BETHEL – This has been the busiest year yet for Mahoosuc Mountain Search and Rescue members. They work with Maine State Police and the Maine Warden Service to find and help lost or injured people out of the backcountry.

Including the team’s search last week for lost hikers Michael Hawkins and Ryan Weeks on the unfinished and closed western side of the new Grafton Loop Trail north of Newry, they’ve participated in 16 incidents since Jan. 1.

The 35-member Bethel-area volunteer group is comprised of Outward Bound personnel, Gould Academy and Sunday River Ski Resort staff, and Maine guides.

They are driven by a desire to help people and their passion for the outdoors. Many team members are in the their 50s and 60s, although they have some gung-ho 20-year-olds, leader Robert Baribeau, 52, of Bethel, said Thursday.

“Groups like Mahoosuc are invaluable to us because we don’t have the personnel to do searches and rescues by ourselves,” Maine Warden Service spokesman Mark Latti said Thursday by phone in Augusta.

It takes a minimum of 30 people, Baribeau said, to carry someone on a litter in mountainous terrain.

“Throughout the state,” Latti said, “we rely on trained search-and-rescue groups to help us, but their work often goes unrecognized.”

Mahoosuc Search and Rescue was formed 20 years ago and trained to be a technical rope rescue team. It can be sent anywhere from Ashland in northern Maine to Buckfield or Mount Desert Island. But the team’s expertise lies within the Western Mountains, especially the Mahoosuc Mountains Range, Baribeau said.

“In reality, in the state of Maine, we do very few rope rescues. The vast majority is finding individuals where they’re not supposed to be,” he said.

Most members are either emergency medical technicians or wilderness first responders. Some are paramedics, like Bob Jordan of Med-Care Ambulance in Mexico, or Paul and Evie Marcolini of Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.

“The ground search and low-angle litter carry is our bread and butter, but we like to spice it up with high-angle rope rescue training,” Baribeau added. In spring and winter, they train and do search-and-rescue missions in Baxter State Park.

But their busiest area is the Mahoosuc Mountains Range, where they average up to seven searches annually.

“This year, it was either dehydration, broken ankles or legs, or the occasional heat exhaustion,” Baribeau said.

Among the searches were finding the site of the June 22 plane crash in Newry that killed four people; the July 28 incident on Baldpate Mountain with a hiker who injured a leg and had to be airlifted out; and, the same weekend, a late-night search for a guy who underestimated the difficulty of hiking through Mahoosuc Notch, a mile-long rat’s nest of boulders the size of two-story houses.

“Most individuals have an intuitive sense of risk. They know darkness is not good. Others have a developed sense of risk – they know the terrain – but (Hawkins and Weeks) had neither. That’s what makes it difficult for us” to find them, Baribeau said.

Searching for lost people is almost a science, but it’s still difficult to predict where someone would go.

“One of the first things that happens is that you have to sometimes assume the perspective of the lost person. Hawkins and Weeks were young, inexperienced, not well-equipped, nervous and a little panicky, versus an older person, who may stay put and is more predictable,” Baribeau said.

That’s why local knowledge of terrain is a big plus.

He recalled one incident years ago involving two youths who got separated from a prep school group hiking south on the Appalachian Trail from near Goose Eye Mountain to Mount Carlo near the Maine-New Hampshire border.

Prior to searching, two Mahoosuc Search and Rescue members recalled a drainage that looks like a trail and ends up at the Wright Trail, which leaves Sunday River Road and summits Goose Eye.

“We sent a group up the drainage, and sure enough, there were the boys. The Warden Service thought we were geniuses,” Baribeau said.