05/28/2026
This describes the situation brillantly.
The Slow Fade
As Rangers hold the line, the volunteer depth behind them erodes
Fifteen to twenty years ago, volunteer search and rescue teams across New York State ran multiple operations a year, some lasting days. Today the call-outs have slowed to a trickle. What is driving the shift, and what happens when the volunteers are gone.
In those years, a volunteer search and rescue team in New York could expect to be activated multiple times a season, real searches, multi operational period missions, the kind that test training against actual terrain and actual stakes. Teams were called in early, integrated into the command structure, and expected to carry significant portions of the ground search load alongside DEC Forest Rangers. Being a member of one of these organizations meant something operationally. The call-outs were the point.
That has changed. Across the state, from the Adirondacks to the Catskills to Western New York, teams that once ran five, eight, ten activations a year now report one or two. Some go entire seasons without a call. In my roles as founder and former president of Adirondack Mountain Rescue, as a SAR crew boss, and as a reporter covering search and rescue operations across the state and region, I have followed this shift closely. Team leadership has made the pattern clear through comments on my reporting, consistently and in their own words. The calls are not coming the way they used to. And the people are leaving because of it.
This is the story that is not being told. Not a dramatic collapse, not an abstract resource crisis, but the quiet operational retreat of a volunteer infrastructure that took decades to build and is now eroding, search by search, season by season, in plain sight.
How the System Works
When a person goes missing in the New York backcountry, the DEC Forest Rangers are the responsible government agency. They take command, manage the incident, and bear legal authority over the search. The division is MRA certified, accredited by the Mountain Rescue Association, whose standards require rigorous team level evaluation in technical rock rescue, snow and ice rescue, and wilderness search, conducted by at least three existing MRA teams, with mandatory re accreditation every five years. MRA standards exceed all NFPA mountain, wilderness, and technical SAR benchmarks. Rangers are sworn law enforcement officers, trained incident commanders operating within the Incident Command System, and professionals who live and work in their assigned territories. They know the terrain the way most of us know our neighborhoods.
When a search exceeds Ranger capacity, on extended operations, in remote terrain, when multiple incidents overlap, they call the New York State Federation of Search and Rescue Teams. NYSFEDSAR operates a statewide call-out system through which any official agency can request volunteer resources at any hour. The volunteer teams that answer those calls cover the entire state: Adirondack Mountain Rescue, Lower Adirondack Search and Rescue, and Search and Rescue of the Northern Adirondacks in the north; Catskill Mountain Search and Rescue and Hudson Mohawk SAR in the mid Hudson and Catskill region; Massasauga Search and Rescue Team and Niagara Frontier Search and Rescue in the west. More than two dozen teams in total, all volunteer, all nonprofit, all operating without a dollar of recurring state support.
The coverage gaps these teams fill are not minor. In Western New York, Niagara Frontier Search and Rescue serves as the only dedicated wilderness and rural SAR resource across eight counties. In the Catskills, Rangers have responded to over 310 calls for search, rescue, and recovery since 2020 alone, with volunteer teams activated as backup on a roughly monthly basis. These are thin margins. When a team is understaffed, under experienced from lack of activations, or gone entirely, there is no fallback.
How Technology Changed the Search
To understand why call-outs have declined, you have to understand how profoundly technology has changed what a search looks like before it ever becomes a search.
Fifteen to twenty years ago, a missing person was a problem with no starting point. You had a last known location, a planned route, and a search area that expanded with every passing hour. Resolving that problem required people, a lot of them, on the ground, systematically covering terrain across multiple operational periods.
An operational period is the basic unit of a managed search, typically a twelve hour block during which a search plan is executed, resources are deployed, and results are evaluated before the next period begins. A search running two or three operational periods is a sustained operation requiring significant coordination, logistics, and manpower. Those searches were the backbone of what volunteer SAR teams were built to do. A team might spend three days in the field across multiple operational periods, rotating personnel, managing base camp, covering thousands of acres of wilderness terrain. That was the work.
Today, that search frequently ends before the second period begins, sometimes before it starts. The widespread adoption of satellite communicators has transformed the opening moments of almost every backcountry emergency. Devices like the Garmin inReach transmit precise GPS coordinates the moment a subject activates an SOS, anywhere on earth, independent of cellular infrastructure. Rangers often know exactly where a subject is before they leave the trailhead. The search area that once took days to define is now a coordinate.
