Charles “Butch” Farraby was a 16-year-old Eagle Scout when he joined the search for three boys, one of whom was a classmate at Tucson High School. He climbed steep inclines in waist-deep snow, slept on the floor of a Madera Canyon lodge, and was then replaced by more well-equipped and experienced searchers.

Faraby spent his career with the National Park Service, participating in over a thousand other rescue operations for missing and injured people.

Now a retired park ranger turned historian, he documented 100 years of search and rescue operations throughout the region.

Although this is his sixth book, and his seventh including his master’s thesis, Southern Arizona Search and Rescue History: 1901-2000 is unlike anything he has written before.First, the 600-page exhaustive volume exists only electronically and is fully Free download online.

Farraby said it was intended to honor all search and rescue workers and catalog their history in the region.

“I want people to understand the sacrifices these people are making,” he said in a recent interview at the nonprofit, all-volunteer Sabino Canyon headquarters. Told. Southern Arizona Rescue Associationor SARA, the region’s largest and oldest search and rescue organization.

“They don’t ask for anything, they don’t even ask for recognition. They just go out and do it, rain or shine,” Faraby said. “We want the public to know they exist.”

This book chronicles many of the major Tucson stories of the 20th century. Because search and rescue workers were inevitably called to the rescue. A cage buried in the desert east of Tucson. An Air Force fighter plane that crashed into the Food Giant grocery store on 29th Street and Alvernon Way in 1967. The deadliest tornadoes in 10 years that hit near the San Xavier Mission in 1964 and 1974. In the early fall of 1983, Tropical Storm Octave caused massive flooding, killing 13 of his people across southern Arizona. After eight-year-old Vicky Lynn Hoskinson was kidnapped and murdered from the Flowing Wells area in 1984, a frantic search followed.

“This isn’t just search and rescue history. There’s a lot of history of events that are largely forgotten: catastrophes, floods, tornadoes, all sorts of jazz,” Faraby said. “Maybe I should forget it, I don’t know. But as a historian, it bothers me.”

The book took four years to research, write and put together.

Faraby said that initially he intended to focus solely on SARA’s history, but the project soon expanded beyond that one organization.

The end result is a well-indexed encyclopedia illustrating significant advances in search and rescue operations and the history of individual rescue groups in the region.

Faraby also drew on local newspaper archives and first-person testimony to write short stories about more than 800 rescues, tragedies and mysteries in southern Arizona over the past century.

He collaborated on the book with David Lovelock, a prominent British theoretical physicist and former professor at the University of Arizona. He first got involved in search and rescue through volunteering for the REACT CB-radio emergency communication system.

In 1979, Lovelock began working in the field of wireless communications and, in collaboration with UA mathematician John Bounds, on a computer-aided search planning program that calculated the probability of finding a lost subject in a given area. Thanks to you, I became a support member of SARA.

Bounds first calculated the numbers on a Texas Instruments programmable calculator. Since then, Lovelock has written multiple versions of the program, first for Commodore 64 computers and then for his use with DOS and Windows operating systems. He has also contributed to the writing of numerous manuals on programs and search and rescue operations in general.

“What this software does is let you estimate how well you have explored an area. You can reassign[searchers]depending on where the region is,” said the mathematician known in the world of theoretical physics for Lovelock’s theorem and Lovelock’s theory of gravity.

It’s Lovelock’s fault that new books are free. That was one of his conditions for agreeing to cooperate with the project.

He never charged money for the software he created to aid search and rescue efforts. This has become known around the UA math department as the “Lovelock principle,” he said. He simply refuses to “profit from the misery of others,” he says.

Bounds sacrificed his life for the search and rescue effort.

A longtime SARA volunteer, he died in 1993 at the age of 51, after a long illness, possibly from Valley Fever, contracted from dust he inhaled during one of more than 200 rescue operations.

Bounds, whose name appears about 43 times in the new book, has since been listed alongside other Southern Arizona search and rescue workers who died in the line of duty.

That list also includes John. D. Anderson, a Pima County Sheriff’s Department agent who fell to his death while rescuing a 15-year-old boy in Upper Sabino Canyon in 1948.

