They find their walker at the edge of a valley, ankle twisted and hypothermic. The 18 volunteers – teachers, doctors, carpenters – lift the man onto a stretcher and carry him more than a mile to safety. This may be a training exercise, but it has all the makings of an everyday emergency in Britain’s national parks. Mountain rescue groups across the country say they are bracing for an extremely busy summer as the cost of living crisis drives more people to cheaper outdoor activities. “We fully expect it to be a very, very busy summer, as busy as we’ve probably ever had,” says Mike Margeson, operations director of Mountain Rescue England and Wales. “Certainly last year we wouldn’t want any busier in terms of what we can handle.” Emergency teams responded to a record 3,629 calls in England and Wales last year, up 15% on 2020. There were almost 1,000 more calls in 2021 than in 2019 as crowds of people headed for the hills during of Covid-19. There is little sign of the pandemic-fueled popularity waning. Mountain rescue teams dealt with 1,489 calls in the first six months of this year, generally the quietest half of the calendar, according to provisional figures for England and Wales. More than half of these were in the three most popular regions – the Lake District, the Peak District and North Wales. “It’s been building and building, and the last five or six weeks have been really busy and very tragic,” Margeson said. It has claimed at least 12 lives in the past two months, the latest being a walker who fell from Snowdon, Wales’ highest mountain, last Tuesday. The vast majority of incidents are due to human error, mostly involving people who are ill-equipped for the terrain. Rescue teams said they had seen a significant increase in people turning up in trainers, without spare clothes and trying to rely on Google Maps for mobile black spots. Edale Mountain Rescue in the Peak District – one of the country’s top walking destinations. Photo: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian “We’re very excited that people have realized the importance of being in the outdoors, it’s just the numbers are so great,” said Margeson, who has worked in mountain rescue for more than 40 years. “And the demographics: people who would normally be on the beach in Benidorm were flocking to join a two-hour queue to get to the top of Snowdon or crammed into the Lake District.” There may be another reason for the increase in emergencies, said Richard Warren, president of the Lake District Rescue Teams: “A lot of people are having knee operations and hip operations now after the pandemic, and I think there are too many of of people descending from high falls, tripping, tripping, falling.” Mountain rescue teams are staffed entirely by volunteers and most rely entirely on donations, as they receive no money from central government. It is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. As well as responding to accidents in the hills and valleys, they are increasingly called upon by police and ambulance crews, either for their technical expertise or when blue light services are stretched. Colin Price, task force leader for Edel Mountain Rescue in the Peak District, said his team had responded to 82 calls already this year and were on track to match last year’s record of 155. Despite the return of mostly unrestricted overseas travel, he said the area was getting “busier and busier” even before the end of the school term. Campsites are fully booked in the Lake District as well. Margeson, part of the rescue team covering part of Cumbria’s Scafell Pike, England’s highest mountain, said: “A lot of people have come back to go abroad, but a lot of people can’t afford it, so going out to the peaks or H north Wales or the Lake District are more affordable holidays – and who can blame them?’
