Skiddaw was the scene of a rescue earlier this week

A Lakeland mountain rescue team has reached its century – four months early.

The Keswick team’s tally of full callouts passed the 100 mark this week, making this year the busiest in its history. In the whole of last year, the team undertook only 90 rescues, a similar number to 2007.

The team’s work has increased 70 per cent this year, and includes fallen fellwalkers, rock-climbing and mountain biking incidents, crashed paragliders and searches. Its members were involved in today’s fruitless search for a pair of walkers on Helvellyn who had changed their plans without notifying anyone. In addition to the 102 full callouts, there have been 21 incidents that did not call for a full team response.

The number of night-time searches has, however, fallen.

A spokesperson for the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team said it was difficult to pinpoint a reason for the rise in demand for its services. “All we can speculate is that there are more people spending more of their leisure time in this country,” the spokesperson said. “Albeit this is perhaps not the case when we have no rescues over a weekend and then get three on the following Monday afternoon.

“The only true logic to mountain rescue is that there is no logic to when the pager will next go off and we might be out all night in atrocious weather conditions, continuing to provide professional levels of care to all casualties with a team of highly trained and highly motivated volunteer members.”

The team issued a plea for walkers to go prepared, even in summer. The high fells of the Lake District demand proper equipment and clothing. “We ask that walkers go out and enjoy the hills and mountains, but please go prepared.

“The current unsettled weather has resulted in several rescues for walkers who were ill equipped to deal with conditions when something out of the ordinary happened. You can quickly get very cold in the hills as soon as you stop exercising.

“We, like other Lakes teams, have had casualties during August suffering from the first stages of hypothermia as a result of being ill prepared. If walkers, by better preparation and planning could themselves reduce  the need for the team to respond to these types of incident that would leave us with more availability to deal with specific trauma accidents.”

Sadly, the team has seen three fatalities so far this year. Helicopters, both military and air ambulance, are used in 20 per cent of rescues.

“To respond as well as the team does takes a huge commitment from its 48 members, all of whom are paged for every call with those available to respond to the incident attending at very short notice. The support received from families and employers in this regard is hugely appreciated, especially this year,” the spokesperson said.

Team members also train once a week and spend considerable amounts of time checking and repairing equipment as well as managing its business affairs. After every callout, all equipment is checked and replenished so the team’s three vehicles and boat are fully stocked and ready to respond to the next incident.

Normally,  the first vehicle leaves the base on a rescue within 10 minutes of being paged by the police so all equipment must be there and ready for use. On occasions this year there have been multiple rescues, with up to three simultaneous incidents being dealt with.

The onerous workload for the volunteer team has meant less time spent on fundraising which, with the straitened economic times, add to the burden in running the team. As with all volunteer teams in England and Wales, the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team receives no Government cash for its work.