The Backcountry Rescue Squad at America’s Busiest National Park

America’s busiest national park isn’t Yosemite or Yellowstone; it’s the Great Smoky Mountains, which straddles the heavily forested border of North Carolina and Tennessee. Half the country can drive there in a day. The park measures 522,427 acres, nearly the size of Rhode Island. The terrain is choked with rhododendron and dog hobble, ground cover that makes it easy to get lost and hard to be found. There are eight hundred and forty-eight miles of trail, and countless manways, which masquerade as trails. The many waterfalls are fed by rain on par with that of the Pacific Northwest. The rivers rise and boil with astonishing speed. There’s little to no cell service.

Every year, the park logs more than twelve million visits, some of which go poorly. From the annals of misadventure and bad luck: A fifteen-year-old boy jumped between rocks at a scenic overlook and fell five hundred feet. Lightning struck near where a man lay reading in his tent; the charge “welded” him to the ground for at least ten seconds. A cyclist hit a deer and flew over the handlebars. A hundred and seventy-five feet deep in a cave, two spelunkers ran out of rope. A child got separated from his family and wound up at the base of a cliff. Hikers discovered a man freezing on the Appalachian Trail, seventy-four miles of which pass through the park; he didn’t have a coat, and had wrapped his feet in underwear and duct tape. A fisherman was stung more than a hundred times by yellow jackets. Three stranded backpackers, unable to figure out how to build a proper fire, even with a small blowtorch, burned their clothes. A kid tried to cross a flooding river after his friends warned him not to, and was swept downstream. An inner tuber fell into a river and got trapped between submerged rocks. “The river will take you,” John Sharbel, a veteran white-water rafter, told me the other day. His friends call him Sharbs. He had just texted me a video of himself on Class V rapids, where—bloop!—he popped right out of his boat. In the national parks, drowning ranks behind only motor-vehicle crashes as the leading cause of accidental death. Sharbs’s rafting drama ended with him dragging himself onto a riverbank and bushwhacking his way back to camp, where one of his buddies, Big Bill, unaware of the bloop, asked, “Why’re you so dirty?” Sharbs also texted me a photo of a random male rafter wearing cartoonishly enormous silicone boobs, and a shot of the under-chin of the youngest of his three sons, who had just spent a morning in the E.R. (Pogo stick; five stitches.)

Sharbs, who is in his early forties, grew up in Knoxville, thirty-six miles north of the park, and has been a Smokies regular since elementary school. In the early two-thousands, he and his wife, Laura, a veterinarian, worked on cattle ranches in California. “When we would do roundups, there was this old firefighter who’d come out and help us, and I’d talk to him and think, That sounds like a pretty cool life style,” he said. Firefighting didn’t stick. Sharbs joined the Tennessee Army National Guard. In 2012, he deployed to Afghanistan and spent a year in Helmand Province, as a combat medic. He was telling me about it over sandwiches in the park, at a picnic table beside the Little River, when an acorn the size of a golf ball very nearly fell on my head. Sharbs went “Holy shit!” Then he said, “Also a big killer in the park? Falling tree branches.” Dead, dangling limbs are called widow-makers. Jonathan Dee, the park’s medical director, who is a family physician, told me that a patient once asked him which of the park’s wild animals frightened him most; he said that nothing scared him more than the wind.

In the American West, visitors to national parks know to expect remoteness. The Smokies’ proximity to cities creates a false sense of security. The park is headquartered in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which has been characterized as an amusement venue posing as a town. You can step out of the forest and play laser tag or eat a corn dog. Chockablock on the main street there’s Smoky Vapes, Pancake Pantry, Gatlin’s Rugged Ropes Adventure Course, the Hollywood Star Cars Museum, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Ripley’s Mountain Coaster, Ripley’s Davy Crockett Mini-Golf, Ripley’s Haunted Adventure, Ripley’s Super Fun Zone!, Ripley’s Motion Blaster, Ripley’s Mirror Maze (and, behind it, Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies), plus an attraction where, after a ten-minute ascent on a canary-yellow chairlift, you can cross a gorge via a cable footbridge designed to tilt and sway with each step. There’s a Trump Superstore, and a sky phallus called the Space Needle. Oversized humanoid art installations appear seasonally on downtown benches; I witnessed “pumpkin people” in October, “snow people” in November.

A brochure describes Gatlinburg as America’s “mountain paradise.” Allow me to vouch for the following: Tennessee barbecue; a rock shop owned by a mountaineer who told me ghost stories; a handwritten sign at the checkout counter of Old Dad’s General Store which reads “Please Do Not Lick Your Fingers to separate your cash when you are paying”; serendipitous bluegrass performances on the front steps of the convention center; and the elevated patio of a certain creekside restaurant where, one golden afternoon, as I ended the day with a cocktail and a book, a big bear ambled by. (Nineteen hundred black bears live in the Smokies.) People on the patio leapt from their seats and crowded the railing, holding up their phones. No one stayed to admire the bear; they just wanted the picture. According to Reddit, travellers often go to the Smokies looking for a “good nature area to drive around in,” or for “outdoors without the outdoors.”

In the Great Smoky Mountains, which have been called a Bermuda Triangle of volatile conditions, a hike can start at noon in tank-top weather and end at night in a snowstorm. Visitors have been known to climb to a high point to watch a sunset, forgetting that they’ll need light to get back down. They don’t think to bring water. They misjudge distances and underestimate the landscape, which isn’t just steep; it’s slippery, snaky, rocky, rooty, humid, buggy, foggy, and misty. Each year in the national park, there are more than a hundred backcountry emergencies. Andrew Herrington, a former park ranger, told me, “The people that get in trouble are the ones that are wearing flip-flops and shorts, and they buy a one-dollar trail map and decide to hike—and take a wrong turn. Now it’s dark, they’re trying to navigate with their phone, the phone’s dying, the kids and the wife are screaming, everybody’s mad and crying and scared.” Sometimes accidents just happen. Lodged in my brain is a photo that Herrington showed me of a woman’s right leg, bare from the knee down and shaped like a hockey stick: the foot cocked ninety degrees to the left. She had snapped her ankle while hiking to Laurel Falls, which search-and-rescue workers have nicknamed Everybody Falls. (The park recently shut down the trail, for refurbishments.)