Expanded cellular coverage across the Adirondacks, Catskills, and surrounding terrain has added another layer. Even without a dedicated device, a subject's cell phone can frequently be located through carrier ping data. Law enforcement requests the phone's last registered tower contact and, where multiple towers have recorded the device, triangulates a position to a workable search area. The process has become routine, and the results are measurable: searches that once required extended multi period operations now frequently resolve in the first operational period, sometimes in hours. A Ranger reaches a known GPS coordinate. A subject is located near a trail junction via cell ping. A State Police aviation unit completes a single aerial sweep and spots the subject. The search closes.
This is unambiguously good news for the people being found. It is quietly devastating for the volunteer ecosystem that was built around a different kind of search.
There is a lesson in this shift that every hiker, paddler, and backcountry traveler in New York State should understand, and most do not. The compression of search timelines through technology does not mean that help will arrive quickly. It means that when help is needed and location is known, Rangers can move with more precision and less wasted time. It does not close the window during which you are entirely alone.
Backcountry travel demands a fundamental operating assumption: that no services will be available. Not because the system will not try, but because terrain, weather, distance, and response time create an irreducible gap between the moment something goes wrong and the moment anyone reaches you. That gap can be measured in hours. In the High Peaks in January, in the remote western Adirondacks, in the Catskill backcountry in a nor'easter, hours are not abstract. A satellite communicator tells rescuers where you are. It does not keep you warm, treat your injury, or prevent shock. The responsibility for surviving that gap belongs entirely to the person in the field.
The volunteer SAR teams that once staffed the deeper end of that gap, the extended operations, the third and fourth operational periods of a multi day search, are, in many parts of the state, thinner than they were a decade ago. The safety margin they represented for long, resource intensive incidents is narrowing with them. Hikers who assume that pressing an SOS button transfers all responsibility to a rescue system with unlimited depth are operating on an assumption that was never fully true and is even less sustainable as that depth erodes.
The Training Gap Nobody Wants to Name
There are supposed to be standards. Volunteer SAR teams that respond to official call-outs are required to complete DEC Basic Rescue Search Skills certification, and the federation promotes uniformity of search procedures as a core organizational goal. On paper, the framework exists. In the field, the uniformity does not.
I have seen this firsthand, not as an observer, but as a crew boss and ground searcher working alongside teams from across the state. The gaps are real and they are not evenly distributed. Navigation is the most consistent failure point. Land navigation, the ability to move accurately through wilderness terrain using map, compass, and terrain association, independent of GPS or cell signal, is a foundational SAR skill. It is also, increasingly, a skill that members of some teams do not reliably possess. A volunteer who cannot navigate independently in dense cover or low visibility conditions is not a search resource in any meaningful sense. From an incident commander's perspective, they are a liability.
Fitness is the other. SAR operations in the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and the rugged terrain of Western New York are physically demanding in ways that a parking lot training exercise does not replicate. I have been on searches where volunteers from outside teams had to be es**rted out of the field by Rangers because they could not continue under operational conditions. That es**rt did not happen without cost. A Ranger pulled off a search to walk someone out is a Ranger who is not searching. In a time sensitive operation, that matters.
None of this indicts individual volunteers, who are operating in good faith within a system that has no reliable mechanism for enforcing standards across independent organizations. The problem is structural. Teams set their own internal bars. Membership continuity pressure, the need to retain people in an environment where recruitment is already difficult, creates disincentives to enforce fitness or navigation standards rigorously. When a team is already thin, it is hard to tell someone they are not ready.
Incident commanders who know this, the Rangers who have seen it play out in the field, make operational decisions accordingly. Those decisions have contributed to a shift toward operations handled without outside activation when Rangers believe they can manage within their own ranks. Over the same period, an expanded Ranger corps with top tier training has proved again and again that it can manage large, complex, multi day searches in technical terrain without outside help. When additional personnel are brought in, they are usually individuals the Rangers already know and trust. In critical situations, that judgment, to rely on their own force and a small circle of proven partners, is not just understandable, it is hard to argue with. That shift is rational from the standpoint of safety and liability. It is also, over time, self reinforcing: the fewer teams deploy, the less field experience they accumulate, the wider the capability gap grows, and the more rational it becomes to keep searches in house.
What Underactivation Does to a Team
A volunteer SAR team derives its cohesion, its skill retention, and its ability to recruit from actual field operations. Training exercises are necessary. They are not sufficient. The gap between a controlled scenario and a real search, real terrain problems, real communication failures, real physical demands sustained over multiple operational periods, real decision points under pressure, cannot be replicated in a parking lot. That experience is earned in the field, and it has to be earned repeatedly to be retained.
