For 25 years, the Mountaineer Area Rescue Group (MARG) has been dedicated to finding and rescuing persons in distress in the outdoors.
The group formed in 1996 and officially joined the Appalachian Search and Rescue Conference in 1997, a community of seven search and rescue groups spanning from Columbus, Ohio through the Blue Ridge area of Virginia.
The non-profit organization celebrated their quarter century anniversary on Saturday at the WVU Natural Resources Center.
Dan Patterson, training officer and one of MARG’s founding members, said while the job remains the same, the biggest change since their start in 1996-1997 has been the technology they use.
“It was really different back in those days,” Patterson said. “I mean we started off with pagers – that’s how we got called out.”
Today, the group uses various phone apps and computer software to not only call searchers to the scene, but also to track their movement, show what areas have been searched, and mark any clues they find in real time.
“We didn’t have any of that, it was pretty dark ages,” Patterson recalled, adding that tracking and marking search areas used to be done by hand on large topography maps located at the base for the search.
In the past 25 years, Patterson estimated MARG has participated in 300-350 searches within a two hour radius of Morgantown, some happy and some not.
“I would say one third are successful where we find the person alive, one third we unfortunately don’t find them alive, and the other third we don’t find them at all,” Patterson said. “Sometimes people just don’t want to be found.”
Patterson said he will never forget one such story of a man who had watched his brother die from cancer and swore if he ever had cancer “you would never find him.” The man was diagnosed and disappeared as promised. During the search, his wife received a call from doctor’s that the man’s tumors were benign.
“We’ve never found the guy,” Patterson said. “That one sticks in my head a lot.”
People who don’t want to be found also present additional risk for rescuers. Patterson remembered during one search they found the missing person deceased, but with a loaded gun set to fire at rescuers.
“So there is some danger out there aside from the natural hazards of terrain, weather, animals, that sort of thing,” Patterson said.
Those natural hazards are seen more often however, like during one of their recent searches “I think five or six people got stung by bees,” Patterson said. “Fortunately none of them were allergic.”
Because MARG is a non-profit organization, their resources are limited, so searches cannot continue indefinitely.
Patterson said longer searches will last about a week. “Usually we go until we run out of resources or we find a reason to disband the search,” he said.
“We will call the other teams in our conference – we are all volunteers so some people might have to leave to go to work. They will go to work and then come back and search for 8 hours.”
While the people might be running the show, some of the most important members of search teams like MARG are their search and rescue dogs.
MARG uses three different types of dogs in searches – trailing dogs, air scent dogs, and human remains detection, or HRD dogs.
MARG member Anne Russell said she owns two types of search dogs, trailing and air scent.
Trailing dogs, like her German Shepherd Talos, who is currently training, and their fully trained dog Quest, are trained to follow a specific scent through an area to make a find.
“So he is good when there might be other people in the area or at the start of a search to give us a direction of travel,” Russell said.
Air scent dogs, which Russell said MARG has a few of, are trained to find any live person in an area.
“They are good once we are further in a search and we’re just trying to figure out in different areas if our subject is in that area.”
Human remains detection dogs do just that – detect human remains, Russell said.
“Those dogs are incredible. They can find super old human remains,” she said. “We have some people on our team that go out and try to help find Native American burial grounds, so hundreds of years old remains.”
Patterson said the group is always open to new members since they are all volunteer based.
“There is a job for everyone,” he said. “If you don’t feel like you can go out into the woods, you may be able to sit in the command post and hand out task assignments, you may be able to download from GPS when they come back – so there is a job for everybody.”
For more information on MARG, what they do, and how you can help visit their website at wvmarg.org.