Park rangers respond to and manage every emergency, but they routinely need outside help to conduct rescues, especially deep in the backcountry. Herrington, like Sharbs, is a seasoned search-and-rescue volunteer. They, and others like them, are essential to public-safety operations in the Smokies, in part because they have so much experience in that highly specific environment.

One afternoon in October, I met Herrington at Look Rock, the apex of the Foothills Parkway, on the western end of the park, near Townsend, which calls itself “the peaceful side of the Smokies.” The crowds and traffic are less intense than in Gatlinburg, and the mountain views are unimpeded; decades ago, Townsend limited development. A Ripley’s Peaceful Side is unimaginable.

Cartoon by Debora Szpilman

Herrington and I left our vehicles in a deserted parking lot and followed a manway through a band of trees, stepping over roots the size of boa constrictors. At the dizzying edge of a sandstone cliff, he spread a park map on a boulder and ran a hand across it. “It’s hard to grasp the immensity,” he said. A particularly remote pocket, Tricorner Knob, has a reputation for being one of the nation’s “true wilderness areas.” When I asked Herrington to describe the park’s personality, he said, “The park is just neutral. People are, like, ‘Mother Nature’s out to kill you’ or ‘Mother Nature’s out to help you.’ It doesn’t care. It just does its thing.”

Herrington had turned fifty the previous day. He has a reddish-gray beard and bright-blue eyes, and shaves his head. He talks fast and drinks not much alcohol and no coffee. He is twice divorced, with an eleven-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter. He lives just outside the park, in a house that he built on a mountainside, with a catfish lake at the foot of his driveway and a yard full of chickens, which he keeps mainly for the eggs. To get there, you drive an infamous eleven-mile section of two-lane highway called the Dragon’s Tail, which has three hundred and eighteen curves. When I visited, in November, photographers had stationed themselves at pull-offs, to shoot pictures of motorcycle daredevils and a nose-to-bumper caravan of candy-colored Corvettes. Herrington told me, “If my kids ever want a motorcycle, I’ll tell them, ‘First, you’re gonna go work the Dragon’s Tail for a year with the Blount County Rescue Squad. Pick up all the pieces, see what that’s like.’ ”

Herrington grew up in Australia, where his mother is from, and south of Nashville, in the rural town of Thompson’s Station, the site of a Civil War battle. More than anything, he liked being outdoors. “I thought ‘survival’ was making arrowheads and wearing a loincloth around the woods, going barefoot,” he told me. In school, Herrington competed in wrestling. (He may have been drawn to martial arts because an uncle, Rowdy Herrington, directed the original “Road House.”) He also kayaked and climbed. In 1993, the day before he turned eighteen, Herrington was sport climbing in a state park near Chattanooga when a rock fell about sixty feet and broke his skull. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. His friends saw him collapse, unconscious. One of them, a cross-country runner, sprinted for help. Rescue was delayed because a responding park ranger had a heart attack during the hike in.

Herrington’s injury, a depression fracture, temporarily paralyzed much of the left side of his body, and derailed his goal of becoming an Army Ranger. Instead, he studied wildlife biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as he recovered from a cranioplasty. (There’s now a metal plate in his head.) He entered what he called his bushcraft phase. “I wore all wool clothes, carried a big axe,” he said. He travelled to Canada to study with survival instructors, and he read a lot: “The Forager’s Harvest,” “The Outdoor Survival Handbook,” “Six Ways In and Twelve Ways Out,” “98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive!” He told me, “When I get into something, I get really into it.”

In 1998, Herrington heard an interview, on NPR, with Rick Varner, who hunted feral hogs for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Varner described the creatures as diabolically cunning, destructive, and nocturnal. He would hike ten or twelve miles at night, hunting, and spend daylight hours in camp, reading. Some weeks, it rained every day. A lot of the time, his knees hurt. He would assemble and bait chain-link traps, which had been dropped by helicopter. The policy was to shoot and bury your catch. Critics complained about squandered meat, but Varner told NPR, “Nothing goes to waste in the wild.” He considered it payback when bears came across that “chunk of protein”—feral hogs are an invasive species.

To Herrington, Varner’s life sounded like “a boy’s dream.” He volunteered in the Smokies’ hog-hunting program, and called Varner Rambo Ricky. Soon, he got hired, and asked to be assigned to the Twentymile district, a remote posting near the Dragon’s Tail. Long stretches of solitude neither bothered him nor appeared to impair his sociability. Herrington is more gregarious and diplomatic—though perhaps not less introspective—than what you might expect from someone who’s spent so much time alone in the woods. One day, he told me, “Men typically have either a trust issue or an unworthiness thing. If it’s that unworthiness thing, you start to seek external validation through achievement, adventure, women, all that type of stuff.”

In 2008, Herrington became a Smokies law-enforcement ranger, energized by the thought of hunting poachers of ginseng and game. He often put his hand up for search-and-rescue missions, and realized that he wanted to be involved in SAR work for the rest of his life after he and Rambo Ricky found a pair of lost grandparents by blowing whistles, a low-tech piece of lifesaving gear. As the grandparents reunited with their family, Herrington had to step away and compose himself.