When activations slow, members begin asking a question that is honest and reasonable: what am I doing this for. They are maintaining certifications at personal expense. They are attending monthly meetings. They are fundraising to buy equipment that is not getting used. They are keeping themselves physically ready for operations that are not coming. Over time, some of them stop. Not loudly, there is rarely a resignation letter, rarely a dramatic departure. They drift away. Stop coming to meetings. Let their certifications lapse. Move on.
To be clear, these teams are not sitting idle. Many have redirected their energy into adjacent work, trail stewardship programs, preventive SAR education, public safety classes, community events. That work has genuine value. But it is not searching. And over time, as teams build identities and schedules around the activities they can do rather than the operations they were built for, something gradual happens to organizational culture. The mission drifts. The people who joined to find missing persons find themselves running a trail education program. Some stay. Some do the math and leave.
Team leadership has made this pattern clear through personal contacts and comments on my reporting: it is hard to keep people engaged on their own dime when the work has shifted from operational searches to organizational maintenance and public outreach. The call-outs were the point. When they stop coming, everything else is a substitute.
Some teams have not merely thinned, they have folded. Organizations that took years to build, trained hundreds of members, and ran real operations in complex terrain have dissolved because they could not sustain membership through a prolonged operational drought. When a team folds, its institutional knowledge does not transfer. The terrain familiarity, the protocols, the relationships with Rangers and sheriffs and neighboring organizations, it disappears with the people who held it.
The Weight of the Organizational Structure
There is a structural problem embedded in New York's volunteer SAR ecosystem that predates the decline in call-outs and quietly accelerates it. Every volunteer team in the state operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. That designation carries real advantages, tax exempt status, the ability to accept donations, eligibility for certain grants. It also carries a burden that the designation was never designed for.
A SAR team is not a charity in the conventional sense. It is an operational emergency response organization that needs to own, maintain, insure, and periodically replace technical equipment, navigation devices, communications gear, medical supplies, rope systems, cold weather kit, and in some cases vehicles. The 501(c)(3) framework provides no reliable mechanism for funding any of that. What it provides is the legal structure to ask the public for money, and then ask again.
The result, in many teams, is an organization whose limited volunteer hours are pulled steadily toward fundraising rather than training or searching. Bake sales. Golf tournaments. Online campaigns. Raffle tickets. These are the activities that keep the radios charged and the gear replaced. They are also activities that have little to do with why most people joined a search and rescue team. The tension between fundraising and actually searching is one of the most consistent themes that emerges from team leadership through comments on my reporting, and it is rarely examined as a contributor to attrition.
A volunteer who signed up to find missing people and spends a growing share of their organizational time on everything except deploying on searches is a volunteer who is quietly calculating how much longer this is worth it. When the call-outs slow and the searches become rare, that calculation tips. All the other activity remains. The mission, in any felt sense, does not.
The grant landscape offers little relief. Available funding pools are fiercely competitive, administratively demanding, and often restricted to specific equipment categories. They require organizational capacity that lean volunteer nonprofits frequently cannot provide. A grant that requires a 40 hour application, quarterly reporting, and matching funds is not accessible to a team run entirely by volunteers with day jobs. The teams that most need the resources are often least positioned to get them.
New York Saw This Coming, For Volunteer Firefighters
The erosion of volunteer emergency response capacity in New York State is not a secret. It is a documented, legislated, state acknowledged crisis, in one sector. New York's volunteer firefighters numbered roughly 110,000 in 1998. By 2021 that figure had fallen to 75,000, a 32 percent decline over three decades. More than three quarters of volunteer fire departments across the state now have fewer members than they did 20 years ago. In the same period, calls for service increased 29 percent. The state recognized the trajectory, named it publicly, and responded. In 2024, Governor Hochul launched a 10 million dollar training stipend program specifically for volunteer firefighters, with stipends ranging from 500 to 1,250 dollars per completed training course. The state legislature has debated further incentives, tax credits, and compensation frameworks. The conversation is active, funded, and on the record.
Volunteer SAR teams in New York are experiencing the same forces, declining membership, rising demand, aging rosters, recruitment pipelines that cannot keep pace with attrition, and to my knowledge have received no equivalent statewide acknowledgment, no recurring state funding dedicated to SAR, and very little public conversation. The parallel is not incidental. It is a policy choice, made by omission, that treats two categories of volunteer emergency responders as categorically different when the underlying dynamics are identical.
