Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
POCATELLO – When Tamra Bassett woke up, she found herself at the bottom of a ravine, and she couldn't remember how she got there.
What Bassett did remember was that she had driven her UTV up Gibson Jack about 5 p.m. that day, Aug. 12. Rather than having a passenger with her, she had put her water bottle and phone on the seat next to her.
Bassett also remembered that before she left for the trail, her husband had gone to work for the evening.
Even if he had been at home, it wasn't irregular for her to leave and spend time outdoors in the evening, thanks to the longer light hours during the summer.
"Nobody's going to know where I am," Bassett realized.
Bassett quickly found that she was too injured to hike back up the ravine when she tried to get back to her crashed UTV.
'This is not the day that I die'
"I fell down, and I hit my head and started bleeding, and I rolled back down the hill," Bassett said.
She thought that getting back to her vehicle would be the easiest way to be found, so she resorted to army crawling up the ravine.
She made it around 30 to 40 feet. The problem was that she had rolled at least 100 feet down the hill, and her UTV had crashed far enough from the trail that it wouldn't be easy to spot.
As Bassett watched the sunset, she prayed that someone would realize she was gone.
Bassett remembers thinking to herself, "You're tougher than this. You're going to be fine. You just have to wait."
And so Bassett waited. As the hours passed, rain drizzled on her, and there were moments when she felt she could have "chosen to give up," but she reminded herself, "This is not the day that I die."
Bassett woke up again in the early morning hours of Aug. 13, still in the ravine, but this time, she could hear a "clicking, staticky" sound. She realized that it was a megaphone, and there was a voice.
The Backcountry Rescue Team had found her.
To the rescue
This team had responded to its first emergency call on June 24, 50 days before rescuing Bassett. Made up of 11 volunteers, each with a strong background in the outdoors and wilderness first aid, the team works alongside the Bannock County Sheriff's Office and search and rescue.
The idea to form a team of people who could specialize in rescuing people from the backcountry started a few years ago, while the pandemic prompted a surge in people exploring the outdoors. Recognizing the need, Pebble Creek Ski Area formed a formal branch of the ski patrol to respond to backcountry accidents nearby.
Some of the members of this team, as well as other community members, started to see a need to have a group that could respond to accidents in the backcountry year round. Two of them were Luke Nelson, who has worked on the Pebble Creek Ski Patrol for 15 years, and Ed Gygli, who has served on the ski patrol for 10 years.
The two of them scheduled a meeting with the sheriff's office and pitched their idea for a team "that could get into the mountains, into technical terrain way out there, where maybe an ATV or motorized vehicle couldn't get to," Nelson said.
Upon hearing the idea, Bannock County Sheriff Tony Manu also recognized the need and officially started organizing the Backcountry Rescue Team in fall 2023.
When the Backcountry Rescue Team is needed for an emergency, they put the call out to all of their members, and around half of the team responds. The responding members then work alongside the sheriff's office as well as any available members of the search and rescue team to coordinate a rescue effort.
Not only do all 11 of the members of the team have an extensive background in navigating the backcountry, they are equipped to render wilderness first aid, and several also have advanced medicine training.
"As far as immediately responding and stabilizing somebody who's hurt really badly, we're ready and prepared to do so," Nelson said.
As volunteers with their own jobs and personal lives, Nelson said that sometimes they have to take time off work to go on a rescue. To him, this speaks to how dedicated the members of the team are to serving their community.
"At times, we're taking our time off of work," Nelson said. "Team members might be taking their vacation time to work on serving the community, which is pretty special, to find a group of people that are that committed to serving that they're willing to do that."
Although some of the calls the Backcountry Rescue Team have responded to have only taken an hour or two to resolve, there are other situations that have lasted all the way into the next day. Even then, that's a relatively quick timeframe to find someone, Nelson said.
