About Us
Maine Mounted Search and Rescue (MMSAR) is Maine’s only Mounted Search and Rescue unit, and is fully certified under the Maine Association for Search And Rescue (MASAR). Our primary mission is to provide a well trained, fully equipped mounted and ground Search and Rescue unit, capable of serving the public as a qualified resource that assists in locating persons lost or missing in Maine's woods, fields, and other wilderness areas.
MMSAR is on call solely to the Maine Warden Service and Acadia National Park. If you are in need of search and rescue resources in Maine, please call 911 and ask that they connect you to the Warden Service. The Wardens will then deploy MASAR units if they deem it necessary.
MMSAR is a non-profit professional volunteer organization, with members who perform Support Services, Ground Search, and Mounted Search functions. Want to be a member but you don't have a horse and/or you aren't physically fit enough to ground search? Do you have administrative or computer skills? Are you good with event planning or logistics? If so, contact us, you might still be a valuable member!
As professionals, we are responsible for attending monthly meetings and training sessions as well as maintaining required certifications. As volunteers, the basic equipment is supplied by each member, and we donate our time and fuel.
We rely on fundraising efforts and donations from the public to pay for our training, purchase specialized equipment such as 2-way radios, and provide fuel reimbursement (when possible) for searches and training sessions.
MMSAR is officially based in Litchfield, ME and we hold about half of our meetings at the Litchfield Fire Station. The rest of our meetings are held regionally via teleconference because we have members all over the state. Wider membership coverage means we can respond faster to searches all over Maine.
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When talking to the public, the number one question we are asked is, has your team ever found a lost person? The short answer is, not during an official search, but that's because we haven’t been assigned the right search area yet. If the Wardens knew exactly where to look, they’d only send that one searcher to that one area. But they DON’T know, so every searcher is equally important. One thing we will tell you is this - no search subject has ever been found later in an area that members of our team had already searched. Also, during every practice search we’ve ever done, we’ve always found the search subject. So yes, we’ve found lots of people, just not the ones who were actually lost. Not yet. Someday, we’ll be assigned exactly the right search area, and at that point, then we have no doubt that we will find them.
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Interested in joining? Click here!
