North Routt Fire, Routt County Search and Rescue and Classic Air Medical worked together Monday afternoon to rescue an injured 32-year-old hunter who had fallen and dislocated his knee three miles south of Pearl Lake.

“It was a team effort,” said Harry Sandler, who was Search and Rescue’s incident commander on the call. “North Routt Fire was a big part, as well as Classic Air Medical, and we were able to work together with all three agencies. I also believe Colorado Parks and Wildlife might have had one of their officers helping out as well.”

The archery hunter lives in Routt County. He reportedly stumbled over some fallen trees and was unable to get himself out of the backcountry after dislocating his knee just after noon Monday. He managed to contact his mother, who lives in North Routt, using his cell phone.

“His mother walked into the North Routt Fire Station around 12:45 p.m. with her cell phone activated and her son on the line,” said Matt Mathisen, the North Routt Fire chief. “She said, ‘I have an emergency. My son is a hunter. He’s 32 years old and he’s south of Pearl Lake. I have him on the phone, and he needs to be rescued.'”

Mathisen said the hunter was prepared for the outdoors with plenty of food and water. He was appropriately dressed, and he had lots of batteries for his cell phone, which made finding him much easier. When he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to walk out, that’s when he called his mom.

When she arrived at the station, one of North Routt’s emergency medical technicians was able to talk to her son while Mathisen was busy with dispatch arranging a page out to Classic Air and providing the coordinates the pilot needed to find the injured hunter.

Mathisen also paged Routt County Search and Rescue at the time, knowing that North Routt would need help packaging and moving the hunter to the aircraft once it arrived.

“The pilot from Classic Air was phenomenal,” Mathisen said. “Being able to find a landing zone below the patient, so that when we carried him out, we could go downhill instead of uphill, so it would be easier to load him on the aircraft.”

Sandler said the hunter was about two or three miles south of the dam at Pearl Lake in terrain littered with fallen trees and steep pitches.

“Due to the temperatures and the elevation, Classic Air had to be pretty conscious of their weight and their power limitations,” Sandler said. “They were able to find a landing zone, I think, about a half mile away, and they were able to drop off their medical providers. They then went and picked up EMTs from the North Routt Fire Protection District, brought them to that same landing zone and also picked up two of our rescuers and brought them in. But that group still had to hike through some pretty nasty off-trail conditions just to get to the patient.”

The first medical provider was on scene around 2:35 p.m., but it took another 30 or 40 minutes to get everyone shuttled in via the helicopter. Mathisen said those times would have been longer if crews from North Routt and Search and Rescue would have hiked to the patient.

“We were both 90 minutes of hiking time before we could get to the patient,” Mathisen said. “That’s why immediately Classic Air was paged. They took the mission and they were on top of the area with two of my crew members, and their crew members were searching within 25 minutes of the page.”

Once medical personal arrived, they were able to stabilize the patient while other crews used ATVs to bring in additional equipment. Once the patient was stabilized, a crew of six rescuers carried the man over the rough terrain to the landing zone where he was loaded and taken to UCHealth Yampa Valley Medical Center.

“It takes everybody,” Mathisen said. “It’s just not one organization, but I was happy to be the commander of it, and that went very well, and kudos to all the crews. But again … one of the points is, if you’re going in the backcountry like he was, he had told somebody where he was going, he had signed the logbook at Pearl Lake, properly dressed, cell phone, food and water — so he was prepared to stay the night.”