MRA Spring Meeting "New Blood" Scholarships

The MRA budget allocated $1000 to each region to be used to send people to the spring meeting in Estes Park, CO. Recipients of this scholarship must A. have never attended a national MRA meeting before, and B. been a member of your team for at least 2 years. 

PLEASE LET SHAUN KNOW how many qualified team members you would like support with these funds, and then we'll discuss how to divide up the funds.

MRA Intermountain Region Minutes

Region team reps met Saturday morning before the MRA Winter Business Meeting in SLC on February 7, and here's a quick review of that meeting:

1. We held region elections, with the following results:

Chair: Shaun Roundy (Utah)

Vice Chair: Mark Butler (Ravalli)

Secretary: Patrick Bentley (Cache)

Thanks, new leaders, for stepping up! And past ones, Alan and Jared, for your contributions.

2. To facilitate organizing recerts, the region needs your help to collect names and contact information for available evaluators for your teams. This is probably the biggest job your region board does and having this list will make our job a lot easier. Please gather and send me the following for each evaluator, and thanks for your support in these efforts:

Name, Phone, Email, Appropriate to act as lead or junior evaluator?

(Lead evaluators must have been evaluators in the past and have strong technical skills; junior evaluators must have at least participated in a recert in some way and have reasonable technical skills.)

3. Shaun will send out some questions to learn how each team functions and share that with the region so all our members can become more familiar with other teams. These will be posted at our blog, at http://intermountainrescue.blogspot.com/

4. What more can we do as a region? Joint trainings, activities, information sharing, recruitment.

5. Need to update the region bylaws.These must then be approved by the MRA board of directors (which is everyone voting at national meetings)

6. Shaun is doing a webinar on the winter business meeting and MRA membership in general.

7. Make an auto proxy where teams send the region chair when the meeting is announced. Then, if the team shows up they can just vote, otherwise the chair will have the proxy on hand.

Present: Wayne Bassham (SL), Jason Tanner (SL), David Wrobel (Cache), Jared Randall (Weber), John Sohl (Weber), Mark Butler (Ravalli), Patrick Bentley (Cache), Eric Gunnerson (Cache), Alan Bergstrom (SL), Sheri Trbovich (Weber), Shaun Roundy (Utah)

Thanks, John and Jared, for taking minutes.

IKAR 2012 Video

Rick Lorenz of Topograph Media (and MRA member) has provided video summaries of IKAR (International Commission for Alpine Rescue) conferences for many years. This year, he cut the video into 10 short clips which you may select by topic of interest. Find these videos at:

http://www.topographmedia.com/ikar2012.html

An email message from Rick points out "Some items of particular interest:

"The video of Peter Vieder (Austria Mountain Rescue) on the latest use of Dyneema (Spectra) rope.  It is all in German but we provided English sub-titles.

"Dr. Doug Brown from Canada gives a great summary of the new Hyperthermia Protocol, recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Finally, take a look at the new network (based in Sweden) on mountain safety or PSAR."

MRA President Announces Focus on Rescue Stats

At the recent Mountain Rescue Association Winter Business Meeting held February 2-3 in Salt Lake City, President Doug Wessen called for regional leadership to increase the gathering of annual rescue statistics.

These stats will be useful in many efforts including fundraising and PSAR (preventative search and rescue, which largely depends on information and education).

The annual stats form that should be submitted by each team may be found at http://www.mra.org/images/stories/members/MRA_Stats_Form123007.pdf

[Note that the email and print buttons don't work. You may fill out the data and then print the form and mail it to the address listed below.]

Facebook Posting Regulations

We invite region SAR members to post news articles and SAR photos to our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/InterMountainRescue, but the following standards must be maintained at all times. Posts not following these protocols will be deleted, and offenders may be blocked from further posting.

1. Do not post sensitive or illegal information. For example, refrain from posting victim names or any medical information restricted by HIPAA regulations. 
2. Be respectful, always. Even if people get into trouble due to making poor decisions such as going into the mountains unprepared, do not mock them here. We all make poor choices sometimes, and someday you could find yourself in a similar situation.
3. Do not post photos that reveal the identity of victims or the public. Any faces should be blurred out before posting.
4. Do not post recognizable photos of teammates without their consent.
5. Do not post disturbing photos such as those displaying severe injuries or death.
6. Please only share your very best photos, and not more than two or three at a time. 

Thank you for your cooperation. We're excited about spreading the word about the incredible work performed by our quiet volunteers and your contributions are appreciated.

Welcome to Intermountain Rescue

Welcome to IntermountainRescue.blogspot.com, a blog hosted by the Intermountain Region of the Mountain Rescue Association. Our goals are to:

• Publicize the activities of MRA member search and rescue teams in Utah, Idaho, Montana and Nevada.
• Keep IMR MRA SAR members connected and informed of MRA activities and opportunities.
• Reach out to volunteer SAR teams throughout the region and invite them to consider whether MRA membership would bring them the many benefits that current MRA teams enjoy.

Bookmark this page and check in often for news and updates.