Interesting writeup on the decline of volunteer SAR in New York State
This was written by a former vice president of NYSFEDSAR. The tl;dr is a combination of highly proficient full-time SAR resources, in this case the NYS Forest Rangers, and a significant decline in unknown location searches (driven primarily by technology like InReaches and cell phone pings) has resulted in volunteer teams rarely being called out, and people are dropping from those teams due to the lack of action, which in turn is lowering training quality and standards.
I recently relocated from California to New York and have been trying to stay informed in case I want to get back into SAR. On my rural NorCal team, we were led by a small number of sheriff's deputies for whom SAR was a collateral responsibility in addition to their full-time law enforcement duties. As such, they were pretty quick to activate us if it became clear that a search was not going to wrap up in a couple hours. Even so, I considered us a mid-to-low call volume team with about 15 callouts per year. However, SARNAK, which appears to be one of the most active upstate NY teams, recently posted about having a total of 3 searches in 2025, so I think this writer might be on to something.