The Park Service closed Twentymile’s station. Herrington couldn’t think of anything worse than being posted to Gatlinburg, or saddled with “sneaking around campgrounds looking for dope smokers, babysitting tubers, or typing report after report.” While listening to a podcast called “Peace Revolution,” he decided that staying on for the next twenty-five years wasn’t worth a future pension of twelve hundred dollars a month. In 2013, he resigned, giving his written reason as “new chapter of life.” You sure? his boss asked. Until recently, a job with the federal government was one of the most stable in the United States. Herrington was sure. A month later, he filed incorporation papers for a new company, BigPig Outdoors, and became a wilderness educator.

The survivalism-and-bushcraft industry is expected to surpass three billion dollars by 2034. Herrington had no plans to turn BigPig into an elaborate survival school (those do exist); he just wanted to live an outdoors life, provide for his family, and help others reconnect to what we, as humans, already instinctively know how to do. Using his own near-death experience as an example, he stressed preparation and critical thinking over the kind of “primitive skills” that were hyped—dangerously, he thought—on reality television. In a life-threatening situation, nobody lost in the woods needed to be trying to make a bow and arrow. What that person did need to know was how to keep the body’s core temperature up, and how to build a fire in “real shitty weather.” The one item that Herrington would want with him during a backcountry emergency isn’t a big-ass knife—it’s a sleeping bag. He told me about a lost hiker who’d survived by simply “laying in his sleeping bag for four days.” A case that haunts him and others concerned a woman who got turned around in the Smokies while walking back to her car. She did what no one should do when lost: she kept walking. The search lasted for days and involved nearly two hundred people. Sharbs found the woman lying face up in shallow water, dead from hypothermia, wearing only leggings. Hypothermia can trick the body into thinking it’s burning up, and cause a victim to strip, a sign of imminent death known as paradoxical undressing. If she had stayed put, rescuers might have reached her in time. A simple trash bag—another low-tech piece of lifesaving gear—could have preserved her body heat: poke three holes in it and wear it like a poncho. Herrington likes to say, “If you can treat your injury and stay warm and hydrated, you’ve got a pretty good chance to make it out.”

At BigPig, Herrington’s students ranged from middle schoolers to game wardens. He taught land navigation, wilderness first aid, foraging. He customized courses for women’s groups, companies, and families, and trained prospective contestants of the Discovery Channel show “Naked and Afraid,” in which a man and a woman are stranded in a remote location without clothes, food, or water, and with one personal item each, and must work together to survive for three weeks. At R.E.I., he taught a free course, “Reality of Survival.” On BigPig’s blog, he published roundups of global search-and-rescue cases, often posting (and unpacking the correct responses to) hypotheticals. You slip and knock yourself out while deer hunting, and wake up disoriented; stranded by a freak snowstorm, you’re running low on food after three days in a backcountry shelter. Now what?

Herrington homesteaded. He ate daylilies, violet greens, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, greenbrier tips, sheep sorrel, thistle stalks. He learned how to make bamboo-pokeweed spring rolls, persimmon ice cream, spicebush muffins, dandelion jelly, pan-fried groundnuts, watercress soup, acorn cookies, roast squirrel glazed with honey and balsamic vinegar. If a wild hog came onto his property, he killed, butchered, and ate it, then freeze-dried the leftovers. He dried stalks of goldenrod and mint on racks. His interest in flowers led to teasing from “the high testosterone crowd,” he wrote on the BigPig blog, adding, “I have killed wild boar with knives, tracked armed fugitives, and had a couple cage fights, so I feel I have enough ‘man points’ built up to call bullshit.” The average male, he explained, had been culturally conditioned to think that “flowers are for girls, guns and hunting is for guys.” Flowers, he wrote, “are for everyone.” Much of the world’s food supply depends on them.

Disaster preparedness was also something that Herrington thought about a lot. He encouraged people to store food and water in case of catastrophe: “A trip to Costco can get you 50 pounds of beans and 50 pounds of rice providing 160,000+ calories for around $75.” His intention wasn’t to stoke fear but to promote self-reliance. “If you trace your lineage back,” he wrote, “you won’t have to go far to find members of your family that were living more independently than we do nowadays.”

Herrington was two years into his “new chapter of life” when he started missing search-and-rescue work. He approached his former boss, Steve Kloster, the Smokies’ chief ranger at the time, with a proposal to support the national park by creating an independent “all hazards” emergency-response team of élite outdoors athletes who were willing to step away from their jobs and families in, say, the middle of the night, or on a holiday, and in weather that you wouldn’t let your dog out in, to save the life of a stranger. They would train for the gnarliest missions: swift-water rescue, long-distance carry-outs, winter rescue, and technical rescue, which involves complex systems of ropes, pulleys, and carabiners. Herrington wanted to name the team BUSAR, for Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue. Kloster liked the idea. He asked Herrington how he planned to keep his guys motivated. Herrington told him, “Leave that to me.”

In the U.S., SAR missions overwhelmingly rely on volunteers, Chris Boyer, the executive director of the National Association for Search and Rescue, told me. “It’s the local Safeway butcher, it’s the lawyer, the teacher.” Herrington’s first recruit was one of his survival-class students, Matt Jernigan, a Knoxville native and a hard-core mountain biker who worked a high-paying job in software product management but had only ever wanted to be a park ranger. Jernigan had hiked all hundred and fifty trails in the Smokies. The moment Herrington mentioned BUSAR, Jernigan said, “I’m in.” He’s the team’s president.

Other members came by word of mouth, and occasionally by happenstance. Dee, the family physician, had no formal connection to the park, though he and his wife, Whitney, a pediatrician, avidly hiked there with their four children. The Dees live in Maryville, which, like Gatlinburg, is one of the park’s “gateway” communities. One day, in 2019, Dee, who’s in his mid-forties, was on Facebook and clicked on an image of a waterfall, which took him to BUSAR’s page. A recruitment poster, whose language Herrington had borrowed from an apocryphal Ernest Shackleton ad, read “Experienced outdoor athletes wanted for hazardous work. No wages. Long hours. Adverse weather. High level of fitness required.” The team worked out together every Tuesday evening near Dee’s home. A photo showed a couple dozen men and women in matching neon-yellow gear, standing resolutely on a mountaintop. “Something inside me kind of leapt,” he told me.

