Welcome!

Welcome to the Contra Costa Sheriff's Search and Rescue Team website.

The information contained here barely touches on the incredible work done by this team. Contra Costa SAR has grown and evolved over the last thirty years. The team began as a jeep club in the late 60's and developed into the 200+ member search and rescue unit it is today. In 2007 the SAR team volunteered over 46,000 hours to the community. Our most important mission is to seek out, find and return missing people to their loved ones. We do this well. Our mission does not stop here.

Each year we average nearly one hundred missions. These include missing person searches, medical support at community events, crime scene support, as well as logistics and management support at large scale incidents.

We search in Contra Costa County and through out the State of California. We have trained searchers that can operate in any environment in California. We can find ourselves on Mt. Diablo one day, or at 11,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains another day. While all team members are "ground pounders" our team members can train in a multitude of different disciplines. These include search dogs, technical rescue, tracking, mountain bikes, equestrians, metal detectors as well as mountain rescue. The team has a very dynamic administrative approach to managing the unit. We divide these functions into training, resources, safety, operations, finance, logistics, search management, plans/intel, personnel/ recruiting and wilderness divisions. Each of these divisions have managers that handle the day to day operations of each area. Anyone joining the team will have plenty of opportunities to find an area to work in.

Everything that we do is done by volunteers. Our volunteers make up one of the best search and rescue team in the state. We continue to recruit highly motivated people. We want you as part of our team.

Come and make a difference

Contra Costa SAR overcame the first and possibly largest hurdle in completing their goal of becoming a Mountain Rescue Association accredited team by passing the MRA Snow & Ice test. This was one of three, full-day certification tests that the Team will be performing to reach MRA accreditation (Technical Rock Rescue and Search Management & Tracking are the other two). The Snow and Ice certification is generally seen as the most difficult of the three, requiring the skills of the other two to successfully complete.

Eighteen members of the Team's Mountain Rescue Group were tested on their ability to perform snowpack analysis, hasty avalanche searches, snow probe post-avalanche recoveries and a rescue of two patients that involved several hundred vertical feet of technical raising and lowering. The Group performed the mock rescue in cooperation with six members of Monterey SAR that were completing the final portion of their MRA certification. The scenario was a complex, multi-pitch evacuation of two critically injured hikers under beautiful skies near Donner Summit, outside of Lake Tahoe, CA.

Evaluators gave positive feedback on medical, technical rope and search management skills. A noteworthy theme among the evaluators was the Team's ability to work together and the general esprit de corps of its members

-Mark Trevor