“That Others May Live.” It’s a powerful statement spelled out across our logo and shoulder patch. But it’s more than that. It’s what we do. It’s what drives us as we regularly “go in harm’s way” to find and assist those in need.

We are a 100% volunteer organization of over 400 members, all of whom stand ready to drop everything, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, to trek into the wilderness or urban settings. Our missions are often dangerous, but people desperately need our help, and we respond. Even as I write this, we have team members deep in the backcountry, likely traversing some of the season’s first snow cover to help a stranded hiker caught by the first bad weather of the season.

Try as we might, we can’t do what we do without your help. With your donation and support, you join us as “we go together into harm’s way so that others may live.” Your financial gifts help bring our teams home safely by ensuring they are well trained and properly equipped to do what is necessary to bring our loved ones home. As volunteers, we assure you that none of your donations pay anyone’s salary. Our time is our gift to the community and to those in need on what is probably the worst day of their lives. What we need is your gift to pay for our ongoing training, our critical and horribly expensive rescue equipment and vehicles, and the ongoing costs of maintaining and operating our home base facility.

When we “go into harm’s way”, we don’t just recklessly charge into the wilderness. We always extensively prepare and formulate a mission plan to enhance our chances of successfully locating and extracting our lost, injured, or deceased community member(s). While we are very careful, we operate in harsh conditions that often damage our equipment. Damaged equipment frequently must be repaired or replaced to ensure the safety of our team. And some of our rescued equipment, including ropes, harnesses, and medical equipment, have expiration dates after which we can no longer use them. Consumables, such as batteries for our GPS units, headlamps and flashlights, simply wear out and need to be replaced regularly.

Larger equipment needs include our fleet of aging rescue vehicles. We recently retired a 1990 three quarter ton Chevy Suburban after almost 35 years of service. While we are thoughtful and intentional, and we certainly get our money’s worth out of our vehicles, they eventually need to be replaced. We have two other mid-90’s vintage trucks and two rescue hovercraft that will need to be replaced soon. The hovercraft manufacturer tells us that we have two of the oldest rescue hovercraft still in service in the entire country! While we’re flattered to know we take good care of our stuff, it’s clearly time for us to upgrade our hovercraft!

The last element of our need for donations is for the infrastructure upkeep and operating costs of our Search and Rescue base, known as Taylor’s Landing, which our volunteers fondly refer to as “TL” for short. Over a quarter century ago, we acquired a property at 5506 Old Machias Road to become our base of operations. The volunteers at that time also acquired some old, decommissioned metal buildings at Paine Field. They literally moved the disassembled buildings from Paine Field to the Machias Road property, and painstakingly reassembled the buildings on the site, to become TL.

The original age of these buildings is unknown to us, but a reasonable guess would be in the decades. For the last several years, what began as minor roof leaks became increasingly severe. Thanks to our Capital Campaign that started a year ago, combined with our Capital Improvement funds we’ve been able to set aside over the past decade, we finally were able to replace the aging original metal roofs on all our buildings. That was a good start, but we are not quite finished. In addition to the roof replacement on our 6,500 square foot helicopter hanger, we replaced the wall insulation and sealed the floor. We still need to replace the wall insulation and seal the floors in our 5,000 square foot rescue trucks storage bay and classrooms/ offices building and in a smaller utility storage building. To finish those repairs, we need your help.

Our needs may be great, but lucky for us, so is the generosity of our many financial supporters. Some of you are able to make cash donations. Others donate appreciated shares of stock, choosing to support us rather than pay significant capital gains taxes. And some of you choose Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs), donating your annual required minimum distributions (RMDs) directly from your IRA(s) to us, avoiding income taxes on these distributions in the process. All your financial gifts, whether large or not so large, are important to us, and we assure you we will deploy your gifts prudently in our mission, so “that others may live.”

Mike Loney Snohomish County Volunteer Search and Rescue President