Dee had no spare time. But, after three days of being unable to stop thinking about “rescuing people in the woods,” he e-mailed the address on the Facebook account, writing, “I don’t know anything about search and rescue, but the idea of crawling through the mountains, rescuing people, really appeals to me.” Herrington invited Dee out to eat with some of the team, and when that went well he invited him to a workout.

Herrington and his teammates designed their workouts to be brutal—every BUSAR I’ve met has confessed to craving what one called “purposeful shared suffering.” A team member would concoct an exercise; the rest would do it. The exercises mimicked the demands of difficult backcountry missions. Someone who could walk up and over a picnic table for thirty minutes, wearing a twenty-pound pack, with a fifty-pound sandbag slung over his shoulder, would likely be able to help tote a rescue litter, even if, as once happened, the patient weighed four hundred pounds.

The fittest park rangers could do that, too; there simply weren’t enough of them. A tricky rescue may warrant dozens of people, possibly more than are on duty and available at any given time. The Park Service required that a ranger assigned to “arduous” duty be able to walk three miles on flat ground, carrying a forty-five-pound pack, in less than forty-five minutes. The arduous pack test was how BUSARs warmed up. Herrington told me, “In ten minutes, I can gauge whether a candidate has the mental and physical fortitude to do this job. There’s a certain personality that that appeals to.”

Most of Dee’s strength was in his lower body—he’s an ardent road cyclist. He had no trouble passing the pack hike or the picnic-table exercise, or, as BUSAR’s fitness test also required, completing at least fifteen two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound dead lifts within a minute. Then came the burpee pullups.

“Technically, we’re just two people having a conversation at a coffee shop, but if we talk loud enough the room might collectively think, Wow, they should have a podcast.”

Cartoon by Colin Tom

A burpee pullup entails lying belly flat, popping straight up and into a pullup—chin above the bar, please; none of that Marjorie Taylor Greene fish-flop flailing around—and then dropping back to the belly, in one fluid motion. The exercise works all the major muscles. The BUSAR test called for fifty burpee pullups within ten minutes—while wearing a twenty-pound pack. Dee failed. He went home devastated. His wife told him, “Johnny, I’m just gonna say it. You need to train and do what it takes to pass this test, because I’ve never seen anything light you up like this has.”

Dee trained for months. When his family vacationed in the backcountry of Alaska, he took rubber resistance bands. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, and I’m wrapping them around trees,” he told me. He passed the second tryout and became a BUSAR. “I started from absolute zero and just ate it up,” he said. He developed such an aptitude for technical rescue that he now teaches the subject for the national parks. Last spring, when the Smokies’ longtime medical director retired, the park asked Dee, who by then was BUSAR’s vice-president, to replace him. He agreed on the condition that, during SAR missions, he be considered “one of the grunts.” Working search and rescue reminded him of the decision that he and his wife made to become foster parents, and then adoptive parents, after they’d had two biological children of their own: it felt like the right thing to do.

The world’s first national park, Yellowstone, was established in 1872, in what were then the territories of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The writer and conservationist Wallace Stegner later called reserving the country’s signature landscapes for public enjoyment “the best idea we ever had.” There are now sixty-three national parks and hundreds of park “units”—monuments, historic battlefields, scenic roadways, seashores—all run by the National Park Service, under the Department of the Interior.

Funding and staffing aren’t keeping pace with the popularity of the parks, which hit a record three hundred and thirty-two million recreational visits in 2024. By the end of that year, there was a twenty-three-billion-dollar maintenance backlog. Then, in 2025, the Park Service lost twenty-four per cent of its permanent staff; at least a thousand positions were slashed by the Department of Government Efficiency. “This isn’t becoming more ‘efficient,’ ” Phil Francis, who for eight years served as the Smokies’ deputy superintendent and for three as acting superintendent, told me. “The staff can’t do as much as they once did, because there’s just not as many of them.” He described what is happening to the national parks as “death by a thousand cuts.”

The most recent shutdown of the federal government was also the longest: October 1st to November 12th. President Donald Trump insisted that the national parks remain open—at least skeletally. The National Parks Conservation Association declared that the Administration “considerably exacerbated” the Park Service’s resource crisis by “pushing remaining staff to their limits.” The looming threat of a full shutdown hit the Smokies just in time for leaf-peeping season and fall break, a particularly busy period that helps local businesses survive through the winter. Tourists spend $2.2 billion annually in the area, making the Smokies, according to Forbes, the most economically valuable of the national parks. A consortium that included Sevier County, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and a prominent nonprofit, Friends of the Smokies, stepped in and kept the park running.

The Smokies, which was established in 1934, has never imposed an entrance fee, but in 2023 it started charging for parking—five dollars a day, forty for the year. The fee generates five million dollars annually. Some of the proceeds were used to create a Preventative Search and Rescue team, or PSAR, which has seven full-time positions. These rangers educate visitors about avoidable behaviors that may, in turn, trigger a SAR mission, which can be risky and expensive. (Between 2019 and 2023, the Park Service spent twenty-two million dollars on search and rescue. Rescuees aren’t asked to pay anything, even when carelessness or ignorance caused the problem.) I spent the better part of one autumn day watching Joshua Albritton, the Smokies’ PSAR chief, genially engage with dozens of hikers on Alum Cave Trail, a popular five-and-a-half-mile route that leads to a backcountry lodge. He’d ask if they had enough water, and how far they planned to walk. Just above a steep, winding staircase at Arch Rock, a picturesque landmark about a mile and a half in, he told a family with small children, “The terrain gets a lot more difficult at this point, just for your information.”

