Photo: Joshua Tree National Park
To educate and assist some of the 3.27 million visitors exploring Joshua Tree National Park (JTNP) annually, JTNP Ranger Anna Marini created the Preventative Search and Rescue (PSAR) program which places trained volunteers on the trail to answer questions directly, or even ask crucial ones, like, “Do you have enough water?”
The PSAR program has proven so effective that Marini has won the Director’s Visitor Safety Achievement Award, a high honor from the National Park Service (NPS) for “her outstanding dedication, commitment, and achievements to reducing risk to visitors and preventing serious and fatal visitor injuries.”
“This is definitely an amazing award to receive from the director of the National Park Service. I’m looking forward to going to the Washington office next month to accept the award and meet the director, which is really neat,” said Marini.
Marini created the PSAR program in 2021 and expanded it last year after seeing an increase in heat-related search and rescues. The volunteers offer safety tips, strategies on heat-illness prevention, and all aspects of park-wide trail information.
“It’s getting a lot of traction on PSAR in general. People are understanding preparedness, asking questions about it. And it’s exciting that people are interested in the topic of how to enjoy Joshua Tree safely,” said Marini.
Since that expansion, PSAR has accrued 3,100 volunteer hours, contacted 83,700 park visitors during 566 patrols. Notably, the team documented 13,200 actions where volunteers prevented unsafe visitor behavior through face-to-face education, thus likely decreasing the amount of necessary search and rescue operations. With triple-digit temperatures, volunteers are on high alert.
“Luckily our visitation has gone down a little bit there still are folks recreating so with the volunteers and then with the signage I’ve created – even things like putting up physical thermometers for people to see the actual temperature, it’s really made a difference in people’s experience in the park,” said Marini.
Additionally, Marini is helping the NPS develop two PSAR position descriptions for nation-wide use, and other park units develop PSAR programs of their own.
Marini states that a couple of the 30 PSAR volunteers have retired so she will be recruiting more. The volunteer application period will be mid-August through mid-September and interested folks can go to volunteer.gov and search for PSAR and for Joshua Tree Search and Rescue.
For more about the PSAR Program, check out our story here:
