Eastern High Angle Rescue Training Course Held

Over the course of a full week in late April, 32 eager students and 16 dedicated instructors assembled daily at the North Carolina State Forest Service’s Crossnore Mountain Training Center in the rugged mountains of western North Carolina for the fourteenth annual NPS Eastern high-angle rescue training course (EHART).  

The training venues for the week included Holloway Mountain Crags, Grandfather Mountain State Park, Table Rock Mountain, the Chimneys overlooking the Linville Gorge Wilderness, and Blue Ridge Parkway’s Stackrock Trail rock formations on the side of Grandfather Mountain.

This five-day course, geared toward mountain rescue, takes students from learning basic rescue knots and technical gear on Monday through a safely conducted cliff rescue scenario on Friday.

Hosted by Blue Ridge Parkway and coordinated locally by ranger Eddy Cartaya, this year’s training was conducted under the incident command system. The command team began planning the details of the course via conference calls six months in advance. IC Alan Williams and ops chief Bill Cardwell from Shenandoah NP formulated the agenda. Rangers Rob Turan and Kevin Moses worked on pre course finance issues and student selection.  Obed National River ranger Matt Hudson and retired rangers Ron Matthews and Rick Brown rounded out the planning component of the 2009 EHART. Matthews, Brown and Turan were the originators of this course way back in 1994. 

Completing the NPS instructor cadre were Shenandoah ranger Joe Sargeant, Shenandoah Mountain guides Andy Nichols, Jeremy Tooley and Chad Heddleston, and Shenandoah Mountain Rescue Group volunteers Michael Damkot and Andrew Bickers.  Special guest instructors from the US Navy included helicopter riggers Will Araiza and Eric Culberson.  These men brought cutting edge equipment, techniques, and a unique perspective to the mountain rescue class.

As logistics chief, Cartaya arranged for beds, meals and classroom space at the Crossnore Mountain Training Center as well as the needed permits and permissions from the US Forest Service for the use of the Table Rock and Chimneys area.  He also obtained the Linville Rescue Squad building for rainy day training. For the highlight of the course, Cartaya arranged for the exclusive use of Grandfather Mountain State Park after closing hours. Students and instructors alike were treated to a once in a lifetime opportunity to conduct a night time rappelling exercise off of the famous “Mile High Swinging Bridge” located at 5,280-foot elevation atop windswept Grandfather Mountain.   

This year, over 45 exceptional candidates applied for the course and an original class limit set at 25 students swelled to over 30 in an effort to meet the needs of the students and the National Park Service.  Students were divided into six squads of five to six students, supervised by two instructors per squad. Just as squads function in wildland fire, this mix proved very successful in the safe and effective management of students in a high angle vertical environment. 

Students attending the course ranged in experience from old sage to pure novice.  Included were rangers from various NPS areas around the country, Park Police SWAT team members from New York City and Washington DC, FBI agents, and New Jersey state park rangers from Delaware Water Gap’s interagency technical rescue team. Also included were local volunteers from Linville Rescue Squad and Grandfather Mountain state rangers who work closely with the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Some of the students were recent graduates of the seasonal ranger academies, en route to their first NPS seasonal law enforcement jobs.  

Special demonstrations provided by Matthews and Tom Wood of Pigeon Mountain Industries  showed the advantages of artificial high directionals such as PMI’s  Terradapter tripod and an aluminum A-frame. Eddy Cartaya demonstrated how trees could be used to establish high directionals from the forest canopy when available. 

This location of the 2010 course has yet to be determined. Those interested in attending next year’s course should contact Kevin Moses, Rob Turan, Bill Cardwell or Alan Williams for details.