When the park needs rescue help, it issues a callout to a local emergency-services network, which includes BUSAR, whose members receive mission requests in a Signal chat that Herrington set up. More than half of the search-and-rescue workers who show up for the most trying missions are BUSARs. Currently, there are nineteen of them, all men. Herrington leads the recruiting, and encourages nicknames. Big Bill is Bill Ivey, a Smokies wildlife ranger and a marine reservist who is six feet six. Jernigan is Jernigator, who, this year, at age fifty-five, left his software career to become a wilderness E.M.T. and a park ranger, the life he’d wanted all along. Captain Morgan is Andrew Morgan, a physician’s assistant and a former member of the Army Special Forces. Superman is Ken Miller, a retired surgeon who serves with nine local, state, and federal SAR organizations but—so goes a joke—assures his wife that he belongs to only one. (Several years ago, when Miller turned eighty, the guys were so excited about throwing him a surprise party that they forgot to invite him.) Lando, Ben Landkammer, grew up in Montana and trains canines. Silkwood, Mark Silkwood, is also ex-Special Forces, and an Army contractor. Cody Watson, BUSAR’s quartermaster, recently retired early from the Air National Guard; he’s an E.M.T., as is John Danner. Zack Copeland, who chairs BUSAR’s board, is a former wildlife biologist turned poultry farmer. Howitzer, Andrew Howe, is a civil engineer and a competitive mountain biker. Kelly Street is a Knoxville lawyer and a former military-intelligence officer. Caleb Edmiston is a chiropractor who, like Herrington, has competed in mixed martial arts. Greg Grieco played football at the University of Tennessee and now runs a nonprofit that rescues bear cubs. Obi-Wad, Jeff Wadley—a pastor, an author, and a former Civil Air Patrol officer who’s been working SAR missions in the Smokies for more than forty-five years—teaches courses on “lost-person behavior” and may be the greatest living expert on airplane crashes in the park. Daz, Andrew Randazzo, started a company that provides continuing education for medical-industry professionals; he did emergency-response work in New York City during the COVID-19 outbreak, and near the border of Syria and Turkey after the earthquakes in 2023. Ski is Brian Borkowski, who flies Black Hawk helicopters for the Tennessee Army National Guard.

Sharbs is a critical-care flight medic for the Guard. He’s often the guy at the end of Ski’s rescue cable. BUSAR’s unofficial motto, “Right foot!,” derives from “RTFOOT,” an acronym inspired by a response that Sharbs once gave when a teammate asked how a mission had turned out: “Rescued the fuck out of them.” Every prospective member of BUSAR must pass Herrington’s winter-survival class. The final exam requires students to build a fire in the woods after having been submerged in a frigid creek. BUSARs have been known to retake the course for fun.

The Smokies, like other national parks, pays some outside search-and-rescue forces an hourly wage, ranging from about twenty-five to thirty-three dollars. But a third of BUSARs take no pay at all, and the income is so negligible that Herrington doesn’t mention it when he recruits. “Here’s the thing,” he told me. “My guys don’t have to be here. They’re here because they want to be.”

BUSARs always roll for a child, or for someone with dementia. Most members have a spouse or kids at home. Big Bill’s wife, Jennie Ivey, a professor of equine nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Tennessee’s Institute of Agriculture, told me that her husband got involved in BUSAR when their children were little: “It was, like, ‘What do you mean you need to go out again? It’s a volunteer thing!’ But it was really meaningful for Bill to find that community. And to know that you’re giving back? If our kids were hurt, I’d want somebody to go.”

One Sunday in August of 2019, J. R. Huber, who worked in the residential-mortgage industry in Knoxville, took his twin daughters, Peyton and Lauren, for a short hike in the Smokies. The girls were fourteen. They chose a moderate trail, to Fern Branch Falls—four miles round trip. Huber wanted a quick in-and-out so that he could get home in time to play a soccer match. They carried water but little else. Peyton, a promising soccer player who was starting her freshman year of high school, ran up ahead, to take a selfie at the top of the waterfall. Her dad had just opened his mouth to warn her to be careful when she slipped. “I could see her reach for—there was nothing to reach for,” he told me. “The vision that will not ever leave my mind is my daughter in the air, falling.”

Peyton landed about twenty feet below, on a narrow rock ledge. Huber clawed through underbrush to reach her. She was bleeding from a gash in her head, but she was conscious. She told her dad, “I’m sorry!” He told her, “You’re alive!” Her left wrist was broken; her left femur had snapped. The femur is the human body’s longest, strongest bone, and among the most agonizing to break. Peyton kept saying, “I want to die!”

Cartoon by Roz Chast

Huber sent Lauren up the mountain, to try for a cellphone signal. He knew that he had to get Peyton away from the water, to keep her dry and warm. Even in temperate conditions, trauma can cause hypothermia. (Organs shut down as the body loses heat; think of a person walking through a house, turning off the lights.) “I’m going to have to carry you,” Huber told Peyton. When he picked her up by the armpits—“like Simba in ‘The Lion King,’ ” she told me—she could see the grotesque deformity of her leg, which was “dangling.”

Huber carried Peyton off the ledge and into the woods, about ten feet away. He used some of their drinking water to clean her head wound. Beyond that, there wasn’t much that he could do but hold her head in his lap, tell her to take deep breaths, and play Kenny Chesney songs on his phone. Lauren came back. She’d been able to call 911. “They’re on their way, but it’s going to be forever,” she told her dad and sister. “They have to assemble a team.”

