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John Davidson spent a day training with Assynt Mountain Rescue Team in Lochinver and learned more about what this group of volunteers does
What’s in a name? When it comes to Assynt Mountain Rescue Team, not much, it would appear.
For while the volunteer team covers the mountains of the north-west and far north, its operations are not confined to the high peaks of Ben More, Suilven, Conival, Ben More Assynt and Ben Klibreck, among others.
And, as that geographical spread suggests, Assynt is a bit of a misnomer too.
I joined the team for part of a training weekend in Lochinver last month and, while I was waiting for my virtual rescue from the top of a hill, I caught up with team leader Tim Hamlet, who has been in the role for three years.
He explained: “This area, although it’s called Assynt Mountain Rescue Team, it’s all of Caithness and Sutherland, and it covers an absolutely enormous part of the north-west. I think we’re probably one of the largest geographical areas in terms of mountain rescue teams.
“It’s one of the most sparsely populated areas of Europe, actually. I believe there’s probably more sheep on this area than there is people – certainly in the winter! It’s a huge area.”
Given the wide-open spaces and the distance between roads, it is a challenging area to operate in, whatever the time of year.
“Quite honestly, although mountain is in the title, as soon as you’re about 500, 600 metres off of the tarmac, suddenly it’s going to be a mountain rescue thing,” Tim adds.
“It can be things like wind farm workers that have had an injury, or a forest worker, a stalker. Everyone likes to jump to the conclusion of tourists in the area but quite frankly that’s not many of our call outs.”
The majority of the shouts are for people who have had a simple slip or trip, and end up immobile on the hillside or in some other hard-to-reach location, off the beaten track. Tim explains that the “high-end technical rescues” people tend to think of are actually few and far between, and one team member sums up most of their tasks nicely as “lots of wandering about in the rain”.
There are also the missing person searches, which Tim explains can be long drawn-out processes. The team has been involved in the high-profile search for Tain man Finn Creaney, who went missing in Sutherland in March 2022. He was last seen at Altnaharra near Loch Naver, and was understood to be on his way to Golspie.
“We’ve got quite a number of long-distance walking routes that cross through large chunks of Sutherland – thinking of the Cape Wrath Trail as one – and often people will not turn up at appropriate places on appropriate days, and then we get tasked with trying to find out where they’ve actually gone, often with no phone signal across a lot of this area as well,” Tim says.
What motivates people to get involved in mountain rescue varies for every individual, but for Tim it was very much a personal experience of being rescued – when he was just 17. As a relative rookie to ice-climbing, he fell and was left with a tib-fib fracture, and still lives with a piece of titanium through his tibia to this day.
Reflecting on that experience, he tells me: “We all make our mistakes, and we are the sum of those mistakes. I think what mountain rescue really gave me at that point and what I really enjoy giving back to others is that second release, if that makes sense, that giving life back.
“I was lying there with a broken leg thinking, well that’s it, my life’s over, at the age of 17 I’ll never walk or run again. And of course since then I’ve gone on to become a mountaineering instructor, run my own outdoor business, run a marathon and all sorts of other achievements.
“And I felt like mountain rescue gave me that back – so for me using the cliché of giving something back is a lot of the reason why I’m involved.
“No one goes out and plans to get rescued, but knowing that that safety net is there is also something we can be really grateful for in this country.”
He also says that encouraging and enthusing new people to get into the outdoors and enjoy all of its benefits is one of the main reasons he is involved with the Assynt team.
The challenges of running that team continue to add a strain, though, with costs rising and technological advances to keep up with. The team has benefited from a three-year deal with clothing manufacturer Helly Hansen to kit out its members, while an anonymous donation of two top-end drones with night vision and other add-ons was also welcomed.
Yet fundraising is a constant requirement for team members and other interested parties, as well as a willingness to help with funding applications and other admin tasks.
Tim explains: “Running that voluntary service where the price has gone up and the grant funding hasn’t really gone up the same, there’s more of a burden on team members to fundraise really, and more of a burden to just try and match those core costs.
“And then there’s extra added costs in terms of getting a few new bits to put onto a stretcher, suddenly that’s £3000, or getting a new AED because the old ones have reached the end of their life and then that’s a new application.”
Despite these challenges, the team are clearly a motivated bunch and, as Tim tells me, first and foremost they are all friends.
As our conversation draws to a close, the members tasked with finding me arrive and start to assess my condition. They are friendly and professional, yet clearly willing to listen to Tim’s advice and learn more as the day progresses.
Later in the day the HM Coastguard helicopter arrives from Inverness for a training session and the team members get a refresher in those “high-end” rescues – practising getting in and out of the machine and then being winched up and down, with all their kit in tow.
It may not be the bulk of their call outs, but it’s reassuring to see their confidence that when called upon, these volunteers from across the north will be ready to help in any and every situation.
