They’ll Find You; They’ll Help You

With more than 11 million people visiting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park every year, it’s bound to happen. A hiker wanders onto the trail, maybe without a coat, maybe without having checked the weather or packed a map, or maybe completely prepared but falling victim to a debilitating slip or fall—and a rescue is needed. 

That where Park Ranger Dylan Jones, 32—or any one of the other members of the park’s Search and Rescue team—comes in. Jones has worked in the Smokies for two years of his 10-year National Park Service career, entering the search and rescue side of things in 2010 at Death Valley National Park. 

What got you started in the search and rescue field?

I started working for the Park Service in 2008 and I worked at a couple different parks out west. I saw that rangers were getting to do search and rescue as part of their job, and that’s something that was interesting to me. I started getting involved in Death Valley, which has a pretty good search and rescue program. It’s sort of an exciting game—I guess you can call it a game—where you have this mission where someone needs help and you’ve got to go find them, help them and figure out a way to get them out. It’s this challenge that causes you to think in different ways, but at the same time you have a real-life mission of helping people and sometimes even saving them. 

What do you find most challenging about the job, and most fulfilling? 

What can be most challenging is sometimes we have to find people in places that we haven’t necessarily been. Sometimes people aren’t on trails. Maybe no one’s ever been there before. And that’s a big challenge and a big frustration too, when you know somebody is missing and may be hurt and you can’t find them. What’s most rewarding is when you are able to help somebody who is in need, whether it’s just small—somebody rolled their ankle and they can’t walk out—or somebody fell and they have a lot of trauma and we’re able to get them stable enough to get them to a hospital. It’s a good feeling to know you can have such a strong, positive impact on somebody’s life. 

What are some of the most memorable rescues you’ve been on in the Smokies? 

One of the ones I remember most, which was from this year, is this man fell from one of the waterfalls and he broke his femur. He was carried out by bystanders and we met him halfway down the trail from the falls and got him loaded into the litter. It was a pretty awesome feeling knowing this person is hurt, they’re going to have a lot of recovery, but they were there being strong with it and we had a strong team to get that person out and get him the help he needed.  Another one that sticks out is we had two men that were in a rainstorm earlier this year. It wasn’t even cold, but they got caught in a rainstorm and they didn’t have a raincoat with them and it got late on them and they got hypothermic. So we had to spend the night with them on the trail, get them warm, get them fluids, and that was one where they had to use the Air National Guard because they were too weak. They couldn’t recover on their own to walk out. 

What do you wish the general public understood better about backcountry rescues?

It’s very labor intensive. It requires a lot of resources. I don’t think most people understand that when they step out of their car. I think if people took an extra 10 minutes in their trip planning to think about the risks involved with hiking in the backcountry and camping and prepared for some of those risks, they would be able to help themselves.