Search and rescue (SAR) teams in US national parks respond to lost hikers, injured climbers, stranded boaters, missing children, and emergency medical emergencies. Their work ranges from relatively simple trail searches to high-angle rope rescues, rapid water retrievals, helicopter evacuations and multi-day backcountry operations.
The National Park Service (NPS) has its own search and rescue capability. Many parks employ licensed law enforcement rangers and specialist rescue rangers who are trained in technical rescue, emergency medicine and incident management. Some large or high-risk parks maintain dedicated SAR teams consisting of full-time personnel.
At the same time, NPS often collaborates with volunteer and partner organizations. Depending on the park and the incident, they may coordinate with local sheriff’s offices, county SAR teams (often volunteer-based), mountain rescue teams, state agencies, the Coast Guard, or even military aviation units. In some parks, volunteers are formally integrated into SAR operations under the supervision of the NPS.
Among the parks partnering with outside organizations is the Great Smoky Mountains, America’s busiest national park. That’s where the Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue (BUSAR) team;headed by Andrew Herrington, operates.
When BUSAR members train, they do so through their own non-profit organization. When a rescue mission is launched and they respond, members are temporarily hired as National Park Service emergency workers. Some members don’t get paid and just volunteer their time and talent. No one gets rich from this. it’s not because these guys do it. They find the work incredibly challenging and rewarding.
If you break your leg while hiking in the Smokies, chances are Andrew and his crew are helping the PSAR Rangers carry you out. They’ll do it whether it’s raining, snowing, dark, steep, or completely off-piste. And carrying an injured person in a litter through rough terrain while wearing packs loaded with medical and survival gear is brutally hard work.
To achieve this, these guys need to be fit. Not fit for Instagram-influencer. Useful app.
To create a group of men who are physically fit, BUSAR has developed a fitness test that checks which members will be able to do the hard, frustrating work of rescuing people.
I recently spoke with Andrew about why he created the BUSAR and the fitness test he uses to assess whether potential team members will be ready for action — and for anything.
Meet Andrew and BUSAR
Andrew is a professional hunter and trapper who has worked for the National Park Service in the Smokies for over two decades. Raised outdoors, taught his first survival lesson as a child (still teaches them), and eventually landed in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Law Enforcement Division. There he got his first taste of search and rescue work. Whenever there was a rescue mission, rangers would call in personnel from various park departments. Andrew’s experience as a hog hunter in the park gave him deep knowledge of its vast, complex trail system.
Although, in fact, his first real experience with search and rescue was rescuing himself after a climbing accident as a teenager. This accident left him with a fractured skull, partial temporary paralysis and a metal plate in his head.
Twelve years ago, while working on search and rescue teams in the Smokies, Andrew noticed that not everyone who took on the job was prepared for it. He sat in on meetings where leaders admitted they couldn’t send some rangers to rescue because they weren’t fit enough.
So, about a decade ago, Andrew decided to create an elite, dedicated search and rescue team. He wanted the most qualified and physically fit people available and began recruiting guys who had extensive outdoor, military, surveillance, survival, firefighting, law enforcement and medical experience and possessed superior levels of physical fitness.
The BUSAR Fitness Test
To assess the readiness of potential members of this crackerjack search and rescue team, Andrew developed a rigorous fitness test they would have to pass to join. The test is designed to answer one question: Can this person do the job?
The Park Service requires rangers assigned to “difficult” duties to pass the USFS Work Aptitude Test, but it’s not particularly strenuous or revealing: rangers must walk three miles on level ground while carrying a 45-pound pack in less than 45 minutes. The test is easy to pass and doesn’t tell you much about how someone will perform off-road, under fatigue, while handling uncomfortable loads.
Andrew’s test is different. It’s stripped down, demanding and designed to replicate the effort required on a real life rescue mission.
Here is the BUSAR fitness test:
Thirty minute load transfer test
Applicants must first take the USFS package test described above. They then exchange their 45-pound pack for a 20-pound search and rescue pack. While wearing this pack and holding a 45-pound kettlebell, the candidate must also climb over a picnic table in a continuous circuit for 30 minutes.
Movement is awkward by design. Simulates lifting, lowering and repositioning of weight on uneven terrain. Grip fatigue sets in quickly.
Trap Bar Deadlift
A candidate must lift a trap bar loaded with two hundred and twenty-five pounds for as many repetitions as possible in one minute. The minimum you should go through is fifteen repetitions.
Back injuries are the most common injuries among rescue personnel. Carrying waste and repeatedly handling victims puts stress on the posterior chain. If your back can’t handle that kind of work under fatigue, you’re responsible.
Burpee pull-ups with a pack
This is the hardest part of the test.
Wearing the 20-pound SAR pack, candidates perform a burpee, jump to grab a pull-up bar, and pull themselves up. They have 10 minutes to complete at least 50 repetitions.
It is not a strict pull force. It’s about mobility, coordination and the ability to get up and down off the ground repeatedly. Crawling, climbing, scrambling and retrieving from awkward positions are constant features of real life rescues.
It is also a test of how candidates manage energy and fatigue. A lot of guys make the mistake of trying to go too fast and end up passing gas. Knowing how to regulate yourself is a skill you need when carrying someone out on a litter.
Andrew asked people to suggest he change the test to make it “more scientific”. But he believes that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In the ten years he’s been giving the test, he hasn’t seen anyone who passed it fail a real mission.
Education Together
All BUSAR members are expected to maintain physical fitness so that they are ready when the call ends. Many of them do CrossFit and rucking.
For a while, Andrew’s team met weekly for team training. They would show up at a park with their suitcases and someone would bring kettlebells and sandbags. They would create a workout on the spot: sandbag throws, buddy carries, burpees, pull-ups, kettlebell swings. The workouts weren’t fancy or optimized. They were practical.
But more importantly, according to Andrew, they built cohesion. Shared physical suffering creates trust. When you’ve watched someone grind without complaint, you have a better sense of how they’ll behave when things go awry in the wilderness.
Life eventually got in the way and the weekly workouts died down for a while. Andrew is now looking to bring them back, especially for younger team members.
In addition to maintaining physical fitness, the team meets quarterly to keep their technical skills sharp: land navigation, tracking, first aid, shelter systems and moving waste on land.
During high visiting periods, the team sometimes goes up to the park for pre-deployment. They are trained, stay ready and can respond quickly when called upon. During busy periods, they may be called several times a week.
Be strong to be useful
Most of us aren’t going to be pulling injured hikers out of the Smokies. But I think the average guy can learn from how BUSAR approaches fitness.
These guys are, as the 19th century naturalist Georges Hébert put it, strong enough to be useful.
You never know when you’ll need to move furniture all afternoon, shovel snow for an hour, carry a child who fell asleep, help a friend move, or deal with some minor emergency that turns physical. Training for general strength, core conditioning, and handling awkward loads helps you be ready for those moments.
So yes, keep doing your hypertrophy work and chasing PRs on your deadlift. But be sure to incorporate some BUSAR-style training so you’re ready when called into action.
And if you’re interested in doing volunteer search and rescue work, here are a few reasons why you can get involved.
