After 10 years as the face of North Shore Rescue, Mike Danks is stepping down.
Danks, who was recently promoted to be the District of North Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services chief, attended his last team meeting as leader on Tuesday. Longtime volunteer Scott Merriman has been chosen by the team as Danks' successor.
When Danks, a Lynn Valley resident, became the leader of North Shore Rescue a little more than a decade ago, it was sudden and not something he’d asked for. His predecessor Tim Jones died suddenly in January 2014, and Danks was still in grief for his mentor when he was asked to take over leadership.
At the time, the number of people getting lost or injured on the North Shore’s trails was climbing and the volunteers were facing burnout.
“When I stepped into that team leader role, in my mind, I thought, No. 1, How are we going to maintain this level? And No. 2, How are we ever going to improve?” Danks said.
Whether he takes credit for it or not, Danks oversaw a period of rapid progress for the team, despite some tremendous challenges.
A decade of change
The record call volumes North Shore Rescue saw during the Tim Jones era were smashed when the pandemic came, but by then Danks had recalibrated how they responded to calls, sending fewer rescuers out per call and leaving more time for others to rest.
He prioritized training the next generation of search managers and specialists, and sought to make sure North Shore Rescue had access to cutting-edge tools such as drones, infrared cameras, motion sensors, and technology that allows rescuers to zero in on smartphones even if they are out of range of cell towers.
Under his leadership, the team became the first civilian rescue organization to have access to night-vision helicopters capable of quickly and safely hoisting people out of danger in the dark. Their unique skillset and gear put them in high demand for assisting other teams around the province, including evacuating families from flooded homes during the 2021 atmospheric river.
North Shore Rescue now has an advanced medical team – doctors and nurses who bring the ER with them to the backcountry.
The team updated their backcountry rescue caches and helipads and built a brand new search and rescue base at Capilano Lake.
None of that comes cheap, and so Danks had to redouble his tap dancing for donations to keep the team funded.
He’s also pushed for countless trail safety and public education campaigns to help ensure people enjoy the wilderness and get home without ever needing to call North Shore Rescue. That included twice allowing a documentary film crew to embed themselves with the rescuers for the Knowledge Network’s Search and Rescue: North Shore.
Today, North Shore Rescue is the most advanced volunteer rescue outfit in Canada and among the best in the world. Danks, though, never misses an opportunity to acknowledge the rest of the team for any advancements they’ve made together.
“All of these ideas organically evolved amongst our membership and we just had the ability to push those through,” he said. “We’ve just progressed in so many ways, but that’s because we have a collective membership that is so passionate about progressing, and being the leaders.”
Not so glorious are the endless meetings and phone calls and behind-the-scenes administrative headaches, including skirmishes with the province when the bureaucracy was getting in the way of saving lives.
“I don’t know that you can put a set time or hours to it because it’s 24/7,” he said. “Everything you do relates to that position.”
Rescuing the rescuers
If there’s one change that Danks is most proud of, it’s very likely the way they now approach the mental health of the volunteers.
The change came following a difficult stretch he went through himself in 2017 as the stress of leadership piled on a series of traumatic calls in the backcountry. Danks sought help and took resiliency training originally developed to protect the mental health of firefighters who deal with traumatic scenes daily, but it was easily adaptable for search and rescue purposes.
“It allowed me to accept that I wasn’t Tim and I didn’t need to try to be like him and I didn’t need to be at all the calls and I could let go a little bit,” he said. “That was a turning point for me, where I started really leading in my own way.”
Now every mission, especially the difficult ones, is followed up with check-ins for the volunteers, because nothing works better to mitigate trauma than talking about it and processing it.
“The call volume was going up, the trauma that we were seeing was going up. We needed to be able to cope,” Danks said. “I can say with confidence that that changed our team in such a positive way because it just broke down all those barriers and it gave us tools to deal with the calls that we were going to.… I think we’ve been in a really, really good place. We’ve been incredibly supportive of each other.”
Still a North Shore Rescue member
Danks has been a member of North Shore Rescue for the last 28 years and will remain a committed volunteer as a search manager and air operations co-ordinator. It’s both a passion and something he finds therapeutic.
“All of that [stress] goes out the window when we respond to these calls. Everything’s gone. Your main focus is how do we help that person?” he said.
North Shore Rescue founding member Gerry Brewer said he has been proud of Danks through his tenure.
“He took over unexpectedly, so that was, to me, quite impressive.… With coaching and guidance and his own initiative and effort, he grew into the role to be very successful as a team leader,” he said. “And being successful as a team leader doesn’t mean just leading the team. It’s representing the team in any aspect of the team and its relationship with the community.”
In his time as leader, North Shore Rescue was tasked with just shy of 1,500 calls, for everything from twisted ankles to avalanches. You couldn’t guess how many people are alive today because of their efforts and the decisions Danks made at the top.
Yet, as he moves on, Danks is the one who feels compelled to say thank you. His wife and three daughters sacrificed much time with him so he could serve his community. And then there’s his other family that dons the red parka and charges into the wilderness with him.
After he’d given his final speech at Tuesday’s team meeting, Danks broke into tears when teammate Kayla Brolly presented him with a tray of cupcakes bearing images of his face.
“That’s the kind of support that you get on that team,” he said. “It’s been a privilege. I mean that. I feel lucky to have been in that position and I appreciate the support that I got. It’s been incredible.”
Check back later this week for our profile on North Shore Rescue's new team leader, Scott Merriman.
