ABQjournal: Group Comes to Aid of Stranded or Injured Hikers in the Sandias
By Toby Smith
Journal Staff Writer
Chances are you won’t bump into an Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council volunteer unless you are in trouble. Big trouble.
Say you’re a hiker in the Sandia Mountains who wanders off course, slips and turns his ankle. Suddenly you’re stuck with a bum foot and no idea which way to go.
It’s getting late when your friends in town start to worry about you. That’s when the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council generally gets a telephone call, usually from the State Police.
Fifty years old this year, the AMRC is a wilderness and search and rescue team, one of several working in New Mexico.
The group got going in February 1955 when people were needed to recover and bring down bodies from the TWA airplane crash in the Sandias. …
“The Sandias are much more complex than they look from the city,” says Scherzinger, a Sandia Labs aerospace engineer. “They’re pretty big, and it’s easy for people to get lost up there.”