Paul “Woody” Woodward, a 38-year volunteer mountain rescue legend with Alpine Rescue Team, pulls up a Slack channel on his computer, where six rescuers are working through an aviation rescue of a teenage hiker who fell on Mount Elbert earlier this month.
“Let’s see, we’ve got helicopter pilots, hoist operators, the incident commander, state coordinator and the sheriff,” said the 34-year state coordinator who has participated in more than 1,700 rescue missions across Colorado. “This is part of the program built by the National Guard and CSAR (the Colorado Search and Rescue Association.) It’s a nationally renowned, just incredible program that coordinates pilots and rescuers on the ground. There’s nothing like this in the country. Why CPW wants to take this over and shut it down makes no sense at all.”
Earlier this month Woodward sent a fiery four-page letter to the Colorado attorney general, the director of the Department of Natural Resources and other Colorado heavyweights announcing his immediate resignation from the state’s search-and-rescue realm. His issue: Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management’s move to take over statewide incident response and replace the Colorado Search and Rescue Association that has trained and advocated for rescue volunteers since 1973.
Woodward, who stepped down from the Backcountry Search and Rescue Council and his 18-year role as a statewide coordinator for the Colorado Search and Rescue Association, said the new plan is “a manipulative scheme inconsistent with our existing structure.”
“The work that CSAR has been doing over the past 53 years should be applauded and not eliminated,” Woodward wrote. “We do this volunteer work because we want to help people having a bad day in the backcountry, not for a paycheck.”
The new Interagency Agreement announced in late March, rippled through the volunteer ranks of rescuers that are the foundation of the state’s unique search-and-rescue system. Colorado Parks and Wildlife said it was a simple structural change that would not really be noticed on the ground. The plan was to send out a proposal seeking a statewide incident management operator and the Colorado Search and Rescue Association was expected to apply.
But the association did not apply. And Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s request for proposals for that new plan yielded two responses. The contract for the Colorado Search and Rescue Association’s management of statewide incidents — which includes managing aviation rescues with the National Guard’s High Altitude Aviation Training Site in Gypsum — expires this month.
While the state is seeking to extend that deadline, it does not appear the association is ready to operate under the new Colorado Parks and Wildlife management plan.
So what happens next month when the association ends its role? Is the state ready to step in and fill that job, which includes 22 volunteer incident coordinators, like Woodward, who participated in a nine-month training program built by the association and volunteer for as many as eight three-day, round-the-clock shifts every year?
“These are things I worry no one is thinking about right now,” Woodward said in an interview. “Who is going to do this work?”
Woodward suggested more resignations from coordinators like himself could be coming. There is a simmering angst over the way the volunteer-driven Colorado Search and Rescue Association is being pushed aside, he said.
“I know the volunteers and the state coordinators will always do their work, but they just won’t do it under the authority of CPW,” he said.
Legislation for volunteer rescuers
Four pieces of legislation approved by Colorado lawmakers since 2020 were built to better support the 2,500 volunteers with more than 50 sheriff-directed teams who conduct as many as 3,000 backcountry rescue missions every year. Those volunteers spend more than 400,000 hours a year on missions and training, often spending their own money on gear.
Senate Bill 130 in 2020 and Senate Bill 245 in 2021 kicked off a multiyear effort to better support those volunteers, calling for a review of backcountry search and rescue in the state and asking for recommendations to improve the volunteer-based program. The 111-page study that came out of those pieces of legislation led to Senate Bill 168 in 2022. The law shifted control of the Colorado Search and Rescue Fund to Colorado Parks and Wildlife from the Department of Local Affairs, and immunized rescuers from lawsuits and offered some health insurance coverage for volunteers.
The 2021 legislation that created the Keep Colorado Wild Pass — Senate Bill 249 —provided a path to more consistent funding for the state’s search-and-rescue teams. That bill said the first $36 million of revenue from Keep Colorado Wild Pass sales — a $29 fee automatically included in vehicle registrations that allows access to state parks — was divided between Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the Search and Rescue Fund and the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Colorado Parks and Wildlife gets $32.5 million for parks, $2.5 million goes into the Search and Rescue Fund and the avalanche center, which is under the Department of Natural Resources, gets $1 million.
But exactly how that money gets distributed is a point of contention. The Colorado Search and Rescue Association has argued its members should get portions of its allocation as the Keep Colorado Wild Pass pot grows. Colorado Parks and Wildlife argues it must first get its $32.5 million before anything spills over to search and rescue teams and the avalanche center, in what is called a “waterfall funding” scenario.
Between 2022 and 2025, Colorado Parks and Wildlife distributed $7.9 million in Backcountry Search and Rescue grants to 42 county sheriffs, based on the number of missions for search-and-rescue teams. (Boulder County has received the largest distribution, $553,257, followed by Summit County at $446,837 and Clear Creek County at $440,340.)
Woodward said Colorado Parks and Wildlife is sitting on at least $3.4 million in undistributed funds — from the fees collected on sales of hunting and fishing licenses as well as Keep Colorado Wild Pass revenue — for rescue teams.
