Ian Brown was among many deployed to La Ronge in 2015. Their mission: to protect the community from a wildfire.
"You had volunteer fire departments from all over Saskatchewan all coming together for the one sole purpose,” Brown said Saturday. “It was really quite a sense of comradery that i had never experienced before."
The 22-year-old paramedic is also a member of Seach and Rescue Regina (SARR). For him, helping others is always his top priority.
"Always the end goal whether you’re a firefighter, paramedic, police; it’s about wanting to be able to do something for your community," Brown said.
SARR has been looking for missing people in Saskatchewan's outdoors since 1998. Lloyd Goodwill, a former RCMP member, has been with SARR for five years. In that time, he has been on around 100 search-and-rescue missions.
Goodwill says it's the unsuccessful searches that stay with him. He was part of the search for 17-year-old Cody Wolfe on the Muskowekwan First Nation in 2011. Goodwill says he'll never stop looking for the boy who left his friend's home on a cold night and didn’t return.
"You're still not going to give up; the family will never give up,” Goodwill said. “I'll go back sometime and take a look around and just see what there is there."
SARR was at the Cabela’s store in Regina on Saturday, trying to get more people to volunteer on search and rescue missions.
The organization says most of their expenses are out of pocket. It wants more help from all levels of government, and would like to be equipped with the same gear as lvolunteer firefighters in the province.
But, even if more money doesn't come in, this group says it will always be ready when people are lost in Saskatchewan's wilderness.
