by Luke Mehall
It started with a professor lost in the mountains of the Gunnison backcountry in the 1960s and it’s grown to be the top college-based mountain rescue team in the United States.
“We don’t have an exact record of when the team started, but the story is that a professor was lost in the mountains and a group of students and teachers banded together to find him,” Chip Lamar, team leader of the Western State College (WSC) Mountain Rescue Team said. “These types of searches continued to happen and then the team got involved in more technical, rock climbing rescues.”