He said the list of $7.9 million in search-and-rescue grants was just published after he spent two years on the Backcountry Search and Rescue Council asking for that information.
“Maybe my letter has done some good in regards to transparency,” he said.
Woodward points to a Legislative Council Staff fiscal note with the legislation that created the Keep Colorado Wild Pass that assumed “if less than $36 million is collected, the Search and Rescue Fund and Avalanche Information Center Fund will be fully funded.”
CPW said the “waterfall” funding approach was long-planned by the agency.
“Funds are being allocated in the exact manner CPW testified to during the committee hearings for (Keep Colorado Wild),” Bridget O’Rourke, a spokesperson for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said in an email. O’Rourke, quoting legislative rules in Colorado, said fiscal notes are “a nonbinding, decision-making tool for legislators and others to use when deliberating state policy.”
Woodward, who served as president of the Colorado Search and Rescue Association from 2014 to 2017 and again from 2022 to 2024, said Colorado Parks and Wildlife has withheld funding for the 10-year-old Colorado Hoist Rescue Team, a collaboration between the High-Altitude Army National Guard Training Site, or HAATS, in Gypsum and the Colorado Search and Rescue Association. That team, under coordination by the Colorado Search and Rescue Association, arranges military helicopter rescues with 28 civilian volunteers trained by HAATS and the association. Last year the team conducted more than 40 rescues — a record number of missions almost doubling responses from previous years.
“I cannot understand why they would want to dismantle this program. It’s a one-of-a-kind collaboration that is unrivaled in this country,” Woodward said.
A new approach to incident response
The decision to shift 24-hour-a-day statewide incident coordination and management for backcountry search and rescue missions over to the state came from an interagency agreement between Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, or DHSEM, with support from the County Sheriffs of Colorado nonprofit trade group. That agreement tasks Colorado Parks and Wildlife with training and supporting volunteers and sets up the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management to “monitor, facilitate and promote” backcountry search and rescue operations.
That interagency agreement was designed to replace a 2017 contract that assigned oversight of statewide volunteers and statewide incident management to the Colorado Search and Rescue Association. That 2017 agreement is set to expire at the end of June. A revised interagency agreement is pending that would push the Colorado Search and Rescue Association agreement to November as the state seeks a third-party contractor and hammers out its own management plan. It is unclear if the association is going to agree to the extensions of its contract.
In early May, Colorado Parks and Wildlife published a formal request for proposal seeking a third-party, like the Colorado Search and Rescue Association, to “provide 24/7 statewide incident resource coordination, technical expertise, and incident management support for backcountry search and rescue (BSAR) emergency events.”
The 22 state coordinators trained by Colorado Search and Rescue Association respond only when called by a sheriff or incident commander. The volunteer state coordinators help enlist ground crews, horse and dog teams, helicopters, swiftwater specialists and expert incident management staff needed for large or technical search operations.
There are two state coordinators on duty every day of the year, working three-day shifts and ready to work 24 hours a day. That’s more than 17,000 volunteer hours every year. Some of those state coordinators, who declined to speak on record, asked how a group tasked with managing that roster could afford to pay them if they were not volunteers. At $25 an hour, the labor cost alone would reach past $400,000. The amount the state will pay for the new contract will be determined based on proposals from the two companies that applied for the statewide management job.
Greg Foley has spent 47 years as a volunteer search and rescue team member and 18 years as a state coordinator.
Foley said the new agreement between Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management was reached without any input from the Colorado Search and Rescue Association or any volunteer teams.
“They also did not collaborate with the majority of sheriffs,” Foley said. “I have heard that some sheriffs are not pleased that important decisions like this agreement are being influenced more by personality conflicts instead of what’s best for sheriffs, teams, team members and the public we serve.”
That said, a proposal by the Colorado Search and Rescue Association to raise dues — to a maximum of $5,000 for the busiest teams — this year did not please many sheriffs. But the association quickly nixed that plan as sheriffs complained.
As Keep Colorado Wild Pass revenue continues to climb and Colorado Search and Rescue program fees increase, more money could be coming to search and rescue volunteers. Foley, like Woodward, does not have faith that Colorado Parks and Wildlife will distribute those dollars fairly.
“CPW is either holding back the funds or is incompetent and inconsistent in distributing the funds,” said Foley, who fears Colorado Parks and Wildlife could start directing money meant for teams toward high-dollar projects like regional search and rescue facilities or even buying helicopters. “There appears to be minimal oversight of how CPW is handling the funds. And especially no accountability to the teams.”
The deadline for responding to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s request for proposals was May 21 with an expected award on June 9 of the new one-year contract starting Aug. 1. The agency is interviewing the two companies that responded and said it is on track to meet that deadline with a new group managing statewide incident response and volunteer training by the end of July.
The Colorado Search and Rescue Association did not respond to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s request for proposals. Representatives from the association declined to comment, saying the situation with the state was changing daily.
Woodward, in his resignation letter to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s overseers, pleaded for intervention.
“Management of these concerns must be addressed and cannot be delayed by yet more evasions by CPW,” he wrote.