than a marathon to climb Denali. That's been a little bit of a troubling trend the last few years, that people try to climb too quickly and get themselves into trouble in a variety of ways.

Dave: And you see people that are sometimes not making the right decisions for their safety and the safety of others. But I know that you've got stories of people that make the right decisions. You were describing to me a couple that had wanted to make the ascent and ultimately changed their minds. Can you tell us about that? Because it seems like somebody was really trying hard to make the right decision for their safety.

Steve: They did make the right decision. They successfully reached the high camp at 17,000 feet and took a fair amount of time, probably 10 or 12 days to get to that point, giving themselves plenty of time to acclimatize and prepare for their summit push. They left the high camp at 17,000 feet and headed for the 20,000 foot summit, 20,320 feet. They got to about 19,700 feet, 500 feet from the summit, probably an hour, hour and a half away from the summit, and one of the partners did not feel well and they concluded that the best decision was to turn around. This person was not going to improve by going up, was not going to improve by staying out longer. They turned around and returned, even though they were within almost spitting distance over the summit. They came back the following year and almost exactly the same thing happened, and yet they still turned around, made a wise choice.

A number of years ago I helped fly a patient off from 17,000 feet who pushed on to the summit in bad conditions. And this person had extensive frostbite on fingers and toes and was fortunate that the helicopter was able to fly them off and get them to medical attention very, very quickly. That was somebody who probably could have avoided that frostbite had they not suffered from what we often call summit fever. You just get so close you, you think, you know it's not going to happen to me. I'll get this done.

Dave: Yeah, I can understand that mentality when you've been pushing for a goal so hard, so hard. But it is heartening to hear that there are people that are cognizant of their surroundings, know their limits, know what cannot be accomplished this time around. And I think it's really commendable that, you know, we're able to cite people doing the right thing because I think a lot of the times, we're having the opposite conversation.

Steve: It's really a challenge, a conundrum for climbers all the time. Climbers by their very nature are ambitious and goal oriented, and they they want to get to the top. But at the same time, many of us hope to return home. Many of us hope to continue doing this for years. And so, there are times that you need to turn around. Each person has to make that decision themselves and sometimes it works out well and other times it does not work out so well.

Dave: Yeah, so Steve, as I've described, I mean we have volunteers across the National Park system, tens of thousands of people every year that are putting in hours that you cannot believe, to help us make the parks what they are and there are all sorts of r