It’s like an explosion.
A plastic, disposable lighter with a striker, something that weighs mere grams, lights up like a little explosion when you’re looking at it through military-grade night-vision goggles from the back seat of a helicopter. If you’re out in the backcountry, it may be worthwhile to always have a lighter on you – for starting fires and for creating a signal flare that can be seen from quite a distance.
Alamosa Citizen was invited by Alamosa Volunteer Search and Rescue to participate in a night training in early August that involved identifying different light sources through night-vision goggles in a helicopter, from more than 700 feet above the ground.
A team like Alamosa Volunteer Search and Rescue used to have a hard rule against searching at night. With the acquisition of two pairs of military-grade night vision goggles, things have changed. Now the team is training and conducting missions with two sets of high-grade goggles.
Getting lost in the backcountry could happen at any time of the day. Night will always come and night vision goggles and experienced rescuers make the case for searching at night. With different technologies like thermal imagining and different forms of night vision, searching at night no longer becomes an impossible task.
Late on a Saturday, a group of AVSAR team members, wearing their signature high-vis green shirts, joined at the Lake Como Road Helipad.
First there was a crash course on how the goggles work, how to adjust them to eye height and width, how to focus them, and generally how to feel comfortable while moving with them on top of your head.
It looks like something straight out of a military movie. Except for the bright safety green high-vis helmets, the setup is similar to anything you would find in operation today through any one of the United States’ armed forces. The helmets have collapsable headphones and the ability to plug directly into a helicopter’s internal communication system.
These specific goggles were designed for infantry fighters, who typically operate while wearing them for hours at a time.
When the sun fell behind the San Juans and the moon rose over Culebra Peak, it was time to turn on the goggles and focus them. This involved looking at a star or a single light out in the distance. The night becomes entirely clear, the green phosphorus that lights the world in high contrast.
The goggles are hardly telescopic and in near 4K definition. Some people can get dizzy or nauseous while wearing them. Combine that with a helicopter ride and it becomes doubly uncomfortable. Fortunately, the overall fit and high quality view through the goggles only felt enhancing, rather than hindering.
Just after nightfall, two team members drove a few miles from the helipad with a handful of different light sources and acted as the training’s “missing subjects.”
Then the helicopter arrived. A full crew from REACH Air Medical arrived and the pilot took two team members up at a time.
With the assistance of the medical crew, each team member was guided to the helicopter while the blades were in full spin.
Once up in the air, the “missing subjects” who were in direct communication with the helicopter cycled through the flashlight, the phone light, a glowstick, a stove light, and of course, the lighter.
If you are a hiker who is lost or injured, sending a light signal helps rescuers locate you. Using a signal mirror takes practice to get right. Signal mirrors work really well if you have the experience and the sun is out. With a lighter and a couple of people with night-vision googles looking for it, there’s no experience required.
“When you hear that helicopter just start sparking it,” said Stephen Cline, a member of the Alamosa Volunteer Search and Rescue team. “It’s like a small explosion.”
Despite the depth perception challenge, the world around you is entirely maneuverable. On a nearly full moon night with the ambient light of campers on Lake Como road and Alamosa County the world is alive. While up in the air, the entire Valley is visible. It’s like being in a green desert, every little town and road that intersects the Valley floor refocuses how you look at the world.
LITTLE BEAR
“WARNING!” Reads the 14ers.com description of the Little Bear-Blanca Traverse. “The traverse between Little Bear and Blanca is the most dangerous and difficult of the 14er traverse routes. This is a route like no other on this site, requiring some Class 5 moves and sustained Class 4 climbing, with extreme exposure, and multiple difficult downclimbs. Once into the traverse, retreat is extremely difficult, and a misstep could be fatal.”
Late weather rolling in forced a hiker to bail off the Blanca-Little Bear traverse during the summer a few years ago. It’s a mile-long and highly-exposed class five route connecting 14,000 foot peaks Blanca and Little Bear.
