(Riverton, WY) – Riverton Search and Rescue filled the Fremont Center at the Fremont County Fairgrounds on Saturday night for a fundraiser that will help carry the all-volunteer team through the next two years of training and equipment costs.
The banquet, which the team puts on roughly every other year, is one of its main sources of funding. Riverton Search and Rescue responds to more than 30 calls a year, and the majority of them are water calls on the rivers and reservoirs around the Riverton area.
“We have more water around Riverton than the other teams,” said Bryce Roberts, the acting commander. Fremont County splits its search and rescue coverage between Riverton, Lander and Dubois, and the teams routinely back each other up. Riverton members have gone into the Wind River Range with the Lander and Dubois teams on searches.
Roberts said the team fluctuates between about 15 and 30 members, all of them volunteers, and that past banquets have brought in somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 for the organization. The team holds monthly meetings and monthly trainings on top of whatever calls come in.
“It is a lot of work for an all-volunteer organization,” Roberts said.
Much of the money goes to training. The team does what it can in-house, but it also pays to bring in professional instructors, often an outfit out of Jackson, and sends members to courses in Casper and elsewhere. Roberts said the cost of that outside instruction is one of the biggest reasons the fundraiser exists. When the team sends people out, it tries to send half the roster or a solid group, then has them bring the skills back to everyone else.
“When you check the donation box on hunting tags for search and rescue, that money doesn’t go directly to us,” Roberts said. “It goes to the state, and then things get distributed to the counties.”
Nearly everything on the auction tables was donated. Roberts estimated that more than 100 donors contributed items, with the exception of a few guns that the team bought to round out the higher-dollar lots.
“We appreciate anything from the small item to the big item,” he said. “It’s just the community support that we really appreciate.”
Ticket sales ran somewhere around 220 to 230 in advance, Roberts said, with more sold at the door. Fifteen corporate tables were reserved, and Kai Espresso catered the event.
The draw this year was Rulon Gardner, the Star Valley native who won Olympic gold in Greco-Roman wrestling in Sydney in 2000, beating Alexander Karelin in one of the biggest upsets in the sport’s history. Gardner spent close to an hour on stage walking the room through a life that has twice put him in the hands of search and rescue teams.
Gardner grew up on a farm outside Afton, the youngest of nine. He was placed in special education in first grade and stayed in it through college. Advisors told him he would not last a semester at the University of Nebraska, and told him again that he would never finish a physical education degree there. He finished both, he said, and credited his mother, who went back to school and became a nurse at 52.
The wrestling stories got the crowded Fremont Center laughing, but his survival stories got the room quiet.
On Valentine’s Day 2002, weeks before the Salt Lake City Olympics, Gardner got separated from a friend while snowmobiling above Afton and dropped off the wrong side of the mountain into the Salt River drainage. He went into the water, got soaked, lost the machine, and walked to a stand of trees. He had left his coat in the truck. He spent roughly 15 hours out overnight in temperatures he said ran 25 to 30 below, standing up and sitting down to stay awake, at one point pulling a frozen boot liner off with bare hands.
Search and rescue was looking for him by that night and came within 200 yards of him in the dark, he said, before an aircraft spotted him after sunrise. He was flown out with a core temperature of 80 degrees. His boots had to be cut off. He lost one of his toes and had three surgeries and still has little to no feeling in his feet.
Olympic gold medalist wrestler and Star Valley native Rulon Gardner tells his story to the Riverton SAR fundraiser dinner Saturday night at the fairgrounds. Gardner’s inspirational story goes beyond his wrestling career, also shedding light on stories of survival with the help of SAR teams. h/t Carl Cote Seth Rohn was recognized for 17 years of service with Riverton SAR at the fundraiser dinner Saturday night at the Fremont Center. /t Carl Cote Hundreds gather in the Fremont Center for the Riverton Search and Rescue Fundraiser Dinner Saturday night in Riverton. Riverton SAR relies on money from the fundraiser to buy new equipment and to provide training for its volunteer members. h/t Carl Cote
He wrestled again eight months later, made the 2003 world team, and took Olympic bronze in 2004.
In 2007, he survived a plane crash into a lake, swimming roughly two hours to shore in 43-degree water and spending another night out with the two other survivors before a fishing boat found them.
Gardner said he agreed to come speak because of who does the work. He was asked afterward whether he was frustrated that the crew searching for him had turned back that night in Afton.
“This is a volunteer force,” he said. “I’m the stupid one that put them at risk.”
Roberts said the team does not require any prior training to join. People who show interest and stick with it get brought up to speed through the team’s own program. Anyone interested can reach out through the Riverton Search and Rescue Facebook page or contact a member directly.