About Us

In the 52 years since it's foundation, the Team has been involved with more than 800 incidents - including non-mountain incidents such as plane and train crashes, searches for despondent and vulnerable people and animal rescues on the mountains and in rivers and forests. There are never two call outs quite the same!

The team is also available to 'back-up' other Mountain Rescue Teams in the central Lake District when they are stretched to cover more than one incident, and has contributed to major searches in Northumberland, Durham and Southern Scotland. Often we share our big North Pennine searches with Kirby Stephen MRT and Weardale-Teesdale MRT.

The membership is a cross section of people from many different backgrounds. All of us are very experienced ‘hill people’ who have spent much of our lives in wild places. Some are hardened rock climbers, others strong snow and ice climbers, while others are deeply knowledgable mountain and fell walkers.

About a third live in or very near to Penrith, about another  third in or around Carlisle.  

30+ of PMRT have been awarded their MREW Casualty Care Certificates which have to be re-sat every 3 years. This allows us to give a really strong response to any medical/trauma situation.

20+ of PMRT are Swift Water Rescue Technicians which has been a more recent response to the risk of flooding in Cumbria.

Our Leadership is made up of a Leader and three Deputies who are annually elected by the Team. We have a Committee and we meet as a Team very month to share ideas, news and decisions.

We all carry pagers and mobile phones. We are all on call 24/7 and hope that we can respond within double quick time to any requests from Cumbria Police.

PMRT is a registered charity. We do not receive any central (Government) funding, consequently the provision of this service is reliant upon the generosity of members of the public, local and National businesses, to fund our running costs of approximately £20,000 per annum.