College Students Who Could Save Your Life: The Western State College Mountain Rescue Team

WSC mountain rescue

by Luke Mehall

It started with a professor lost in the mountains of the Gunnison backcountry in the 1960s and it’s grown to be the top college-based mountain rescue team in the United States.

“We don’t have an exact record of when the team started, but the story is that a professor was lost in the mountains and a group of students and teachers banded together to find him,” Chip Lamar, team leader of the Western State College (WSC) Mountain Rescue Team said. “These types of searches continued to happen and then the team got involved in more technical, rock climbing rescues.”

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24 Hours on the Rocks in Gunnison

by Luke Mehall

The mountains in Colorado are ideal for coming of age. I won’t bother quoting anything from “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver here, but I will start with an example from my own life: A few years ago the police came to my place of employment to discuss my overstaying the 14-day limit at a nearby public lands area. Now, years later, this June, the governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, was speaking at a kick-off praising the work we’d done organizing an event at the same area.

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