Every year from May to October is the peak season for hikers entering the mountains, and accidents requiring rescue also occur frequently. Through repeated search and rescue operations for hikers in distress in the Qinling Mountains, the province’s volunteer civilian outdoor rescue organizations have gradually become known to the public. But at the same time, these rescue teams, which are clearly non-profit in nature, have left many passionate wilderness rescue volunteers in a lonely and passive position due to their ambiguous status.
Should we rescue? How to rescue? Who will pay? How to protect ourselves? These have become unavoidable pains. How to regulate emergency rescue systems and bring wilderness rescue volunteer services back from passion to rationality is not only an issue that volunteers and NGOs need to resolve, but also one that the government departments who benefit from such services need to acknowledge and support.
On the evening of May 28, in the surgical ward of the Provincial People’s Hospital, Tianwang (his online name in the rescue team) from the Baoji detachment of the Shaanxi Dawn Rescue Corps struggled to move the fingers of his right hand.
Two days earlier during a rescue mission on Mount Ao, a venomous snake from the Qinling Mountains had bitten him. At the time, he was leading seven teammates on a rescue operation at an altitude of 2,000 meters. “I’ll definitely be discharged tomorrow. I feel much better. The hospitalization cost me quite a bit, so I can’t stay any longer,” said Tianwang, whose right hand was still somewhat clumsy. His entire forearm was covered in ointment, and he even needed help feeding himself.
Some outdoor rescue volunteers who didn’t know him came to the hospital to visit. Some left a few hundred yuan as they were leaving to help Tianwang cover his medical expenses resulting from the injury sustained while rescuing others — this snakebite struck at the vulnerability behind years of volunteer efforts by rescuers in our province.
Bitten by a snake while rescuing a hiker, sent to hospital nearly unconscious
On the night of May 26, Tianwang received a distress call: two out-of-town hikers had gone missing during the Aotai (Ao-Shan-Tai) trekking route. As the on-duty deputy leader of the rescue team, at 5 a.m. on May 27, he led seven team members from downtown Baoji and entered the mountain near Mount Ao in Taibai County at 8 a.m.
Time is life. Outdoor rescue is different from ordinary hiking — you need to race against time, take shortcuts, and walk paths no one else has taken. “Around noon, visibility and temperature are both better, which makes it a good time to move forward,” said Tianwang, who has over ten years of outdoor experience and had been leading the way.
“The grass was tall and dense. I was just parting the grass to find the path when I felt something prick me,” Tianwang recalled. A teammate behind him saw the fleeing snake and quickly approached. He spotted the deep bite marks on Tianwang’s right hand from the snake’s fangs and immediately sucked the wound to draw out the venom. Meanwhile, another teammate caught up with the snake, which hadn’t run far, killed it, and cut off its head. It was just past 11 a.m.
No one expected such an accident. Fearing a venomous snakebite, the teammates had no choice but to accompany Tianwang down the mountain to seek medical help, while five team members continued upward. Teammates at the base who learned of the news via walkie-talkie quickly called for an ambulance. By nearly 1 p.m., Tianwang finally reached the base, and when he got into the ambulance, his arm had already swollen, and his breathing was somewhat labored.
He was taken to Baoji, but the local hospital had no antivenom serum, so he was urgently transferred to Xi’an. Volunteers posted a distress message on Weibo. Around 5 p.m., the ambulance exited the Xi-Bao Expressway and, accompanied by a police car driven by officers from the Xi’an Public Security Bureau Traffic Police Detachment, arrived at the Provincial People’s Hospital, which had the needed antivenom.
“When I entered the hospital, I was already somewhat unconscious.” Tianwang could no longer recall the scene of his admission. Later, he learned that the admission deposit had been pooled together and paid by several teammates.
On the night of May 28, lying in bed, Tianwang told reporters, “It’s another lesson learned. I should wear thick gloves when crossing areas with tall, dense grass quickly.” He even felt somewhat lucky — first, because his teammates happened to have the experience to handle the situation, and second, because the accident occurred in a location that was easy to evacuate from. “If it had been farther, I really don’t know if I could have made it down.”
Just that noon, the two missing out-of-town hikers were found. At the time, there was heavy rain in the mountains. The two had curled up in a tent upstream of the Hongshui River — one had a leg injury, and the other had a sprained ankle and couldn’t walk. One of them had even written a will before being rescued.
“On the Aotai Line, I’ve come across the remains of over 20 deceased hikers.”
Tianwang later learned that after he and his team went up the mountain on the morning of May 27, more than a hundred rescue team members from the Shaanxi Blue Sky Rescue Team, the Shaanxi Emergency Rescue Corps, and the Shaanxi Dawn Rescue Corps also headed up the mountain and began a multi-zone grid search. That night, at least 40 rescue volunteers camped at altitudes around 3,000 meters.