Every search-and-rescue mission begins with an investigation. Who needs help and why? Where are they, or where were they last seen? How old are they? What kind of physical shape are they in? What are they carrying? The incident commander—always a park ranger—may order a “hasty,” in which a scout, or two, gets on scene, assesses the situation, and radios out details that will help determine the size and nature of the response. Sharbs did the hasty for Peyton. He crawled through stinging nettles to where she lay, beside a log. When he saw the waterfall, he considered her lucky for having landed where she did. If she’d missed the ledge, she’d have been “deader ’n Dillinger,” he told me. He zipped Peyton into an emergency blanket and started an I.V. He was authorized by radio to administer the maximum amount of painkillers for her size and age. Huber told me, “It was still never enough.”

There’s a saying in SAR: rescue is not imminent. Park staff and outside search-and-rescue workers may be busy on other calls, or they may have to drive all the way around, or through, the park just to reach the staging area and start hiking in. Peyton’s team eventually arrived with a Stokes basket, a lipped titanium litter that has netting and straps to secure a body during difficult transport. They wore helmets and carried ropes and harnesses, and their waistbands were racked with carabiners and gloves.

The team decided that the best way out was down the front of the waterfall. Huber watched them unfurl ropes and design rigging, later describing the system to me as “this contraption that they created on the fly.” Tech rescue, in fact, requires considerable—and consistent—practice. I recently spent a day watching one such practice at Newfound Gap, a scenic overlook where President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally dedicated the Smokies, in September, 1940. Two dozen rangers, BUSARs, and park volunteers situated themselves on a service road flanked by a steep wooded slope above and another below. At the direction of Albritton, the PSAR chief, the teams mountain-goated up and down the pitches, which were slick with autumn leaves. They brushed up on the alpine-butterfly knot, the Prusik, the figure eight, the Distel hitch. In one drill, several team members stood forty yards upslope, pulling, as others below guided and balanced a silicone dummy in a litter. “Ready to haul!” the person at the bottom would yell. Someone positioned roughly mid-slope would repeat, “Ready to haul!”

“Up slow!”

“Up slow!”

“Stop!”

“Stop!”

“Reset!”

“Reset!”

At one point, Albritton announced a hypothetical: a broken femur. The team fitted a dummy with a traction splint. Ethan Schwartz, a park ranger and an E.M.T. who’d been telling us about having lived in a South American rain forest where he adopted a howler monkey named Paula, explained, to newer members, “We’re preventing increasing muscle contractions and spasms that would cause the sharp, severed bone to puncture the femoral artery.” A patient can bleed to death without the bone ever breaking the skin.

A traction splint can ease the pain. This proved untrue for Peyton. As the team lowered her down the waterfall, buckled into her litter, the basket unavoidably bumping the rock wall, she screamed repeatedly at Sharbs, “I hate you, John!,” which even her horrified father had to admit was kind of funny. Sharbs later told me, “I was, like, ‘Yeah, I get it. I’m causing you a lot of pain right now. But we’re also saving your life. So suck it up, buttercup.’ ”

It got dark. Peyton’s rescuers turned on their headlamps. They mounted her litter on a large treaded wheel and, where they could, rolled her through the forest, which resounded with crickets and frogs. They inched her across a rushing creek, on a log bridge barely as wide as the litter, and, ultimately, to a waiting ambulance, which took her to a medevac chopper.

Peyton had been asking if she’d be able to go to soccer practice on Monday. “No, honey,” Sharbs told her. She missed her freshman year of play but started, as a goalie, for her remaining three years of high school, setting Tennessee’s state record for shutouts. She now starts for Liberty University. In 2025, she was named her conference’s Goalkeeper of the Year. When I called her family, in November, Peyton’s team had just won the conference championship and was en route to the N.C.A.A. tournament.

That wasn’t the only waterfall story I heard in the Smokies. Watson, BUSAR’s quartermaster, had recently discovered that he was neighbors with Nadi Gray, who, in July, 2020, took his then wife and some friends into the park to Spruce Flats Falls, a multipart cascade with a shallow pool, thirty-five miles west of where Peyton went down. Barefoot and wearing only swim trunks, Gray climbed to the fourth level, then went higher, looking for a fifth. He fell and landed forty feet below, on his back, on a log. A friend who witnessed this thought that he was dead.

Gray spent so much time in the backcountry alone that he carried a personal SOS beacon. But the beacon was in his backpack, which he’d left at the bottom of the falls. He later recalled “negotiating” with himself about when to become conscious. One half of his brain would say to the other, Are you ready?, and the other half would answer, No. “At the moment I said yes, all of the pain and the noise and the sight flooded in,” he told me. He was able to tell his wife how to activate the SOS beacon.

Two BUSARs—Jernigan and Lando—arrived with a park ranger, followed by Herrington and several others. Somehow, Gray had wound up in the water; his veins had contracted to the point that the ranger, who was a paramedic, couldn’t place an I.V. for painkillers. A needle had to be jammed directly into Gray’s shin.

“O.K., so I’m twelve. Why do you always drag my age into it? I never drag your age into it.”

Cartoon by Barbara Smaller

I’d been trying to meet up with Gray when Herrington, Jernigan, and I happened to run into him one night at Peaceful Side Social, a restaurant in Townsend. Gray and a friend, and their husky mixes, were finishing dinner at a picnic table. “Last time I saw you, you were—I was the guy that had the plastic over you,” Herrington told him. “We made a little plastic tent to keep you warm, because you were getting hypothermic.”

“I was in the river for three hours!” Gray said.

Gray, who is in his early sixties, with silver hair and a perpetual tan, grew up in Nashville. He changed his name from Scott to Nadi after spending time in India, where he travels for work. He described himself to us as an experienced outdoorsman, and said that whenever he went ice kayaking he’d make himself swim, to remind his brain that his body could “handle” the cold.

