It doesn't really help a short staffed organization when people don't show up or show up randomly. You'll have 15 people one day and 0 another day. If it's ski patrol that'll highly correlate to 15 people on the blue bird powder day when you need 8, and almost no one will get hurt so you only need people to open and close the hill. And 0 on the skiied out icy day when you have 5x the injurys as you have staff on the hard conditions and you don't have time for lunch or bathroom brakes.

Also do you want someone binding up your kids broken arm or dislocated shoulder who doesn't know what they're doing, then taking them down a mogul covered black that they couldn't handle themselves with their weight and the toboggans weight with no practice? edit: removed worse injuries I've seen, I think I made my point.

Also did I say it was short staffed?

The rest of the thread explicitly states that (1) SAR is badly short-staffed; and (2) they have similar training requirements. (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42997100 )

You're presenting ski patrol as an example of how SAR operates, and the other comments seem to agree. Is it desirable to run SAR that way?

Yes. Search and rescue is not an employment agency. A search and rescue organization without the necessary training to perform search and rescue doesn't help anyone.

That might depend on whether you prefer being rescued incompetently to dying alone in the wilderness, no?

An "incompetent rescue" can end up with more than one person dead in the wilderness.

Sadly, if rescue is likely to put others in danger, I'd expect to be left to die.

a bad rescue means you need to send in 4*n personel where n is the number of rescuers + original patient.

I feel the gp is just trying to win an argument in comments and not actually understand anything.