Now for a little change of pace...

We had our first significant snowfall last night. Not much and mostly melted off by now...but...up in the hills, in our Urban Wildland Interface Zone, things get pretty dicey pretty quick because there's no direct sunlight until summer.

So... Around noon today someone coming down the hill managed to drive off the road. By off-roading I mean down a steep embankment end-over-end for at least 100 yards, coming to rest -- fortunately -- on his wheels about 100 yards from another -- fortunately -- more accessible road. Unfortunately the vehicle was not visible through the dense vegetation from either vantage, but -- fortunately again -- the guy he hit on his way down was able to point out where it happened.

Photo: Tom Chilton -- Hondo VFD

 After about a half-hour of hiking around and yelling to each other we found the car and patient, who, thanks to modern vehicle restraint systems was not seriously injured and had better vital signs then me. Our medics packaged him up on a backboard in a stokes litter and we belayed him down the rest of the embankment that he hadn't managed to negotiate with his vehicle and onto a Big Wheel. The Big Wheel is exactly that, a Big Wheel with a bunch of handles onto which you strap a litter, so 4 or 6 folks can hump a patient out of some god-forsaken location (we used it this summer to get a guy having a heart attack an hour into a National Forest trail back to civilization-such-as-it-is because the chopper couldn't find anywhere to land).

We loaded the patient into a City of Santa Fe Med unit -- our County guys were busy and probably kicking themselves for missing the fun -- and shipped him off to the Horsepiddle. I'll bet the City guys were happy about the Big Wheel thing, but they are too professionally pre-occupied to thank mere volunteers.

Way better than doing homework, to which I must now return...