“You probably don’t remember, but I was setting up a rope system,” Herrington told him.

“I do remember! And I was terrified!” Gray said. He had fallen in what he called a deep “slot” in the earth. The SAR team planned to raise him up enough that he could be carried out via a manway. “I was terrified because—have you ever broken a rib?” Gray asked us. (He had broken seven.) “This arm? Completely tore away from my clavicle and shoulder. I had bleeding in my lungs. My pelvis wasn’t broken, but it really was not happy. Burst eardrum. Sprained wrist.” The Tennessee Army National Guard ended up sending a Black Hawk and dropping a long hoist cable. Gray remembered a flight medic standing over him “like a Stormtrooper.”

The day after we saw Gray, I visited him at home. He was living in a campground on the peaceful side, in an elegantly outfitted Airstream, next to a well-organized trailer stocked with outdoors gear. The Airstream had a Kamala Harris decal on the back. This had cost Gray a couple of friendships in the campground. He didn’t mind.

“The glass isn’t to keep shoplifters out—it’s to keep that guy in.”

Cartoon by Ellie Black

Over coffee, he told me about his YouTube channel, where he pairs meditations and poems that he’s written with footage shot in national parks, and he showed me his collection of first-edition books by John Muir, and some of the tchotchkes that he’d brought home from his travels: rocks, river glass, a tiny Buddha. “I tell people, ‘Every year, you should find yourself in a place where you are completely naked in the wild. The first time you do it, be somewhere where there’s no chance anybody will see you. You will discover how completely out of your element you are,’ ” he said. “When I go out into the wild by myself, it’s not because I want to be naked. It’s because I want to know who I am.”

It worried Gray that digitalization was creating an “alternative reality.” He went on, “And people rely on it! If it ever breaks, the true crisis of society will be people not having any capability to cope. We have to accept that it’s going to be non-governmental approaches that solve problems. BUSAR is a perfect example. Most people don’t know about the cuts to the parks, because, on the surface, the Interior Secretary has said, ‘Keep the window dressing, everybody! Keep the buses and trains running.’ Yet they’re cutting the biologists and the rangers. People that maintain trails in the backcountry are unheralded—they go out with chainsaws, and on horseback, and clear trees and repair trails. If you don’t have that, what happens within a generation is that the park falls apart.”

At busy times, BUSAR “pre-deploys,” which means hanging out in the Smokies in case something happens. BUSAR and the park have been talking about pre-deploying more. The logistics would need to be worked out—BUSAR is a nonprofit with no full-time staff. Park rangers drive automobiles from the federal fleet; BUSARs show up in their own vehicles. Herrington has a 2009 Honda Pilot with two hundred and forty-nine thousand miles on it, a crack running across the windshield, and shredded armrests. BUSARs buy their own gas and stock much of their own equipment. They need new emergency radios. They have no headquarters. Their skills must be continually practiced and recertified, which costs money. The organization relies on donations and grants, but the most it ever collected in a single year was fifty-six thousand dollars, in 2022. BUSARs would rather hike all night in a blizzard than fund-raise, or do admin.

One Saturday in mid-November, Team BUSAR convened in the woods in Tallassee, Tennessee, just outside the park, on the peaceful side, for a quarterly training. A friend of Herrington’s lets him use private land for that and for BigPig’s classes. Training lasts all day, and, afterward, anyone who wants to camp spends the night. It was just after nine in the morning when I got there and parked on a dead-end dirt road, behind BUSAR’s equipment trailer. To the right, flat ground fronted a creek; to the left rose steep woodland. Twenty yards up a visible manway stood a semi-open tepee structure cloaked by a salvaged parachute. There was seating around a fire pit. At the manway’s entrance, a rope swing hung like a storybook doorbell.

Several BUSARs had already set up tents; Sharbs brought a one-person cot pod. My tent got pitched near the creek. At the other end of camp loomed a gigantic khaki military tent, which Watson and Herrington had erected the previous day so that the team’s children could bunk together. Herrington collectively calls them cobra kids—the cobra is a BUSAR symbol. The kids ranged in age from four to twelve; the military tent was soon being referred to as the Thunderdome, so constant was the ruckus.

Watson unpacked tables and chairs and a grill and coolers and butane cannisters and groceries and ice. Copeland, who competes in chili cook-offs, got ready to make a huge pot of chili. The forecast called for overnight temperatures in the low forties and little to no rain. Sharbs told me that at the last quarterly training it had “monsooned.” Training, like searches and rescues, happens in every kind of weather.

Around midafternoon, after refreshers on tech rescue, land navigation, and tracking, the BUSARs loaded into vehicles and were driven a couple of miles away. They were dropped off with instructions to hike, in pairs, to predetermined coördinates in the forest, where they would find Herrington playing the part of a schoolteacher who’d fallen ill while leading an elementary-school field trip.

Herrington and eight kids and I walked to the designated point, to wait. He told the children not to be alarmed when he started acting “out of it.” As the first pair of yellow helmets appeared in the forest—Captain Morgan and Kelly Street—Herrington curled into the fetal position and went silent, shivering.

Cap knelt beside him and checked his vital signs. Street asked the kids the patient’s name, and the kids, giggling, said, “Mrs. Herrington!” Cap pulled a BUSAR beanie from his pack and put it on Herrington’s head. Street took out an emergency blanket, and he and Cap wrapped Herrington in it, insulating him from the “cold” ground. Street turned and said, “All right, kids, can y’all help me collect some dry sticks?”

Sharbs and Lando arrived, with Lando’s working canine, Kato, a German shepherd who wore a BUSAR harness and yellow-rimmed goggles. Street, kneeling two feet away from Herrington’s calves, constructed a small cone of twigs. As he worked, he kept up the act with the kids: “Where’re you from?” They replied, “BUSAR Academy.”

