Distress calls in Yellowstone tax local services

Every summer as the population of Montana’s Yellowstone National Park gateway towns swell with tourists, emergency calls for medical services climb.

Although auto collisions, and the occasional recreation-related injury such as a rock climber’s fall or a grizzly bear mauling may be the most deadly for victims, those cases are rare.

Officials in West Yellowstone, Bozeman, Red Lodge, Gardiner and Cooke City said calls for ailments like altitude sickness, dehydration or physical distress caused by failing to take a prescription medicine are the most common reports they receive.

“Our call volume in West Yellowstone shifts drastically from winter to summer and the shoulder seasons,” said Shane Grube, the Hebgen Basin Fire District chief.

In talking to representatives of the different gateway communities, it is evident the challenges are varied and sometimes unique to each place.

Tourism medical

Whether a reported fire, an emergency medical situation or a search and rescue operation, Grube’s crew responds.

The crew is comprised of nine full-time paramedics, himself, the assistant chief and 10 volunteers.

In the winter, when the town becomes a snowmobiling hotspot, Grube’s team may average around 30-plus calls a month – often trauma caused by snowmobilers crashing into trees.

By summer the blotter climbs closer to 90 calls a month. In the last two years, as more people ventured outside during and following the pandemic, call volume rose by 25%.

Yellowstone National Park’s entrance statistics highlight the rise in visitor volume.

In July, August and September 2022, the West Entrance at West Yellowstone averaged more than 133,000 visitors.

In comparison, West Yellowstone’s most recent census revealed a population of around 1,200 residents.

The increase in calls began this year around Memorial Day weekend, Grube said.

Families with children will crowd the town from June until mid-August. In the fall, Grube said West Yellowstone sees more newlyweds and elderly visitors.

Maturing tourists

Tom Kuntz, chief of the Red Lodge Fire Rescue, said although his town’s businesses are heavily reliant on tourism, most of his medical calls are for elderly residents living alone.

Outbreaks of COVID or a bad flu can also tax the community’s ambulance service.

“Thirty years ago if we got a call for somebody over 90, it was shocking,” Kuntz said. “Now it’s not uncommon to happen multiple times a week.”

A couple of years ago, the department was geared up for an increase in motorcycle accidents as a rally visited town.

Instead, the ambulance was called out eight times for locals with medical emergencies.

Red Lodge has a ski area right outside town, but Kuntz said with the advent of shorter skis, better bindings and more widespread use of helmets, the ski hill’s calls for injuries have dropped significantly.

“The bulk of our calls are not recreation related,” he said.

Annually, the community of about 2,500 residents averages around 700 ambulance calls, but it’s trending up and spiked during the pandemic, Kuntz said.

Transition

Gardiner, at Yellowstone’s North Entrance, has seen its population shift away from elderly residents, according Bob Kopland, chief of the all-volunteer Gateway Hose Company.

The town’s older residents have either moved down the valley to the larger community of Livingston or died, he said.

In one recent spike of activity, his crew saw 16 ambulance runs over the course of 12 days to take patients to the hospital in Livingston.

The drive pulls his volunteers away for three hours or more each trip. Crews send the more seriously injured victims out by helicopter.

Kopland said one of his department’s biggest problems is getting volunteers as the town’s population becomes less family-oriented and more transient.

He started out as a volunteer at age 18. Now 73, Kopland said he’s seen the department – like the town – transition.

“We take the mental health thing very seriously,” he said, despite describing himself as “old school.”

“There’s no more ‘toughen up, buttercup,’ ” he added. “You have to invest in your people because they’re the best resource you have.”

Yet workers have a hard time finding a place to rent, much less an affordable home to buy, he said.

As a result, families are smaller and Gardiner’s school enrollment has declined.

Out of the roughly 20 volunteers in the department, he said more than half have emergency medical technician training.

Resort tax

Although pessimistic about Gardiner’s changing character, Kopland said the community is lucky to have a resort tax to help pay for capital expenses like vehicles, as do the other park gateway communities.

West Yellowstone enacted its tax in 1986, the first in the state.

As of a 2015 survey, the town collected $1.71 million in revenue from the tax.

In the same year, Red Lodge earned around $700,000, Cooke City made $150,000 and Gardiner collected $350,000.

“Some other places in Montana are having a lot harder problem because of their limited budget,” Kopland said.

Remote Cooke City, near Yellowstone’s Northeast Entrance, was able to finance a new fire hall, trucks and gear from its resort tax, according to fire chief Troy Wilson.

The town of around 80 permanent residents may see 100 to 130 emergency calls every summer, he said. Most of those come from vehicle collisions and medical calls, such as cardiac arrest.

Because the town is so remote, it has no ambulance service and relies on either helicopter evacuations or a response from a nearby community like Cody, Wyoming, to transport accident victims.

In the winter, the popular snowmobiling and backcountry skiing destination is known for its assistance to avalanche victims.

Search and rescue

The Gallatin County Sheriff Search and Rescue also responds to avalanche victim and snowmobile calls, in addition to other recreation-related incidents across southwestern Montana.

Based in the outdoor-oriented community of Bozeman, the county search-and-rescue squad deals with residents who’ve gotten into trouble, not just ill-advised tourists, said Sheriff Dan Springer.

That makes sense, he added, because locals are in the woods, mountains and on the streams more than visitors.

As the region has seen rapid and continued growth, Springer said calls for search and rescue have climbed roughly 5% every year to about 150 calls a year.

Gallatin County funds the services through a mill levied on property-owner tax assessments.

Although there have been calls for charging a fee to rescue victims, Springer said one concern is that might make someone who is lost or in trouble delay calling for help.

His crews would rather operate in the daylight than at nighttime, which is more dangerous.

Unlike smaller towns, the Gallatin County search-and-rescue team has 150 volunteers – some of them elite athletes – along with a waiting list of applicants who step in when someone drops out.

Complex issues

As the different gateway communities demonstrate, each has its unique problems of staffing and responding to medical emergencies as their towns’ population annually shrinks and swells due to tourists.

“We have more total volume in the busier summer months, but the complexity in terms of the severity of calls, the number of simultaneous calls that we get – those scatter throughout the year and are driven by factors more than tourism,” said Kuntz, Red Lodge’s fire chief.

“So while having more people in town can result in more strain on the emergency medical system, there are other factors that really can tax the system.”

Kuntz testified before the Montana Legislature this spring in support of a bill that would have allowed the creation of ambulance districts.

The measure unanimously was passed out of committee but died in the state senate.