As soon as the news of the missing hikers’ discovery spread over the walkie-talkies, all rescue team members began to withdraw. One group of rescuers didn’t manage to get out of the mountains until 14 hours later. Almost all of them had torn openings in their jackets and various degrees of scrapes and frostbite.
The most talked-about trekking route in the Qinling Mountains is the Aotai Line, which has also been a high-risk area with persistently high rates of accidents and fatalities in recent years.
The Aotai trekking line starts from Mount Ao in Taibai County, Baoji City, at an altitude of 3,475 meters, then proceeds eastward along the main ridge of the Qinling Mountains through Taibai Liang at 3,523 meters, and finally reaches the main peak of the Qinling Mountains within the boundaries of Meixian County — the 3,767-meter-high Baxian Platform. Though the route spans only about 40 kilometers on satellite maps, the actual trek requires covering at least 120 kilometers via detours. The entire area is uninhabited, with extreme weather changes — heavy snow and winds exceeding force 8 can occur at any time, and there is no way to resupply along the way. This trekking line is widely recognized as one of China’s most grueling and extreme self-challenge hikes.
Above altitudes of 3,000 meters, most mobile phones have no signal, and some hikers do not carry walkie-talkies, so if they encounter danger, no one may even know.
“On the Aotai Line above the snow line, I’ve encountered the remains of over 20 deceased hikers. They’ve been there for years, and no one knows who they are,” said Tian Guai xu, a local villager from Taibai County who has served several times as a guide for rescue teams and often goes to collect herbs in the unmanned areas above the snow line.
Despite the frequent media coverage of mountain tragedies, hikers continue to flock here from afar. Many domestic hikers connect online to form groups, casually find a local outdoor club in Shaanxi, and then follow guides or team leaders of varying quality to begin the perilous Aotai trek.
“Even the most experienced local hikers, those who have crossed the Aotai Line multiple times, still need to prepare for months before each crossing, carefully reviewing every possible danger on the mountain,” said A98, a committee member of the Shaanxi Blue Sky Rescue Team, who is now somewhat weary of the reckless adventurers on the Aotai Line. Still, every time an accident occurs, he and his teammates are among the first to arrive near the mountain entrance.
One of the female hikers from our province, Taxue, who has completed solo crossings of the Aotai Line in all four seasons, almost managed a full round-trip crossing during her most recent winter attempt. However, for this crossing, she prepared for nearly a year, planning her food supplies down to the gram. Even so, she encountered numerous dangers during the trek.
To reduce risks, Taibai County has issued multiple notices at mountain passes like Mount Ao to discourage hikers from forming groups and climbing impulsively. The county’s Ecology Office also announces annual mountain closure periods and requires hikers to register in advance during the climbing season, but very few hikers comply.
Volunteers organize rescue teams and share costs equally
At least 10 years ago, within the outdoor enthusiast communities in Shaanxi, there were already kind-hearted individuals who often participated in emergency outdoor rescues. Relying on their rich outdoor experience, they repeatedly saved fellow hikers in distress, despite not knowing them personally.
After the “5·12” Wenchuan earthquake, grassroots volunteer organizations across the country responded en masse to assist in disaster relief. In the domestic philanthropy circle, 2008 was referred to as the first year of mainland NGOs.
It was also in this year that the Shaanxi Outdoor Rescue Team was spontaneously established. Afterwards, several arduous yet impressive outdoor rescue operations, coupled with unpaid voluntary service, quickly garnered them widespread popularity, while several paid outdoor rescue teams within the province gradually faded away.
Entering the era of unpaid volunteer service, the Shaanxi Outdoor Rescue Team enjoyed enviable social reputation and professional fulfillment, but the pressure also multiplied. When hikers went missing, their families were reminded to contact the Shaanxi Outdoor Rescue Team when filing a report. The volunteer service even included recovering the bodies of deceased hikers from cliffs, as well as handling various assistance requests from the police, leaving volunteers exhausted. More critically, in these outdoor rescue activities, all participating members had to split all expenses equally on an AA basis. All equipment and personal gear were purchased and prepared by the volunteers themselves; round-trip vehicles and handheld radios were also self-funded; food, accommodation during rescue missions, and the purchase of commercial insurance all came out of their own pockets.
The more rescues they carried out, the greater the volunteers' expenditure, and the more they had to share.
After less than two years of stability, due to a lack of self-sustaining capability and protection in rescue operations, differing opinions began to emerge within the team, and several committee members chose to resign or leave. The once-thriving team of over a thousand active rescue volunteers also began to fragment and disband. The original Shaanxi Outdoor Rescue Team split into what are now the Shaanxi Dawn Rescue Corps, the Shaanxi Emergency Rescue Corps, and the Shaanxi Blue Sky Rescue Team.
