Sunday 22nd February 2009 06:30hrs – Exercise
Team on Kinder March Exercise
Beep, beep, beep…what the heck is that. It was my mobile phone blaring its text message tune. What time is it? 6:30am – what’s going on? We were planning to have an early start, but I was expecting 8am and had set my alarm for 7. I decided I’d better make an attempt at getting up. “Hurrumph frumpf” said my wife rolling over in disgust at the fact that I’d just woke her up in the middle of the night. After dragging myself around the house in a half sleep, I finally had all my gear together and was ready to go.
The scenario for the day was that two people had gone for a walk around the edges of the Kinder Plateau and not returned. We were sent out to find and evacuate them. By the fact that it was such an early start and that we had been threatened with a long day, there was a good chance that we would be searching into the boggy centre of the plateau. Perhaps that’s why the turnout was so low today.
We managed to get enough team members together for three search parties, though with a few people also not fit for full hill duties, it felt like there were more people out on radio link than out searching today.
Fate frowned on me again as I was sent up Sandy Hayes, the steepest route up Kinder, for the second exercise in a row.
At the top we split our team and I was sent off with Lee to search round the edge path back to Ashop Head. Once there, we joined up with Kinder 1 and searched down the northern edges. It took about another hour of searching in the increasing wind and rain before we eventually found one of our missing casualties. Ian was sent in to carry out Casualty Care, with Vinny to assist and the rest of us got ready for a long cold wait for the other teams to arrive with the equipment needed to evacuate the casualty.
As we were waiting, we heard on the radio that Search dog Ian was operating in the valley below us. It wasn’t long before we heard that he had a find, and could soon see him below us with the second casualty.
Due to the fact that we were facing a very long stretcher carry and would need every team member we could muster, control decided that they would have called in another team to evacuate this casualty. This meant that we didn’t have to worry about this one.
Eventually the team with the heavy equipment arrived. They had been trudging across the middle of the plateau and had almost lost Ryan as he sank up to his waist in a peat bog! The Casualty was loaded on to the stretcher and we began the long carry off.
It was a long and difficult carry which our lack of numbers did not help. Finally after around three hours of stretcher carrying, through wind and rain, we arrived at the road head, with the promise of a mug of hot coffee waiting back at base.
