He's an above average writer, but the stories are excellent. "Get out my poison oak pants," and he rappels down into a canyon through the poison oak and vine maple to treat someone.

This is especially interesting after you've taken wilderness first aid training, because you recognize the common injuries and improvisation needed to save people. ( )

rabck from hyphen8; overall very good. One small part was a bit preachy, but then he got back off that tangent and into more interesting things. The author found a way to combine his love of extreme outdoor sports with medicine. He's a ski resort physician, Emergency room doc and a volunteer member of the Crag Rats, a search and rescue organization based in Mt Hood, Oregon. He describes what rescues are really like and the tools and techniques used. It's far beyond my knowledge of city medicine. Now moving along in the books about people bookbox. ( )

Chris Van Tilburg is a Hood River doctor who volunteers with the Crag Rats, a volunteer search and rescue organization. In this book, he tells stories of swimming up a creek to rescue an injured jumper at a waterfall, being lowered down a cliff to recover the body of a mountain biker, and searching for lost snowshoers. The storytelling is riveting, but the author is inconsistent about naming locations, sometimes describing exactly where a search and rescue operation occurred, sometimes not providing any identifying details whatsoever, and sometimes using false names. Perhaps he is trying to discourage people from making the same mistakes as the people he has rescued, but he doesn't acknowledge the fact that he gives some landmarks a pseudonym, so the reader is simply left to wonder. That error aside, this is a fantastic look into the world of search and rescue and will increase your appreciation for the important and hard work these brave volunteers do. ( )

What do you get when you combine a medical degree, a desire to give back to one's community, and a life-long passion for outdoor sports? You get Dr. Christopher Van Tilburg, an emergency room physician who donates his time to the Crag Rats; one of the country's oldest search and rescue groups. Each chapter details a rescue that Dr. Van Tilburg either took part in or has intimate knowledge of. If you enjoy reading outdoor adventure non-fiction, this book does a great job of describing what happens when those adventures go awry. ( )

I think this book doesn't know what kind of book it wants to be. It's not a memoir - the author does not provide many details about his own person life or anyone else's. He hints repeatedly at problems with his marriage caused by his mountain rescue volunteering, but does not follow up on that with any introspection. The book includes some information about the history of the Crag Rats, the oldest mountain rescue team in the country, but does not include much about current Crag Rats except to list a few of the current members' occupations. The author deals some with difficulties of specializing in wilderness medicine in medical school, but then rather drops the subject of how he has fared professionally (his work with the Crag Rats is as a volunteer) with this specialty, changing jobs (ER, working for a resort) without much explanation. Most of the book deals with a few examples of mountain rescues, but even these are uneven and detached. Some of the victims are given names and personalities, some are "the patient" and the reader never finds out how the patients fared - did they live, were they permanently disabled? We never get to find out. Some of the rescues the author barely takes part in, however, he doesn't get the point of view of the more active participants. This book does take an interesting look into the debate over whether victims should be charged for their own rescues, and with the continuing public fascination with extreme sports and mountain climbing disasters, this book may interest readers of these genres. ( )