During the May rescue mission on Mount Ao, although Tianwang was hospitalized after being bitten by a venomous snake and faced nearly ten thousand yuan in medical expenses, he still had to split the team’s costs.
On the day of Tianwang’s accident, Shark, the captain of the Shaanxi Dawn Rescue Corps who led the team to the scene, bore an even larger share, because just prior to that, he had just taken part in a rescue operation in Lantian County.
On May 25 during the rescue mission in Saiyu, Lantian, the Shaanxi Dawn Rescue Corps dispatched a total of 41 volunteers to rescue four missing hikers. In the end, the rescue expenses were shared on an AA basis—each person had to cover an additional one hundred yuan or so. When the secretariat team collected the money, the paying volunteers were even somewhat happy, because the meals for this rescue were provided free of charge by the local government, which was rare in the past.
An even bigger surprise came afterward: to thank them, the Lantian County Party Committee and County Government promised to provide the rescue team with tens of thousands of yuan worth of additional rescue equipment after the mission.
“More than 40 volunteers came, all unpaid. Logically speaking, for something so dangerous, even offering 300 yuan per person per day might not find anyone,” said a person in charge at the Lantian County Emergency Office. “If they hadn’t come, those people probably wouldn’t have been saved that day. Any further delay and if something really happened, the aftermath wouldn’t be something that could be resolved with just tens of thousands of yuan. Giving the rescue team some support is only reasonable.”
Volunteers pay the price when rescue operations go wrong
On September 4 of last year, during a rescue mission, three volunteers from the Xingping Detachment of the Shaanxi Emergency Rescue Corps were involved in a car accident midway and all sustained serious injuries. Because it was a volunteer rescue and insurance could not be purchased at night, the medical expenses had to be borne individually. Although several sister rescue teams spontaneously donated more than 20,000 yuan, the high medical costs had to be quietly shouldered by the three volunteers. Tianwang, who was bitten by a snake during the Mount Ao rescue, checked out of the hospital after three days despite others’ dissuasion. The high medical expenses were already too much for his family to bear.
On June 5, when a reporter reached Tianwang by phone, he had just left Baoji Central Hospital. That afternoon, he took half a day off from work specifically to handle insurance matters. The snake bite incident from a week earlier alone cost 1,400 yuan for the 120 ambulance, and although he was discharged early, the total medical expenses had already accumulated to over 8,000 yuan. Before the rescue, Tianwang had purchased a daily 10-yuan personal accident insurance policy, with a maximum payout of 5,000 yuan for injuries. “We’ll claim as much as we can—that’s our own money, after all.”
As the deputy leader of the rescue team, Tianwang always tells his teammates the most important thing during training and drills is how to avoid accidental injuries, because once someone gets hurt, no one will help pay the bills or deal with the consequences.
But navigating complex mountain terrain at high speed inevitably leads to stumbles and falls, which is also the main reason why almost every rescue mission sees some team members twisting their ankles.
However, in terms of risk response, the relatively professional volunteer rescuers are almost all highly experienced. In many outdoor rescue operations, it’s common to see government functional department joint rescue team members climbing mountains in leather shoes. For snowline rescues, the lack of proper equipment and experience also makes them hesitant to get involved.
Therefore, the rescue team volunteers have earned the respect of frontline police officers in mountainous jurisdictions. When they routinely receive reports of missing hikers in high-altitude areas, they immediately contact the heads of various rescue teams or proactively remind the families to get in touch with the rescue teams. “When we call to notify them, if something happens once they arrive, it’s hard to explain,” a grassroots police officer also expressed concern for the rescue teams.
Currently, whenever a rescue team is deployed, volunteers are required to purchase a daily 10-yuan electronic travel accident insurance policy. This insurance provides a maximum payout of 5,000 yuan for accidental injury medical treatment and 50,000 yuan for accidental death.
Multiple governments begin purchasing volunteer services
NGOs similar to the Shaanxi Outdoor Volunteer Rescue Team exist in many cities across China, each with different survival models.
In June 2005, Foshan, Guangdong, began providing special funding for social volunteer service forces. The Foshan Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government issued the "Opinions on Giving Full Play to the Important Role of Mass Organizations Such as Trade Unions, Communist Youth League, and Women's Federation in Building a Harmonious Foshan," encouraging the exploration and implementation of approaches and methods for the government to purchase social public services from people's organizations, increasing financial investment in volunteer services, and incorporating them into the public finance budget.
Statistics from 2006 show that Foshan had over 80,000 registered volunteers in the city, along with 109 service stations and 1,278 service teams, forming a social volunteer service system.
