Youth in Linn County are helping with vital search and rescue missions

The warmth and sunshine of summer makes it an especially ideal time  in Oregon to recreate outdoors and experience the state’s bounty of hiking trails, rivers, mountain peaks and other scenic attractions. But that spike in outdoor recreation can also lead to more calls for potentially life-saving search and rescue missions by law enforcement in remote locations. Linn County is one of the many counties in the state that have well-established search and rescue programs that rely heavily on unpaid volunteers, including youth as young as 14 years old. 

The Linn County Sheriff’s Office has been operating a youth search and rescue program for more than 30 years. The bootcamp-style training academy is open to youth ages 14 to 18 years old who are taught first aid, shelter and fire building, navigation using compasses and maps and learning how to search for and gather evidence of possible crimes in wilderness areas. The majority of the personnel responding to search and rescue missions in Linn County are youth volunteers, who age out of the program when they turn 21. 

Ric Lentz, emergency manager and search and rescue coordinator for the Linn County Sheriff’s Office, and Drew Funk, a 19-year-old volunteer who has been with the county’s youth SAR program for four years, join us to share the critical role youth play in SAR missions and describe how that role has evolved in recent years.