When the call came in it was around 9 p.m., Cline said. “By the time we could mobilize it was close to 10 o’clock. Totally dark.”
A REACH Air Medical helicopter was able to assist AVSAR. Their pilot, with combat experience, was the only one with a pair of night-vision goggles. Cline noted that this pilot had hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of time spent looking through a pair of NODs.
The night search was tricky, Cline said, because the pilot was flying in high winds and searching for the missing hiker, “He definitely had his hands full.”
The hiker went down the Blanca Basin side, which is the only way to go, “because if you go toward Lake Como it’s just a vertical cliff.” Finding himself turned around, the climber was able to call 911 but wasn’t sure exactly where he was.
The helicopter picked up two team members and began the search. The winds at the airport in Alamosa, where the team mobilized to make things quicker, were “dead calm. It seemed like a great night to fly.”
But the Blanca Massif can create its own weather patterns that vastly differ from what’s happening on the Valley floor and “once we got on the massif the winds were just crazy,” Cline said
After about a 45-minute search, the pilot spotted a possible light source that the two team members couldn’t confirm. With the high winds and unsure footing on where to land the helicopter, the pilot pulled out of the basin and the teams finished the mission up the next day.
The hiker was rescued, hypothermic and dehydrated.
During the debrief of the mission, AVSAR members, the pilot and the base manager at the time discussed what the partnership would look like if the pilot could focus on flying and AVSAR members had their own goggles to search.
Cline said they asked the pilot, “If you’re just flying and we were searching, you weren’t having to fly and look down, would that go better?” To which he replied, “‘Oh, it would be way easier.’”
“And I can’t quantify what ‘way easier’ means,” Cline said, “but you would get to just fly the helicopter.”
What it came down to was: We could search better, you could fly better.
“So that is actually what hatched our goal to get a couple pairs. It was a real mission that kind of made us go, ‘We should try this.’”
AMBIANT, AMPLIFIED
Though some night vision technologies date back to before World War II, it was during the Vietnam War when soldiers were issued a large, heavy, bulky optic called a Starlight Scope. It used ambient starlight or moonlight to allow soldiers to see.
Over the past five decades, different versions of night-technology have advanced and turned night into day.
Currently in Generation 3+, breaking it down simply, photons from light sources enter the tube of the goggles and bounce through three plates. Photons enter the lens and then pass through a photocathode that converts the photons into electrons. Those electrons are then passed through a microchannel plate that has a higher voltage, exciting the electrons as they pass through. Those electrons are then taken through the green phosphor screen and projected onto the viewing lens as visible light.
This video by Veritasium, on YouTube, breaks down the technology and the classified nature of what goes into a pair of NODs.
Green phosphor is what gives night vision that classic green look. There is also white phosphor, but it’s far more expensive.
The goggles are robust and clip onto AVSAR’s helmets securely. Wearing them doesn’t feel too weighty or cumbersome. When they are flipped up, they add a few inches to your overall height and when they are flipped down you tend to want to lean forward.
The goggles pack into small bags that could easily fit into any hiking pack.
After that initial discussion with the helicopter pilots a few years ago, Cline began “frantically” sending emails to some funders to see if he could raise some money for the goggles.
Each setup “shook out” to be around $12,500, he said. Thanks to the Trinchera Foundation, the Cielo Vista Ranch, and the Early Iron Club in Alamosa, Cline was able to raise the funds.
“I was pretty proud of the fact that within three days I raised $20,000,” he said.
A mission on Cielo Vista Ranch prompted the ranch to reimburse a mutual aid helicopter’s fuel. That helicopter was an asset of the Colorado Department of Fire Prevention and Control, meaning that fuel was taxpayer funded. DFPC told the ranch to match that donation to AVSAR instead.
The Trinchera Foundation donated enough for the team to be able to purchase the first pair outright.
With the aggressive saving the team had been doing and the three donations, Cline called it “perfect timing.”