Street built the fire the way Herrington had taught everyone, using tinder, fatwood, and Vaseline-soaked cotton balls, hit with a spark from a ferro rod. Every BUSAR carries personal fire-starter kits and a twenty-five-pound pack filled with gear: headlamps, extra batteries, survival blanket, chem light, grid reader, pens, hemostatic gauze, trash bag, dry bag, gaiters, gloves, spork, M.R.E.s, flagging tape, two types of tourniquets, HotHands, 550 cord, multi-tool, folding saw, microspikes. Showing me all of this one day, Sharbs held up a small item and told me what Herrington had told him: “This is the best fire starter in the history of man.” It was a Bic lighter.

Jernigan and Daz arrived. They strung a tarp, on paracord, at an angle between trees, sheltering Herrington and the fire. Watson played dispatcher: “BUSAR One, Seven Hundred.”

“Seven Hundred, this is BUSAR One,” Cap said.

“Sit-rep?”

“We have a fifty-year-old female, presently hypothermic.”

“Location?”

Sharbs read off their coördinates, which he’d written in a field notebook.

Shelter in place overnight, dispatch instructed. Within minutes, makeshift structures mushroomed in the woods.

The sun was setting. The kids were getting punchy. As Watson casually quizzed them about hypothermia, one mentioned an insect that “climbs up your pants and bites your balls.” Watson, suppressing a laugh, said, “Stop it, watch your mouth.”

Herrington came out of character and lay flat on his back with both hands behind his head as if at home on the sofa, watching a football game. He looked so cozy next to the fire that the kids clamored to get under the shelter with him. Then he jumped up, assessed the BUSARs’ shelters one by one, and said, “All right, break it down!”

As Street dismantled his setup, I asked him why he’d joined BUSAR. He told me that he’d served in the Army from 1995 to 2005, then got out, got married, went to law school, had kids. “What I realized as I got into my forties was that I wasn’t done serving,” he said. “So this scratches that itch. It’s really low on bullshit, and I enjoy being a part of something that’s useful.” Glancing at his teammates, he said, “I’m surrounded by people who are useful.” Then he showed Miller and me the logger’s knot that his granddaddy had taught him in childhood.

Half the team stayed to camp. We made a fire at the tepee, drank beer, and stayed up late. Lando described the quarterly trainings and campouts as BUSAR’s “sinew.” They were still processing their most harrowing rescue in recent memory, which began on September 27, 2024, the day that Hurricane Helene reached the Smokies. An SOS beacon from a personal device pinged 911, alerting rangers to a crisis at Tricorner Knob, where a diabetic hiker was gravely sick, and deteriorating. Hiking to Tricorner takes at least four hours—in good weather. As in much of the park, all-terrain vehicles are of no use, because the trails are so rugged and narrow. Choppers couldn’t penetrate the cloud cover. The trail was a river. The Tricorner mission lasted thirty-six hours and required dozens of people. “Everybody was smoked,” Big Bill told me. When he got home, he fell asleep eating a burrito.

In search and rescue, a mission may require a body bag. Corpse recovery is part of the job. The Tricorner hiker survived. He reached out to the park, to say thanks. SAR workers rarely hear from the people they save, or even learn whether they ultimately survive, or how their lives turn out. I did hear about a guy who got rescued in 1974 and whose mother took a poinsettia to park headquarters every Christmas thereafter until she died, in 2020. Now the son delivers the poinsettia.

During the campfire portion of BUSAR’s quarterly training, Herrington sometimes asks his teammates to throw written questions into a hat. Everyone is expected to answer. Tell us about your craziest rescue. Tell us your worst memory from childhood. Copeland once said that BUSARs tend to be “first responders, military, and former athletes with a smattering of childhood trauma.” Herrington told me that members join “for whatever reason, but they all stay for the brotherhood.” When one member deployed to Kosovo, the others mowed his family’s grass. When Herrington was juggling a divorce, a sick parent, and a busted transmission, the team pooled money to help him pay legal bills. The memory still choked him up. “In my dad’s era,” he told me, “the only emotion you were allowed to express as a man was anger.”

The kids were up at daybreak, congregating beneath the parachute, having already swung on the rope swing, picked on one another, cried a little, and gotten into a cooler of sodas. One was eating sour cream and shredded cheddar for breakfast until a dog slurped it off her plate. Another made a “rifle” out of duct tape and sticks. Two had turned huge dried leaves into “fairy hats.”

Watson cooked scrambled eggs and bacon. Daz made coffee. Lando had gone home to get Koa, his Belgian Malinois puppy, whom he kept on a leash. (“He does bite work.”) The head of Sharbs’s cot pod had collapsed overnight, and he’d gone on sleeping, at an angle, with one hairy bare leg protruding from the zipper. When he emerged, he told us about having been attacked by a donkey and a rooster, in separate incidents, which led somebody to suggest that he reëxamine his relationship to nature. The group had planned to jump off a bridge and into a river—one kid said, “Good, now I’ll know what hypothermia feels like”—but time ran out. Watson had an ambulance shift; a couple of kids had wrestling matches. Before breaking camp, the fathers and their children lined up in a row, like a ground-search team, and walked forward together, scanning for forgotten items and trash.

Herrington has long admired a passage from a book called “Last Child in the Woods,” by Richard Louv: “Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart.” He and Sharbs often talked about how cool it would be if even one cobra kid grew up to become a BUSAR. The Smokies weren’t going anywhere. The week after we left the woods, a woman who lived in one of the gateway communities was driving to her bank job when a bald eagle dropped a cat through her windshield. A three-hundred-and-seventy-five-pound bear got stuck on the roof of Ripley’s Motion Blaster. The bear survived; Big Bill participated in the rescue. The cat had run out of lives. ♦