Foshan adopts a volunteer service tendering approach to purchase services from volunteer organizations. The publicly assessed purchase fees are mainly used to cover basic work-related expenses such as volunteers’ transportation, meal allowances, and communication costs. Because government-purchased volunteer services significantly reduce the operational costs of relevant functional departments in these areas, the model of "government entrusting people's organizations to purchase public services" has also gained attention and been promoted.
In June last year, the Wuxi Municipal Government in Jiangsu Province paid 5,000 yuan to several environmental NGOs in the city to obtain data from volunteers related to low-carbon community construction, biodiversity observation, and urban river water quality monitoring. In April this year, the Anshan Municipal Government in Liaoning Province funded the purchase of volunteer services from the Anshan Breathing Alliance Volunteer Association. This association provides extracurricular training in music, art, sports, and other subjects for the children of migrant worker families in the city.
“In June and July 2012, our jurisdiction received a total of 21 reports of missing or stranded hikers,” said a police officer from the Ziwu Police Station of the Chang’an Branch of the Xi’an Public Security Bureau. “Searching for hikers in the deep mountains is not the police’s specialty, and we don’t have professional outdoor gear. Without the help of volunteer rescuers, a lot of things could have gone wrong.”
The headache isn’t limited to the police—repeated incidents of hikers encountering danger in the outdoors have also left functional departments in counties and cities around the Qinling Mountains complaining bitterly. “Every time we participate in a rescue, the first thing we think about is the safety of the rescuers, especially since we’re in deep mountains at altitudes of two or three thousand meters where conditions are complex,” said a person in charge at a functional department in Taibai County. He also suggested that the government purchase rescue services. “Let professionals do professional work. The current multi-department collaborative rescue efforts are exhausting, costly, and inefficient.” He revealed that a few years ago, during a seven-day rescue operation, the county government allocated 200,000 yuan to form a joint rescue team. “In the end, it was still the unpaid rescue team volunteers who saved the people.”
“The funding issue is currently the most pressing challenge for all rescue teams, and many problems stem from it. Volunteers paying out of their own pockets to participate in rescues, with no guarantees if something goes wrong, really affects everyone’s morale,” said Shark, captain of the Shaanxi Dawn Rescue Corps, who has also been paying close attention to the survival strategies of civilian rescue NGOs. After all, under a one-way expenditure model of volunteer service, it’s hard to say how far passion-driven rescues can go. For him and the volunteers, innovative social volunteer service management models like those in Foshan, where there’s a “small government and big society,” seem out of reach.
Reference Materials
Frequent incidents of hiker dangers on the Ao-Ai Trail in the Qinling Mountains in recent years
July 2001
Seven university students from Nankai University climbed Mount Taibai. After getting lost, one of them, a student surnamed Zhang who went ahead to scout the path, fell off a cliff and died.
May 2002
Hua Zhengrong, a Shanghai-based hiker, climbed Taibai Mountain alone. After successfully reaching the summit with a light load, he encountered a snowstorm on the way back and was eventually found dead in the rocky wilderness.
July 2005
Forty-seven students from Shaanxi University of Chinese Medicine were conducting fieldwork near the Main Hall of Taibai Mountain. They got lost while descending the mountain and went missing as a group. Following the incident, police officers from multiple areas of Baoji City jointly launched a search mission. After an overnight search, they were finally found on Yingge Chaihu Mountain in Taibai County.
May 2008
Four hikers from Hebei climbed Taibai Mountain. The team leader developed a severe cold and experienced serious altitude sickness during the trip. By the time rescuers arrived, he had already passed away.
June 2008
Three hikers from Xi’an started their climb on Ao Mountain from Tangkou in Taibai County. One of them, who had wandered away near the Paoma Ridge at an altitude of 2,881 meters, has been missing ever since.
January 2010
A well-known experienced hiker from Xi’an went missing near Taibai Mountain while participating in an Ao-Tai traverse with a group. After the incident, multiple rescue teams comprising dozens of members searched for several days but failed to find him, and the search was eventually called off.
April 2011
During an Ao-Tai traverse, the team leader died of pulmonary edema caused by a cold while in the high-altitude mountainous area.
August 2012
Nine hikers from Xi’an were climbing near Ao Mountain when the team leader got lost and died in complex weather conditions.
November 2012
Ten hikers were traversing Ao Mountain when they encountered a snowstorm. Multiple rescue teams rushed to the mountain to help. Of the nine hikers, three unfortunately lost their lives.
June 16, 2013
The body of a hiker surnamed Zhang was found near Jiuchongtian at an altitude of 3,500 meters. He had gone missing during an Ao-Tai traverse while hiking with others.