It was “one of those summers with a lot of missions. Search and rescue was on a lot of people’s minds.”
The team used to have a hard “we’re not searching at night policy. Which was weird,” he said, because it’s much easier to see a campfire or flashlight at night. Even with practice with a signal mirror, spotting lights at night requires no training of the sort.
Cline said that searching at night during the shoulder seasons is important.
“The shoulder seasons are wicked dangerous,” he said, “It’s one thing in the winter when you know it’s gonna be freezing and you’re dressed for it, you have plenty of clothes, but when you’re out in quote, unquote summer conditions and you end up spending the night and you’re not ready, that can be a game changer in a bad way.”
In some situations, he said, “we need to search at night.”
Especially in medical situations, he said, “even if you can get to them two hours quicker, that could be life or death.”
He noted two recent missions plus a mutual aid mission where the night vision goggles were used by the team. There was a rescue in the Little Bear-Blanca traverse, near the same as the hiker earlier. It was another “bail off the traverse.”
The other mission was “another example of a search having a different outcome” if they had spent all day searching instead of identifying the subject’s location at night and rescuing them at first light.
A mutual aid in Saguache County that two AVSAR members responded to called for the use of the goggles.
Alamosa’s search and rescue team is of a technological caliber unlike most teams in Colorado, because of the nature of the Blanca Massif and Sangre De Cristo range. Members often conduct mutual aid with teams throughout the Valley. Two members from the Mineral County Search and Rescue team took part in the night training and this training marked a step forward in increasing inter-team relationships.
As long as weather holds and there isn’t a more pressing and urgent call, AVSAR frequently works with helicopter services like REACH, DFPC Helitack and the Colorado Air National Guard.
“Helicopters were once described to me as the pickup truck of the sky,” said Jay Christianson, public information officer for Colorado Search and Rescue. “That has been and still is the use of helicopters in search and rescue in Colorado. Frequently, patients are far from rapid access, and are in terrain that would be difficult to access and retrieve them safely. Helicopters have the ability to get teams close to subjects and, in many cases, they have the ability to evacuate those subjects as well. Used correctly, helicopters can serve to reduce risk exposure and expedite patient care.”
Team members have to have active “lift tickets.” It’s a card or certificate given after training and that they must carry during missions and is their ticket to ride. Helicopter services have differing lift ticket requirements.
Alamosa Citizen had to sign a waiver in order to fly during this training.
Identifying the various light sources was an eye-opening experience for the team, some of them have only been on the team for just a year or more. The weather held, there were no urgent calls, the helicopter flew smoothly, and the batteries on the goggles didn’t die.
“If we can search at night,” Cline said, “we’re going to hopefully have more positive outcomes.”
Getting lost in the backcountry could happen at any time of the day. Night will always come and night vision goggles and experienced rescuers make the case for searching at night. With different technologies like thermal imagining and different forms of night vision, searching at night no longer becomes an impossible task.
If you are a hiker who is lost or injured, sending a light signal helps rescuers locate you. Using a signal mirror takes practice to get right. Signal mirrors work really well if you have the experience and the sun is out. With a lighter and a couple of people with night-vision googles looking for it, there’s no experience required.
“When you hear that helicopter just start sparking it,” said Stephen Cline, a member of the Alamosa Volunteer Search and Rescue team. “It’s like a small explosion.”
Other kinds of light sources – for example, a headlamp, phone flashlight, glow stick, or stove flame – could potentially be spotted by someone with NVGs or NODs, Night Optical Devices. Though these lights stand out, on a full-moon night they don’t stand out nearly as much as the explosion of a lighter.
Even without a flame, the spark is brilliant. The spark of a lighter emits both visible light and infrared light, making it stand out, unmistakably, in the night vision.
If you follow the Ten Essentials, a lighter is probably already in your pack. It’s just a little piece of gear that another very expensive and technical piece of gear could spot pretty easily, even from quite a distance away.