Anderson’s fatal fall was captured on camera by Sam Levitz, a photographer of the Daily Star, Arizona, who later became famous in Tucson for an entirely different reason.

Michael Raymond is also mentioned dozens of times in the book, why not? In his 50 years as a volunteer with SARA, he has participated in over 2,500 emergency calls. .

He also serves as an archivist for the Search and Rescue Council, Inc., a non-profit corporation that coordinates the work of SARA and four other volunteer search and rescue groups serving southern Arizona. does not charge for services.

“Search and rescue is free. A lot of people don’t know that,” Raymond said. “We insist on being free so people will call us soon.”

“It’s much harder to contact them later,” he added.

On average, SARA answers about two calls a week, but earlier this month there were as many as four calls a day, which Raymond said was “very unusual.”

SARA President Jason Schlueter said volunteers need the support of understanding spouses, children and employers because when the call comes in, they have to drop everything.

Raymond enjoys being rushed on an unplanned hike up the mountain at short notice. He said he regularly tells people he’s helping, “Thank you for inviting me out today.”

He is not contemptuous. he’s sincere

“The last time I said it was yesterday. I picked up a hiker from Chicago who was exhausted from the heat on the summit, gave him a snack, took him outside, and said, ‘Thank you for inviting me today.’ ” said Raymond. He said. “Today is a wonderful day for hiking.”

Farabee and Lovelock are already working on a second edition of the book, primarily to correct some of the mistakes they found or pointed out in the first edition.

Lovelock, 85, joked that he decided not to extend the study to the first 23 years of this century because he was worried that he and Farraby, 80, would live long enough to finish the last century’s record. said.

Through the search and rescue operations covered in this book, you can trace the development of southern Arizona itself.

In the early 1900s, most incidents involved flash floods and mining accidents. Then, during World War II, search crews responded to a series of bomber crashes in southern Arizona, while soldiers undergoing intense training to take part in battles abroad.

After the war, as Tucson developed, reports of missing or injured hunters in the mountains around the city gradually increased to missing hikers or while playing in the water-filled canyons of the Rincon Mountains or the Catalina Mountains. was superseded by reports of injured persons.

Faraby said Tanque Verde Falls has had the highest number of accidents and fatalities in many years.

Raymond said SARA has responded to numerous calls on the ground and has proactively improved the safety of the trail leading into the gorge, installing permanent gear in the upper rocks to help lift the injured. It is said that

The book focuses primarily on Pima, Cochise, and Santa Cruz counties, but includes some stories from other areas as long as they have some connection to a rescue organization based in southern Arizona or here. I’m here.

One of the most memorable and infuriating events Faraby describes is the June 1994 12-hour incident in a gorge known as Hell’s Hole, northeast of Lake Roosevelt, which killed an injured hiker. One request for helicopter rescue turned into multiple rescue calls. canyon.

When it ended, a Black Hawk at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base crashed into Hell’s Hole, seriously injuring two crew members and resulting in a flurry of additional dangerous helicopter rescues.

Faraby said miraculously there were no fatalities, but he is confident that all could have been avoided if a few tired but healthy people had hiked back from the valley without seeking rescue. rice field.

“Every time a helicopter is involved, and every time people needlessly go over cliffs, it just puts rescue workers in danger, and it’s basically pissing me off,” he said.

Then there was the disappearance of three Boy Scouts in snowy Santa Ritas in 1958.

“That was my first search,” said Farraby. “In this climate, my parents would get arrested for child hazards or something because I was out wearing Levi’s, sweatshirts, and stuff like that.”

He remembers the scene as “chaotic” as hundreds of soldiers, airmen, law enforcement officers and local ranchers on horseback showed up to join the operation.

After 19 days of searching through snow and steep terrain, the bodies of Mike Earley, 15, David Greenberg, 12, and Michael La Noue, 13, were found by Josephine. Found south of Saddle, in the shadow of Mount Wrightson.

In the book’s preface, Faraby writes that search and rescue was still in its “awkward early stages” at the time. In the decades since, advances in technology, training, and tactics have dramatically improved the way such operations are conducted.

But despite the advent of helicopters, satellites, smartphones and drones, the core of the work remains exactly the same. That is, people on earth who lace their boots and march into the wilderness in search of strangers in need of help.