Reminiscing about a life in mountain rescue

Found: A Life in Mountain Rescue By Bree Loewen Mountaineers Books, 202 pp., $24.70

Reading Bree Loewen’s memoir, Found: A Life in Mountain Rescue, seems just about as emotionally exhausting as dashing out in the middle of a stormy winter night to slog miles through mushy snow in hope of saving some hapless mountaineer.

Yet that is the kind of adrenalinpumping, survival-in-the-balance call-out around which life revolves for this at-home mom who lives in Carnation, Washington.

Loewen’s stream-of-consciousness storytelling makes for a pageturner. The tales of adventurers in trouble kept grabbing my attention the way calls for help come on her cellphone — relentlessly, without warning, sometimes in the middle of the night.

She drops what she’s doing every time there’s an avalanche on Mount Snoqualmie, or a stranded climber on Guye Peak. Some victims survive to make amazing recoveries; others go home in a body bag.

Groups such as Seattle Mountain Rescue, with whom Loewen volunteers, put vital feet on the ground: outdoors-obsessed people who are there to rescue their own when everything goes south.

With a real stake in the outcome, they add credibility to the effort, often add the margin of success, and lighten the load on taxpayers who’ve never experienced joy at the perfume of alpine firs on a July day. With no pay, and minimal community support, they help lots of people make it home to their families.

Among intriguing tick-tock storytelling, Loewen weaves her emotional challenges of being a female leader in a field heavy in testosterone, including the dilemma of being married to another rescuer (and what happens to little Vivian if both parents die in the mountains?).

“Russell and I share a preschooler with big blue eyes and blond pigtails that stick up in the air, who is asleep at Grandma’s right now, spooning a pink polkadot security blanket,” Loewen thinks as she weighs whether they both should be heading down an avalanche chute on Red Mountain to recover an almostcertainly dead skier on a cold, dark night. Still, she goes.

“This is a job for a human, not a hero, a human who has nothing else to do today but this,” she writes of her pastime. And that’s how she finds reward: by helping without pay, by giving aid and dignity to others who love what she loves — communing with mountains — but who need help at the end of the day.