By Joel Willits

Bellevue Reporter

There are plenty of things that Newport boys cross country coach Paul Turner can worry about, but his athletes trusting one another in a race isn’t one of them.

That’s because trusting your teammates on the course isn’t nearly as tough after you’ve entrusted them with your life.

The reason? Twelve of Turner’s runners are members of the King County Explorers Search and Rescue Team.

What started with only two runners participating three years ago – Neil Baunsgard and Yazan Fattaleh – has now spread to an even dozen of Newport’s cross country runners who volunteer their time to search, and often times rescue, stranded or injured hikers across King County.

“They are really an eclectic group of guys with a lot of interests,” Turner said Tuesday while his team warmed up. “They hike, mountain climb, rock climb and help people. It’s been fun to work with that as a coach.”

Baunsgard is the ringleader of the crew, Turner said, and the one who got each of the 12 Newport volunteers into Explorer Search and Rescue (ESAR).

Baunsgard, a senior captain and state qualifier last season, first entered the program after an older woman he met while hiking told him about it. Partnering with Fattaleh, the pair entered what every member of the team now describes as the worst ordeal: the training.

A series of five weekend sessions north of Monroe at Camp Berkley, the training culminates with the dreaded “Course Two,” a weekend practice mission that tests all the skills necessary for entry into the ESAR.

“You’re in the woods with your partner for the whole weekend,” Baunsgard said. “It’s raining, you have to walk through swamps and you are soaking wet. It’s completely miserable, but once you are done, you are so excited.”

The training, which teaches the hopefuls navigation, first aid, survival skills and search techniques, comes with pass/fail criteria. It’s normal for people to fail once, Baunsgard said, and the difficulty of the training helps to weed out those who don’t have a strong passion for search and rescue.

But that doesn’t make it any easier heading back to course two, says Andrew Coover, another Newport senior on the team.

“It was a very intense experience in my life,” said Coover, who went through training his sophomore year. “Michael [Hutchins, Coover’s parter] failed our first one. It was tough for us to go back for another course two because we already knew it was going to be miserable.”

But as soon as the training is over, Coover said, you get to start doing missions.

Anytime someone needs assistance, a page goes out to the beepers that each team member carries. Its then up to that team member to respond, Baunsgard explained, but it’s usually the same 20-30 people that show up for each mission.

“The searches just have such a wide range,” he said. “There’s fun searches where you just go out, find the person and package them out. And then there are some where its 33 degrees, raining and miserable.”

The varying nature of the team has given each of the 12 Newport participants distinct memorable missions.

Senior Ryan Steele’s first mission after training was an evidence search. The team was called out, Steele said, in a mission to find a T-shirt that may have helped solve a crime.

“We had a huge field of blackberry bushes,” Steele recalled, “and they gave us machetes and rakes and just told us to go for it.”

One of Coover’s most memorable missions was one that received quite a bit of notoriety. Coover and Baunsgard were paged at 2 a.m. last year to held aid in the search for Michael Schreck, the 47-year-old Issaquah man who went missing for three days after running on Cougar Mountain.

“When we got the page, it was a Friday night, so we figured we might as well go for it,” Coover said. “We were the first ones to respond at the scene besides the cops who were already down there. We got assigned with dog handlers to search for him and we basically blazed through all the trails at Cougar Mountain.”

Schreck later returned to his home uninjured.

Not all the missions are memorable for the right reasons, however. Many of the Newport runners have been on body recovery missions, including Baunsgard, who spent his 17th birthday recovering two bodies from an avalanche.

“It’s not always fun,” he said. “But knowing you are helping families who are going through the grieving process, that’s really the best part.”

One aspect of the team that’s often overlooked is the danger posed to the ESAR members themselves. Anything can happen at any time, team members say. There’s even been missions where the rescuers have been injured themselves, Baunsgard said, although each member of the team takes the utmost precautions to avoid injuries.

Danger just comes with the job.

“I think we all relish it just a little,” Steele admitted.

Every team member admits the ESAR team gives them the opportunity to bond, which definitely strengthens the cross country program, in Turner’s opinion. For a team hoping to qualify for state in arguably Washington’s toughest 4A league, Newport can use any advantage it can.

“It certainly helps us,” Turner said. “When they’re out there, they’re relying on a group of people. And when they come out in races, they’re relying on those same guys. That connection is something that really helps our team.”

Not only do they do it for the connection, the members say, but also they do it for the thrill, for helping others.

“It’s survival to the max out there,” Fattaleh said. “You really don’t know what to expect. It’s an experience you wouldn’t get in any other volunteer organization.”

Joel Willits can be reached at 425-453-5045 or at jwillits@bellevuereporter.com.