If you can’t get anymore – nobody comes anymore. The new, gripping ARD documentary series “in the highest need” accompanies mountain rescuers from Upper Bavaria in their demanding missions.
If you want to survive a fall from 40 meters in the mountains, you need many guardian angels – and the mountain rescue service. It is she who comes when people have overestimated themselves again when the forces let up, the weather strikes cappioles and no helicopter can fly. A new documentary series that ARD and BR television announces as “the streaming highlight of the year” shows how demanding, dangerous and impressive is the use of the volunteers. And in fact, the eight-part series “in the highest need-mountain rescuers in use”, which is available in the ARD media library and can be seen on BR television from 8:15 p.m. from this Monday (April 14), for real goosebumps.
Everything authentic – nothing staged
The Bavarian mountain rescues Ramsau and Grainau have agreed to this remarkable documentary series and shared their on-call duty for 100 days with a mountain team. Your requirement: everything remains authentic, nothing is staged. The decision of what is filmed and what is not: a balancing act. “Nobody wants to see the really hard operations,” says Max Reichel from the production company Timeline. “It was not about showing fatal rescue gap, but the really admirable and demanding work of the rescuers.”
“The mountain is not a fitness device”
They all have paradise in front of the door, an interplay of beauty and danger that has a fascination for many people. Since Corona, the passion for mountain sports has even increased. Although “Bergsport” is such a word that training manager Lukas Wurm from the Ramsau mountain rescue guard does not find it so far: “The mountain is not a fitness device. You can’t say that time-out ‘or just go off the field if you don’t like anymore. Somehow you have to go down again and again.” His team is on the move with the Berchtesgaden mountain rescue service in the area of Watzmann, Hochkalter, BlaueisGletscher and Reiteralpe.
And right in the first episode, the colleagues are dramatic: A 44-year-old climber fell 40 meters deep on the Schönfeldgraben on Watzmann-without a helmet. “It is unlikely that he is not seriously injured,” said the first assessment. With every minute that the helicopter approaches with the rescuers, the tension in the team increases. “When we noticed that the patient is still available, we were quite relieved,” says one of the first aiders. It is a lucky day for the accident: strong bruises, a few abrasive and cuts that are treated in the hospital. “This is like a six in the lottery,” said a mountain rescue colleague. “Some plunge much unspectacular and are dead.”
But this series is not lurid, from which the ARD ordered a second season before it was broadcast. When the beeper reports, everyone is all about the common goal: the rescue. Equipped with bodycams and followed by drones, the mountain rescuers take the viewers up close – on unsecured descents in the fog, over brittle, exposed paths and on the cable winch of helicopters. They go to the limits of their own forces to help others – also in the Zugspitz region, in which quite a few underestimate nature and the weather. “We hope that this series will help to raise more awareness of alpine dangers,” says Willi Kraus, standby manager of the mountain rescue service Grainau. Because at one point, all volunteers agree: “We prefer to come home rather than move out and break off when it gets life -threatening for us too.”