The state's own position on this could not be clearer, or more contradictory. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has stated publicly: "It is a long held view that search and rescues are an essential lifesaving service the state and DEC provides, and New York State does not bill individuals for the service. DEC believes that if the state billed or fined hikers for rescues, people would be more reluctant to call for help, thus creating more potentially dangerous situations." The state claims the service as its own. The volunteers who staff extended operations, who provide the manpower for searches that run beyond what Rangers can reasonably cover on their own, are performing what the state itself calls an essential lifesaving service, on bake sale budgets, with no state support, and no acknowledgment that the system sustaining them is eroding.
Set against a Ranger force that has repeatedly shown it can manage large, complex, multi day searches without outside help, that silence may not be accidental. It may reflect a quiet conclusion that maintaining deep volunteer capacity simply is not worth the cost, risk, and complexity for a state that believes its professional core can handle most of what the backcountry will throw at it. If that is the calculation, it should be spoken aloud, because the people still trying to hold these volunteer teams together are living with the consequences either way.
Economic pressure, longer working hours, dual income households, and the collapse of the kind of civic infrastructure that once produced volunteers in predictable numbers, these are national forces bearing down on every volunteer emergency organization in the country. Fire protection and backcountry rescue are not identical missions, and the fire service sits more squarely inside local taxpayer funding structures, but the underlying volunteer dynamics are strikingly similar. New York's volunteer fire service got a legislative response. Volunteer SAR got silence.
In 2020, as COVID shut down training and deployments across the state, I told a national publication that the certification gaps created by the pandemic would become a deployability problem within a year or two, as turnover exposed how thin the trained roster had become. That prediction has held. The teams that canceled new member classes in 2020 are still feeling the absence of those cohorts. The institutional knowledge that was not transmitted in those years was not recovered when the backcountry reopened. It was simply lost.
The Gap Nobody Is Measuring
To my knowledge, no agency has conducted a comprehensive, systematic assessment of volunteer SAR capacity across New York State. No one is publicly tracking team membership trends, activation rates, or the pace at which organizational knowledge is being lost in a way that informs policy or operations. The decline is happening in real time, reported by team leaders in conversations that never make it into any official record, because there is no official record to make.
The Rangers who have managed searches within their own resources will, at some point, face a search they cannot handle alone. A major extended operation. A mass event. A winter search in terrain that requires numbers they do not have. On that day they will make the call to NYSFEDSAR. And what answers, or does not, will reflect decisions made across many years by agencies and institutions that never asked what it was costing the volunteers to wait.
In many regions, the calls have slowed to a trickle. The people are leaving. Teams are thinning and, in some cases, disappearing. These facts are connected, and the connection runs in both directions. Fewer calls produce thinner teams, and thinner teams produce fewer calls. It is a loop with no obvious exit, and no one in a position of institutional authority is paying consistent public attention to it.
The decline did not happen overnight. I have watched it build over more than a decade, in the teams I have worked alongside, in the call-out logs, in the conversations with team leadership that find their way into my reporting. The trajectory was already clear before 2020. Then COVID arrived and likely became the final nail for teams that were already failing. Training stopped. Deployments stopped. Recruitment stopped. When the backcountry reopened and hikers returned in record numbers, the Rangers managed the surge. Many volunteer teams never fully recovered. Some dissolved quietly, with no announcement and no record.
There is a version of this story that ends with genuine optimism. Rangers are among the finest backcountry rescue professionals in the country. Technology is finding people faster than was possible a generation ago. The teams that remain are staffed by people of extraordinary commitment. Every person who has walked out of the wilderness alive because someone came for them is a testament to a system that, in its best moments, works.
There is also this: the depth of that system is eroding. The volunteer infrastructure that backstopped extended operations, that provided the manpower for searches that ran days rather than hours, that could be called at midnight and would come, that infrastructure is not what it was. The teams are thinner. The call-outs are fewer. The institutional knowledge is walking out the door with every member who drifts away. And no agency is tracking any of it in public.
Both of these things are true simultaneously. The question is which one will define the next search that asks more of the system than the Rangers can provide on their own.
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John Bulmer is the founder of Adirondack Mountain Rescue and a former vice chairman of the New York State Federation of Search and Rescue Teams. He is a NYS SAR crew boss and the founder and publisher of Adirondack Mountain News.
